"I ended my 18-year career in the hospital just because I didn't like the job anymore. 」
Sitting on the sofa in the live broadcast room, Deng Siliang, who used to be a radiologist in a military hospital, is now a Taobao shop owner. Born into a military family, he graduated from the First Military Medical University of the Chinese People's Liberation Army 26 years ago and worked in a military hospital for 18 years. At the age of 40, this slightly hairless and slightly chubby middle-aged man suddenly made a decision: quit his job and went to Taobao to sell hermit crabs.
Dressed in a baggy cargo jacket and a corduroy beret, Deng Siliang looks like a café owner
For many people, the job in the tertiary military hospital can be called a "golden job": a monthly salary of 20,000 yuan and a troop establishment. But Deng Siliang found that this kind of life made him feel bored and hopeless, but Taobao Live, which was regarded as a new thing at that time, ignited his inner passion.
Before embarking on the road of Taobao live broadcast, Deng Siliang had raised koi fish and poured food with his friends, and lost tens of thousands of yuan a year, and finally stood at the outlet of the live broadcast and became the leader of the hermit crab market, with an average price of about 20 yuan and an annual output value of 10 million. "It's no exaggeration to say that the hermit crabs I sell are enough to circle the whole country. 」
Deng Siliang compares his career as a doctor and an entrepreneur to "bread" and "steak" respectively. Perhaps in the twenties and thirties, getting married, raising children, and settling down are the top priorities in life, and they need the "bread" that can satisfy hunger, and at the age of forty, it is also time to think about the "steak" that you want to and pursue your own values and dreams.
The iron rice bowl is not fragrant
In 2003, Deng Siliang graduated from the Military Medical University and came to work in a tertiary military hospital. Compared with his own choice, Deng Siliang was more influenced by his family. His father is a soldier and his mother is an obstetrician and gynecologist, and the integration of his parents' careers happens to be Deng Siliang's career choice.
is still Deng Siliang when he was a doctor
There is nothing special about the work of the army hospital. Deng Siliang is mainly engaged in heart-related examinations, and the most he does a day is CTA, two days off a week, and he works overtime until seven or eight o'clock in the evening when he is busy. The salary is also good, after working for a few years, I can get more than 10,000 yuan per month. Coupled with the establishment of the army, Deng Siliang's work satisfies many people's imagination of the ideal job.
However, stability is not everyone's pursuit, and perhaps for Deng Siliang, it is more like a shackle. At the end of the day's work in the hospital, Deng Siliang came to the rest room to change his white coat. The moment he hung his clothes on the hook, he asked himself what he would look like in ten years.
"There's no end in sight to the future. Come to think of it, I think if I were a doctor, I would still be like this, whether it was ten years or twenty years. Deng Siliang admits that this kind of stability is very similar to "boiling a frog in warm water".
"Like doing e-commerce now, if we want to open a new store, we first have to find a benchmarking account, look at it, keep up with it and surpass it. But being a doctor is a job that competes with oneself. 」
Not everyone who chooses to be a doctor has a great passion for clinical work, let alone a hospital job that is not only clinical. Issuing papers and getting promoted to professional titles, many unfree places made Deng Siliang feel bored.
Talking about the experience in the hospital, Deng Siliang always felt "annoying". Annoyed with the work he didn't like so much, annoyed to ask him about the idea of leaving. "You're always hoping to dig out some deeper reason, but you just don't like it. There must be foolishness in life, and then there will be success. I don't have this 'obsession' for the doctor's profession and I don't want to stay in the hospital anymore. 」
On the way to Bensi, the idea of leaving the company became clearer. As the saying goes, "forty is not confused", at the age of about forty, people already have their own judgment of value. Deng Siliang has gone through the stage of starting a family and starting a business, and the mid-life crisis at this time is no longer about food and clothing, but about value.
It just so happened that Deng Siliang caught up with the military reform. The central authorities issued the "Circular on Doing a Good Job in the Placement of Demobilized Military Cadres During the Period of Deepening National Defense and Military Reform," stipulating that demobilized military cadres with military service below the division level who have served 18 years or more may choose their own jobs. At that time, he was faced with two choices: either to obey the arrangement of the plan and continue to work in the system, or to retire from active duty and achieve employment and entrepreneurship. Most people choose the former, but Deng Siliang knows in his heart that when he returns to a public institution as a civil servant, this iron rice bowl is still not the steak he expected.
Just after 18 years of working in the hospital, Deng Siliang left the system.
After the failure of the business, bet on the hermit crab
After leaving the hospital, Deng Siliang didn't think about what to do. Most of the people around him who have come out of the system are going to do careers related to the army, or taking on some projects with the help of connections, and they need to constantly socialize.
Deng Siliang, who has been dealing with soldiers since he was a child, doesn't like this way, "I am really not good at dealing with leaders, and I am not very keen on topics that soldiers are interested in, so I rarely participate in discussions in military-related groups." 」
Although Deng Siliang lived in a family of doctors, his parents were not too involved in his career choices. Deng Siliang has an older sister who graduated from Fudan University and was originally assigned to a government unit in Tianjin, but she didn't want to stay in the system to work. In the nineties of the last century, once the allocated places were abandoned, local companies would not accept applicants. Deng Siliang has the impression that his sister did not stay in Tianjin in the end, but returned to Shanghai to start her own business, and no one in the family objected to her choice.
Deng Siliang's company is located in Tianjin's Huichuan Flowers, Birds, Fish and Insects Mall
Children who grew up in Tianjin have been exposed to flowers, birds, fish and insects since they were young, and many of them are addicted to fish and flowers. When he was in elementary school, Deng Siliang would pack the fish raised at home in bags and go to the Xikai Church in Tianjin to set up a stall and shout. Fa Xiao, who used to tinker with these things together, has also become a partner in the future to start a business together.
As early as before Deng Siliang resigned, Fa Xiao asked Deng Siliang to invest in raising koi together. originally thought that feeding the fish was quite simple, but Deng Siliang fell behind. The pond is not like a fish tank, the water is poured and reconnected to solve the problem, where to change the water, how to use the pump to pump the water are the most basic problems. If you want to raise small fry into ornamental fish, you have to take into account the weather factors.
As a result, tens of thousands of yuan of fish fry were scattered, and the wild birds ate one-third of them, and the fish left behind were not large.
The second test of selling goods also ended in failure. After paying tens of thousands of yuan in tuition, Deng Siliang pondered changing his career to sell food, rented a 200-square-meter factory and prepared to do a big job, but the goods were piled up in the warehouse and could not be sold.
Either break up and quit, or change careers and break into it again. With a heart, Deng Siliang and a few small hairs were ready to go back to the aquarium to try.
Ms. Gao is Deng Siliang's small wife, and it was at this time that she joined the entrepreneurial team. In her eyes, Deng Siliang is a person who is imaginative and can grasp the general direction. "At that time, when I went to the aquarium store to buy goods, Mr. Deng stumbled upon a room where there was no water in the fish tank, and when I got closer, I found that there were hermit crabs in the corner. At that time, it was estimated that it was also fresh, and after buying it back, I found that it was very easy to feed, even if I didn't care about it for a week. 」
With the lessons of fish farming before, several partners hit it off and planned to test the waters to sell hermit crabs.
Hermit crab on display at the store
Hermit crabs are creatures that do not move during the day and come out at night, and many players joke that "raising crabs is like raising soil". Compared with other mainstream pets, hermit crabs are miscellaneous and eat little, and do not need to change sand and water every day, so they are regarded as "lazy pets". Hermit crabs are unpopular enough in the aquarium market, but it is also a niche market that is subdivided enough to make Deng Siliang and his partners stand on the cusp.
Sell pets like lipstick
Before Deng Siliang, no one was selling hermit crabs live online.
2016 is the recognized first year of live broadcast in the live broadcast industry, and online live broadcast is like a spark, which quickly burned into the battlefield of e-commerce sales. At the time, "5G" was still a particularly buzzword. Deng Siliang's keen business sense made Deng Siliang realize that with the upgrading of the network environment, live content e-commerce will gradually replace traditional e-commerce based on search. It just so happens that hermit crabs, as ornamental pets, can restore the offline experience in the live broadcast, showing the fun of feeding, changing shells, and landscaping.
At that time, it was necessary to pay a deposit of about 10,000 yuan to open a live broadcast account in the store. After several rounds of losses, Deng Siliang had no choice but to go into battle by himself. In the 50-square-meter rental house, Deng Siliang simply picked up, set up his mobile phone, put a pot of hermit crabs in a plastic box and put it on the ground, and with his experience of playing aquarium since childhood, he sat in Mazha to start the first live broadcast.
Taobao searched for hermit crabs, and the first thing that jumped out was Deng Siliang's Taobao store - a snail pet
Taking off his white coat, Deng Siliang became the store's first talent anchor, introducing products to fans and buyers. "No one was watching at all, so 30 people a day would have been good. After about a week, 30 people became hundreds, and after another week, it became thousands, all of which were natural traffic. 」
At the beginning, Deng Siliang had no bottom in his heart, and he was not very willing to take the initiative to talk to others about the identity of the anchor. Seeing the increase in the number of people in the live broadcast room, the stone in my heart was finally put down. In less than half a year, Deng Siliang became the best-selling e-commerce company for hermit crabs by live broadcasting, occupying about eighty percent of the market share at that time, with sales of about 100,000 yuan.
The snail dwelling pet won Taobao's special treasure live broadcast room award
The live broadcast is 10 hours a day, and half a year later, Deng Siliang calculated that he couldn't be the anchor, he had to be the person behind the anchor.
At that time, there was a saying in the e-commerce circle that "women buy things for the whole family, and men will only buy them for themselves". Different from ornamental fish, turtles, which are mainly male customers' pets, Deng Siliang found that the proportion of female customer service who placed orders in the live broadcast room of hermit crabs was obviously high, not only bought by himself as pets, but also helped children pick up goods.
In the industrial chain of aquarium pets, hermit crabs are only a very small category, and the unit price of a common mini hermit crab is 5~40 yuan.
Generally speaking, the rearing of hermit crabs requires a layer of bottom sand at the bottom of the container to set up shelter for the hermit crab to live in, and as it grows, the hermit crab needs to find a new empty shell to accommodate the larger body. In addition to the preference for the hermit crab itself, female customers also prefer to buy clothes for pets, and landscaping, dodging, and empty shells are all greater expenses.
Deng Siliang aimed at the "appearance" of hermit crabs, but the domestic hermit crab market is not mature, and the varieties and landscaping cannot meet the demand brought by live broadcasting.
"At the beginning, we didn't have our own supply chain, and we sold out all the shell inventory that had been backlogged for more than ten years at an aquarium decoration store in Tianjin, but it was still not enough to sell. Deng Siliang said that the best-selling products in offline aquarium stores are mainly natural shells or green salamanders, and the landscaping is mostly biased towards rough natural styles such as forests and ores.
Deng Siliang's Taobao store has improved the traditional landscaping, adding elements such as dolls and figures
The supply problem is prominent, and the origin of beautiful strawberries, short-wristed, and dark purple hermit crabs is mostly in Indonesia, India and other regions, but the degree of marketization in these regions is not high, not to mention the mature aquarium supply chain. So everyone began to discuss and contacted local fishermen on their own to buy hermit crabs. I thought that the biggest difficulty in expanding the market may be the local language problem, but I didn't expect that shipping back to China also involves customs clearance, customs declaration and other barriers, and it took three or four months before the foreign channels were negotiated.
Deng Siliang frankly admitted that he was not good at product design aesthetics, so in the early days of the company's establishment, he decided to design products from a female perspective, with female partners as product managers.
Deng Siliang and Product Manager Ms. Gao are reviewing the data
Talking about the female perspective, Ms. Gao, the product manager, joked, "You can never trust Mr. Deng's aesthetics, and you don't know what women like at all. Brother Deng sometimes tells me that the new design is very beautiful recently, but he only knows about that product for months. 」
The company has a lot of IP images, and the peripherals for raising hermit crabs are designed and developed by Ms. Gao and the live broadcast supervisor. Ms. Pan, the director of the live broadcast, said, "We refer to the pictures and texts of foreign social media, and at the same time, according to the feedback of the live broadcast, we found that the demand for hand-customized water basins to avoid this market is relatively strong, so we added some dolls, figures and other elements to the design, and the finished landscaping sold will also consider more flower and plant elements that women like, and buyers also like it." 」
The IP image of the design of the snail dwelling exotic pet
A handmade shell in collaboration with a designer
Ms. Pan, the live broadcast supervisor, took out the handmade crab shells designed by the shop, "We have in-depth cooperation with some Internet celebrity designers, just like nail art, the traditional cat's eye snail only costs 2 yuan, and the price of the designer's handmade shell can rise to hundreds of yuan, because it is a limited edition, hand-made, these replacement shells full of design are basically sold out every time they are put on the shelves." 」
The average price of hermit crabs is about 40 yuan, and the unit price has risen to 100 yuan. On Children's Day in 2020, more than 500 hermit crabs were sold in the live broadcast room within one hour, most of which were made by mothers as Children's Day gifts for children. Customers who have purchased hermit crab once are also attracted to the surrounding area to return for purchase, and the store's turnover has been stable in the 8 figures in recent years.
Changing careers and starting a business, nine deaths and a lifetime
"What I think about every day as an e-commerce company is how to develop products, how to do marketing and content, and there are no Saturdays and Sundays. Deng Siliang said frankly that starting a business is like gambling, which is not the same thing as being a doctor in a department: being a doctor receives money at the end of the month, and being a boss pays money at the end of the month, and the adrenaline of entrepreneurs is always 10 percentage points higher than that of part-time workers.
Behind Deng Siliang is the live broadcast room used for special sessions
Deng Siliang took a group photo when he participated in the Taobao Maker Festival
"We can't call it success now, we can only say that we can survive, first look at the money on the books this month, whether it is enough to pay the salaries of more than 30 people, and then talk about development. 」
In 2020, the epidemic affected express transportation, and the hermit crab business was naturally paralyzed. Not to mention that the hermit crab could be shipped out, Deng Siliang himself couldn't enter the company, so he could only watch the hermit crab worth more than 300,000 yuan die in the breeding box, which lasted for a month.
After a few months, the epidemic gradually improved, and Deng Siliang was sure that the consumption enthusiasm suppressed during the epidemic would not disappear, and the "retaliatory recovery" must be a big business opportunity, and according to the current production capacity, it should not be able to meet the market demand.
"For example, a person can only pack 200 bags an hour by hand, while an automatic packaging machine can produce 1,500 bags an hour. If industrial automation is not solved, the output will not only not go up, but the labor cost will increase several times. 」
Hermit crab feed produced by Deng Siliang's own factory
The partner was the first to object. Because of the loss of the epidemic, there is really no money on the books, and it is not a small investment to buy hundreds of thousands of automated machines. "Everyone was in tears, and I said it was a gamble. 」
Ms. Gao, the product manager, said, "It was really difficult at that time, the express delivery stopped, the crab died, there was no money in the account, Mr. Deng still had to buy the machine, and in the end he did not resist him, and applied for a loan from the platform to buy the machine, but the bet was right, in the summer of 21, 8 machines were fully opened, and it almost couldn't catch up with the number of sales per day." Mr. Deng is relatively poor in terms of details, but when it comes to strategic vision and long-term emerging industry issues, we will respect his choice very much, and he has a very good grasp of it. 」
In the past few years, Deng Siliang has not been idle. He is like a hermit crab, constantly looking for empty shells: he has sold Tianjin insects and grasshoppers, the new Internet celebrity rutin chicken in the chicken pen, plans to sell enamel pots again in the future, and plans to engage in camping.
"We have already touched the ceiling of hermit crabs, this market is so big, but the e-commerce live broadcast experience we have explored can be adapted to different categories. seems to have a business that can't be done with hermit crabs, Deng Siliang is like a mirror in his heart: the enamel pot that is sought after by netizens has many factories in Hebei, and it is also an opportunity if it can be discussed.
Rutin chickens are raised outside the company
Deng Siliang's enamel pot shop has 130,000 followers on Xiaohongshu
Deng Siliang is worried about the camping brand name. He reserved a name for the brand, "He Mike", inspired by the Song Dynasty poet Feng Qia's "He Bridegroom", the English name is Hermicamp, which is made up of hermit (hermit) and camp (camping). Listening to the staff, Deng Siliang is still the copywriting director of the store, and the promotional manuscripts are all handled by Deng Siliang himself.
Hobbies, business acumen, copywriting creativity, all this seems to have nothing to do with the profession of a doctor.
When asked how doctors can help him start a business, Deng Siliang's answer was surprising: the paper writing, which gave him the most headache, was actually useful in collecting information about hermit crabs around the world, and could help him successfully contact the author through the paper.
Previously, he forwarded a notice on Moments, which encouraged medical staff to work part-time. Colleagues in the imaging department commented below, joking that the medical staff could do examinations during the day and tell fortunes to the same people at night, and some people asked him if there was a place in the company. Deng Siliang only felt that he was a lucky person.
Deng Siliang's circle of friends comment area
"Leaving the hospital to work in an unrelated industry is a reset to zero. I like to zero myself in and take on new challenges and experience new lives. But it is not easy to return to zero, the difficulty is like a layer of skin like a mountain, the entrepreneur is dead after all, whether he can break out of the cocoon into a butterfly and move the mountain, in the end, it depends on everyone's situation. 」
From the Lilac Garden