There are only ten days left, and 2023 is coming to an end, has your little yellow car deposit refund been successful?
If not, then there is a high probability that it will not be able to retreat for a long time in the future.
Because according to reliable sources, Dai Wei, the "father of the little yellow car" who set off a bicycle sharing boom 8 years ago, went to the United States to start a second business and failed again, and the funds bottomed out.
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At the beginning of June 2019, after the celebration of the fourth anniversary of the establishment of ofo, Dai Wei, as the founder and chairman of the company, seemed to have evaporated from the world and never appeared in public again.
According to statistics, ofo has still not refunded the deposit to the stranded 16 million small yellow car users, with a total amount of 1.5 billion arrears, and its APP and mini program also completely stopped operating in February this year.
Coincidentally, in February last year, some media reported on Dai Wei's recent situation, confirming that he had gone to the United States to start his second entrepreneurial journey in New York.
This time, Dai Wei seems to have been inspired by Luckin and chose to switch careers to a cheap coffee chain.
戴威的这家咖啡连锁品牌，取名为 About Time Coffee，中译则是【咖啡时光】，文艺感十足。
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It is worth mentioning that despite the affordable coffee drinks, the locations for coffee time are all in Manhattan, where land is at a premium, some are located on Fifth Avenue and some are adjacent to Times Square, which are all excellent locations for foot traffic.
However, according to the latest news, Dai Wei's large investment in this new project in the past two years seems to have been wasted again.
Open the electronic map and select the location in the Borough of Manhattan, New York, and you can clearly see that the vast majority of "Coffee Time" stores in the area have been permanently closed, and only one is still operating.
Since Dai Wei has personally experienced the prosperity and decline of ofo, it is said that he should have saved enough lessons, why did he burn a huge amount of money and still failed to do new projects?
If we can go back and count the various misjudgments made by Dai Wei in the second stage of his entrepreneurial journey, we may realize that there are actually signs of his overturn.
As mentioned above, after Dai Wei went to the United States, he decided to start a second business, and the direction he chose was to open a chain coffee shop.
Seeing this, the little question mark that pops up in your mind must be the same as when I first learned the news:
First, isn't this kid "restricted" because of his old lai? How did he buy a plane ticket to the United States?
Second, he owes a deposit of 1.5 billion yuan and has not returned it, where does the money for the second business come from?
After re-reading the court judgment in 2018, I realized that Dai Wei was not listed as a dishonest executor at all, but was restricted from high consumption and was not restricted from leaving the country by the court.
And this also means that Dai Wei is only not allowed to take civil airplanes, high-speed rail second-class or above transportation, and this does not affect his departure by car, ship or private jet, and then transfer to a third country to fly to the United States.
To tell a joke, even if Dai Wei rode his own little yellow car to the customs, if he could go through the regular process of customs clearance, he could still come and go freely.
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As for the funds, it also benefits from the connections that Dai Wei himself has accumulated over the years.
It is reported that since December last year, Dai Wei and his coffee time, which is "valued at $200 million", have been looking for financing.
As of the first half of this year, Coffee Time has raised more than $10 million in investment, most of which come from Dai Wei's personal "old acquaintances", such as Zhen Fund and Weilielie Capital, which are Dai Wei's old shareholders in the early days of OfO.
It is worth mentioning that there have been rumors in the market that the money given to Dai Wei by Zhen Fund was directly invested by the founder Xu Xiaoping, which shows that the "godfather of venture capital" still has high hopes for Dai Wei.
After all, although it ended up in the end, the great success of ofo is undoubtedly the embodiment of Dai Wei's management ability.
Moreover, the successful experience of domestic brands such as Luckin and Cudi has provided Dai Wei with a ready-made template, and the probability of failure should not be large.
But as the saying goes, everything is most taboo to take for granted, just when Dai Wei and his team members were about to roll up their sleeves and work hard, they found that it was difficult to move an inch under their feet.
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The first obstacle in front of Dai Wei is the completely different Xi of Americans and domestic consumers.
Since the two brands share the same founder, Luckin and Cudi's user fission method is basically the same, that is, through the "first cup of promotion" to attract consumers to place an order to taste, and every subsequent successful new person can enjoy another drink for free or at a discounted price.
This set of marketing tactics is not difficult for Dai Wei, who has been in the Internet industry for several years, to learn.
Moreover, in order to attract consumers to a greater extent, Dai Wei's coffee hour hung a slogan directly at the door of the store:
"Our taste is better than Starbucks, and the price is more affordable, as long as you download the registration APP to complete the order, we will please the first five cups!"
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The model is copied across the board, and the discount is greater than that in China, and it is said that Dai Wei's store should be able to quickly harvest a large number of loyal customers.
But it didn't.
So, what's the problem?
The most critical point is that the APP or mini program that Chinese consumers are Xi to order is not popular in the United States.
In the United States, even in today's highly developed mobile Internet, the revenue of mobile payment orders accounts for only 15% of the total number of chain stores, and more consumers still prefer to pay by card or cash.
Different consumption Xi naturally means that consumers' enthusiasm for downloading apps is naturally not high, and Luckin's invincible "fission and new" model in China is obviously unsuitable in this land on the other side of the ocean.
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In addition to the above-mentioned misalignment between the brand and the local market due to the blind copying of the domestic marketing model, the biggest mistake made by Dai Wei may be the location of the store due to the blind pursuit of foot traffic.
Readers and friends may wish to imagine, what kind of people will buy affordable coffee on a daily basis?
It must be a young white-collar "worker" with a good income.
Because of this, domestic Luckin and Cudi stores are often located close to office buildings and office parks, so as to reach a large number of potential consumers within a radius of several hundred meters nearby.
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On the other hand, Dai Wei's coffee days are all in the most prosperous part of Manhattan, although there are many tourists coming and going every day in front of the store, but there is very little demand for coffee drinks.
Of course, as the central business district of the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ, Manhattan is also home to a large number of elite practitioners in the financial industry.
However, it must be admitted that the consumption power of this group is generally high, and the acceptance of start-up small brands is naturally low, and it is difficult for the Dai Wei team to get a piece of the pie.
At the same time, compared with the Chinese market where coffee culture has just emerged in recent years, local residents in the United States generally have the Xi of drinking coffee, and the local market has long been divided into several rounds, but any coffee brand that can maintain market share so far must have something outstanding, and each is a ruthless role.
The lack of fixed consumer groups and the need to face competitive pressure in the industry that are much higher than those in the domestic market, the impact of coffee time on the street can be foreseen from the beginning.
As investors' money and trust burned out, stores scattered throughout Manhattan closed one after another, and Dai Wei's second venture came to an end.
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If you have the patience to compare the development history of ofo and coffee time, you can clearly find that the process of building Daiwei's brands is almost the same.
Back in 2013, Dai Wei, who was about to graduate from Guanghua School of Management of Peking University, had a unique vision and aimed at the market gap of "the last mile of travel".
With the concept of "shared bicycle" and even "sharing economy" pioneered by him, Dai Wei immediately attracted wide attention from several top universities in Beijing and even all walks of life.
The most worth mentioning is that Zhu Xiaohu, the "unicorn hunter" who single-handedly voted for several leading companies such as Ele.me and Xiaohongshu, invested 10 million yuan to help Dai Wei, who had not yet stepped out of the ivory tower, realize his dream.
In the following years, ofo, which has won billions of dollars in investment, began to "burn money without brains", just trying to seize the market as quickly as possible.
Until the end, Dai Wei, who had no money to burn, began to play the user's deposit idea, and the original normal detention behavior gradually turned into fundraising.
But the deposit is always a deposit, and it will be returned to the user after all, and once it is unable to return, the death knell of ofo will also sound.
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Xu is from the same screenwriter, and the two stories are almost the same, but the road to the destruction of coffee time is more than twice as fast as that of ofo 8 years ago.
Even if you haven't systematically learned Xi knowledge of economics and management, you should understand the truth that "if the foundation is not strong, the earth will shake the mountains".
Obviously, the two projects operated by Dai Wei did not form a stable profit model in the early stage of entrepreneurship, and blind expansion will only accelerate their demise.
Business is not a public welfare, feelings and dreams can not be eaten, receiving the real money of investors, can only shoulder the pressure of seeking benefits for the "gold owners".
I hope that after this catastrophe, Dai Wei, who "dreams of entrepreneurship never dies", can really calm down and think carefully about where to place the next game of chess.
Perhaps, he can become the next Luo Yonghao, seize the opportunity to make a comeback, pay off the 1.5 billion arrears and save his reputation;
Or perhaps, he will become the next Jia Yueting, and he will be willing to leave his hometown to be a joke for the rest of his life.
As for the outcome, we might as well wait and see with the 16 million former ofo users in China who are waiting for the deposit refund to arrive.
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Author: Lu Yao
Editor: Ichiyigi