Produced by Tiger Sniff Commercial Consumer Group
Author|Huang Qingchun
Stills from "The Great Gatsby".
Since Lei Jun and Zhou Hongyi stepped out of the path of "executives becoming Internet celebrities", a number of corporate executives have been eager to try.
Soon, on this road where both risks and benefits were leveraged, Xuan Jing, the former vice president of Baidu, became the first negative case - I thought that the "farce" would end with Xuan Jing's resignation, but netizens followed the "melon man" and brought out Xuan Jing's Douyin IP incubation mentor: "Brother Sam".
On May 10, Upstream News learned from "Brother Sam" that about three months ago, Xuan Jing went to Yantai to pay 5,980 yuan and took Brother Sam's "Douyin Trader Class" for three days.
However, for the "golden sentence of Brother Sam" circulating on the Internet for all employees of the department to learn, Brother Sam denied it, and said, "This is completely a rumor, whoever believes in it is mentally retarded."
Even though Sam tried to quickly complete the cut with Xuan Jing, he took on the image of a "commercial IP mentor" that he had cultivated and painstakingly operated for half his life, and was now on the verge of "collapse" like a domino that had been toppled.
"Masters" don't ask where they come from
This is the former vice president of Baidu, who pointed out the maze, and the knowledge Internet celebrity on the market "born in a big factory", he graduated from Muping Vocational Secondary School (now renamed "Yantai Industry and Trade School"), and he became famous by selling sea cucumbers in the early days, which can be regarded as starting from the end of the year.
The turning point occurred in 2018, when the short video platforms represented by Douyin and Kuaishou rose rapidly, and the indifferent algorithm finally overcame humanism - when the growth curve of Douyin and Kuaishou became steeper and steeper, their crowding of netizens' attention and time became more and more obvious, and the Internet traffic pattern was gradually rewritten.
It was in this time window that Samgo rode the wave of wealth creation on Douyin and soared all the way, becoming popular by selling "commercial IP courses" dressed in the shell of emotional intelligence and financial quotient, and became the hottest IP incubation mentor on Douyin.
If you want to sit firmly in the top position in the Douyin knowledge payment circle, of course, you must have excellent "means".
In just a few years, Samgo has incubated several phenomenal IPs with his own experience and methodology, including @Qingtianjian (millions of fans), @毛毛姐 (not "redundant and Maomao sister" with more than 30 million fans), @骆驼姐, and then successively incubated @大健康李Na, @大熊饭局, @星哥, and @家庭教育国庆老师等账号.
Of course, Samgo also has his own account "basic disk".
According to Xindou data, as of May 11, 2024, the Samgo cognitive circle has more than 2.94 million fans on Douyin, and if you add up all the fans of its matrix accounts (including @Senge, @纯然商业, @金尚商业说, @参哥思维圈, @参校长不讲废话, @参哥带你走天下, @私域参校长, and @参哥认知圈等), it is roughly estimated that the entire network will exceed 10 million.
Frankly speaking, such an atypical sample of faltering from the bottom of society to the top, you can say that his grassroots counterattack is a model for seizing the wave of Douyin wealth creation, and even the disadvantaged class to complete the wealth jump.
But no matter how much it is whitewashed, it still reveals a trace of absurdity.
Judging from the former vice president of Gochi Baidu, who graduated from secondary school, he can indeed be called a high-end player in the commercial IP incubation business, but he is just the epitome of thousands of Douyin course sellers.
In the past, the path of "gold plating" for Internet executives was to apply for MBA in well-known universities, but with the rise of the wave of short videos, all kinds of president classes, financial and business courses, and private board meetings have become popular from offline to online, and have become a new place for more and more listed executives, workplace elites, and high-level gold plating of large factories.
After all, MBA has set a threshold through high tuition fees + exams + educational background \ resource links, but with the downward shift of discourse power brought about by the popularization of the mobile Internet and the popularity of short videos, all this is being rapidly deconstructed.
The gilded play of "selling courses" + resource links is no longer monopolized by universities and training institutions - as long as they are willing to pay high, the well-packaged grassroots can also be turned into "mentors" who are exported to the elite.
What's even more terrifying is that these reckless Internet celebrities started from the end of the day, kicked off all the shackles without any psychological burden, and a lot of new terms, new concepts, and new thinking completely stunned the market, but relied on speculation to eat more dividends of the times.
Samgo only crosses bosses and executives
When those high-ranking MBA professors are still researching new cases of the world's top 500 companies, Samgo can "preach" on Douyin every day.
In particular, Brother Sam has been creating a high-cognition, not bad money character from beginning to end, and entrepreneurs who dare to criticize and seek advice, often calling hundreds of millions of dollars a small project, and his confidence is more than Wang Jianlin.
Different from the boring and difficult cases and theories of university professors, Samgo's business IP courses are full of "dry goods", formulas and methodologies that sell well all over the Internet, giving people the illusion of advanced cognition, and pinching the weakness of those who think about the Internet but actually have a chaotic knowledge system in their brains.
But if you are keen on surfing the Internet, brushing Zhihu, Station B, shopping post bars, and forums, you will find that most of Samgo's remarks are just "repackaging" of old dry goods on the Internet - but this kind of content has also been played with a simple and crude business model: create noise by peddling commercial IP courses, and then authorize slices online to monetize + offline private board meetings and communities to collect membership fees.
In the end, after two or three years of spinning and jumping, Samgo fooled a group of rich and idle executives or small bosses, counting the money to the point of exhaustion - according to media reports, Samgo said at the 2023-2024 company annual meeting that in recent years, the company has grown against the trend, from 0 to now more than 1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
The reason why selling classes can quickly reach 1 billion is that Brother Sam focuses on a "don't pit the poor".
Some consumers who have participated in the "Sango" offline training course told Jiemian News that the entire course lasts for 10 days and costs 50,000 yuan, while the price of a single "financial quotient private domain improvement course" and "emotional intelligence course" is about 10,000 yuan (netizens posted its 56 recorded courses "Short Video Traffic Operation Cognition Course" at a price of 5,980 yuan; The course "Short Video Whole Case Trader" is priced at 9980 yuan).
Another consumer who has purchased a ginseng offline class told the Blue Whale reporter that the 9980 course does not include food, accommodation and transportation, but only the cost of the course itself, and the learning time is three days.
"The one I went to had more than 500 people, and I've heard that sometimes there are more people. The categories of Samgo (courses) are very complete, (so) no matter what business you do, you can find the corresponding (course improvement), (courses) each business seems to be independent but is actually related to each other to achieve conversion. ”
Of course, Samgo will provide high-standard, high-consumption customized services for high-end customers.
VIP is the "entrepreneur alliance" (i.e., the private board of directors) of the company, priced at 80,000 yuan, for lifelong service, the course includes 1v1 consulting services, private board boss exclusive, industry research, etc.; VVIP is a distinguished full-case cooperation service, which accompanies business owners to build IP throughout the process, with an annual fee of up to 2 million yuan.
With such a staggering charge, will no one pay for it?
According to Jiupai Finance, the "Gulfstream Entrepreneur Alliance" founded by the Samko team has 2,735 members as of January 2024; Samgo also marked on his poster the income distribution of members who joined the private board of directors: all members have an average annual income of more than one million, of which 73% have an income of more than 10 million, 30% have an income of more than 100 million, and 10% have an income of more than 1 billion.
Why are these people willing to pay money obediently and be "enlightened" by Sam Ge to become a downline?
It is not excluded that many bosses are rushing to the original intention of new media transformation and actively embracing the wave of short videos, but the Internet has fulfilled the dream of too many speculators, and many bosses and executives who get rich overnight or are highly path-dependent always have a fear that their wealth is about to be shuffled.
Although, these people are viscerally eager to master the latest and most fashionable management system, eager to gain an international perspective; But this group of people are so ambitious, eager for quick success, and looking forward to a quick start in the short term, and the bad habit of delusional once and for all in their bones has long been thoroughly studied by Brother Sam's "commercial IP class", focusing on a tailor-made.
As a result, small bosses and executives who suffer from "financial anxiety", "traffic anxiety", and "monetization anxiety" have all been coaxed into Brother Sam's "crash course":
- In the first stage, the basic course coarsely screens potential customers;
- In the second stage, the private board of directors will screen high-end customers;
- In the third stage, the data of high-end customer cooperation explosion is used to bluff people to attract more potential customers, and the cycle is repeated, and the loop is perfect.
As a result, those companies that are looking for "Brother Sam" to empower themselves wanted to overtake in the corner, but they were all blocked in the corner.
After the matter of Xuanjing, the former vice president of Baidu, fermented, the UP master of Station B "Nee Ni Gongzi" broke the news that Xuan Jing was the third leader he had seen who was "overturned" by Brother San. "After the former company leader bought Brother Sam's class, he would teach the traffic skills he learned at the meeting like a bible, and asked all employees to make personal IP for the company for free, but as a result, he spent 2 million yuan a year, and the realization was only 0 yuan."
It can only be said that these courses framed with "business IP building" can spread to the daily work of academic executives like a plague, and precipitate into part of the management dross, and eventually have to be tried and made by workers in the workplace, which is quite sad.
Source: Visual China
There was a joke on the Internet that ridiculed the Internet elite, saying, "They watch Yale open classes every day, Zhihu Guoke pays countless attention, must read Tiger Sniff and 36 Krypton every day, knows Ma Yun's entrepreneurial history well, and is obsessed with Zhang Xiaolong's greed and hatred, likes Luo Zhenyu better than Jobs, and talks about Internet thinking when they meet people...... is still crowding the subway every day. ”
Now, they're even worse off – paying expensive tuition fees and putting what they've learned in business IP classes into practice, only to lose their jobs and get a bad reputation.
#我是虎嗅商业. Huang Qingchun, deputy head of the consumption and mobility group, pays attention to entertainment and social networking, games, video and other fields, and industry professionals communicate with WeChat: 724051399, and news clues can also be emailed to [email protected]
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