Welcome to the "MCN Watch" section of the new list. This article is the sixth in a series of observations from the new list MCN.
Behind the top stream anchor, how does MCN get along with itself? What's new about making friends 16 months later?
Recently, the editorial department of the new list visited the Hangzhou office where a friend was made, and chatted with the founder Huang He about the pain points, difficulties and itch points of live e-commerce.
Many people know Luo Yonghao, but may not know a friend behind him.
The first time I met Huang He, the founder of Make a Friend, was at the China (Hangzhou) Short Video and Live BroadcastIng Industry Summit. He was wearing white sneakers and a light gray casual suit and looked a little sleepy.
But when it was Huang He's turn to speak on the stage, he immediately regained the spirit of the live broadcast, confidently and affirmatively:
"Whether it's tone or picture quality, we don't have to say anything about this aspect of our live broadcast room, and we are not modest."
At the summit site, there were Internet celebrities who took photos, anchors who broadcast live, merchants who distributed flyers, and MCN agencies that introduced their businesses
Since the first live broadcast in Hangzhou on April 23, the focus of making friends has gradually shifted from Beijing to Hangzhou, and together with more than 300 employees, it has become the new gold digger in the e-commerce capital.
Behind Luo Yonghao, how did making a friend grow from a founding team of 7 people to nearly 700 employees? What kind of observations and thinking have you had in this year of entering the live broadcast e-commerce? And, how does making friends deal with the natural risks of a single big anchor?
On July 29, Huang He gave an exclusive interview to the new list in the Hangzhou office of a friend.
Make a friend in Hangzhou Binjiang District Yunhu Science and Technology Park, the intersection diagonally diagonally is Sydney's Chenfan, Wei Ya's Qianxun is in the Ali Park 1 km away.
Here, a friend rented four floors for office, next to a 2,000-square-meter live broadcast base, Luo Yonghao's dedicated live broadcast room is on the second floor of the base.
The live broadcast base is located on the second floor, and the café on the first floor is the only leisure place in the park.
Entering the live broadcast base, the anchor Li Shuang is broadcasting live in a 100-square-meter live broadcast room, behind the camera, 15 staff members are responsible for assisting. Further on, there is Luo Yonghao's exclusive live broadcast room.
This is a large live broadcast room with an area of 500 square meters, Luo Yonghao will sit in front of the 5 * 9 meters LED screen when live broadcasting, and the black table in front of him will be wiped so that a fingerprint cannot be seen.
Outside the lens, there is a slide rail about 5 meters long, three rows of workstations for live feedback, data display, product color grading, live streaming, 2 model shooting rooms, and 5 4-storey shelfs, with a total cost of millions of yuan.
Luo Yonghao during the live broadcast. Source: Make a friend
"These are benchmarks in the industry," Mr. Huang said.
Walking into the office building, the most conspicuous is the large "avoid tailgating" prompt on the glass door, and visitors must be led by employees to enter and exit the office. In the office, no less than 10 large "integrity announcements" were posted to remind employees not to accept any form of money or gifts. On the announcement in white on a red background, a large handcuff was also drawn.
Perhaps because there is not much decoration in the office shortly after moving in, employees are rarely at their desks, some talk to customers in the reception area, and some travel back and forth between offices, which is a busy scene.
At the end of August, 24-hour live broadcast × 7 was achieved, and luo Yonghao's GMV ratio dropped to 30% at the end of this year, which is the new goal revealed by Huang He in the interview.
Talking about what to rely on to make a friend to attract star anchors, Huang He said in an affirmative tone that "the most reliable one is us" to do live broadcasting on Douyin; when it comes to the advantages of operating the business on behalf of the agency, it will feel that the shouting live broadcast is not decent, "some brands are to have brand tone"; when it comes to the matrix number project, it emphasizes that it will not do "a bunch of net red numbers and apprentice numbers".
As for the risk of a single anchor, in Huang He's planning, even if Luo Yonghao returns to the field of science and technology after a few years, Luo Yonghao's GMV accounted for only 20%, "no panic".
Apparently, 16 months after its founding, making a friend is trying to get rid of his dependence on Luo Yonghao, hoping to get out of his own live story.
The following is the content of the interview, which has been published by the new list:
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="57" > live e-commerce is very profitable, but...</h1>
New List: What was the first opportunity to make a friend? There are reports that Luo Yonghao made up his mind to do live broadcasting after reading a report on live e-commerce from China Merchants Securities?
Huang He: Live e-commerce is very profitable, there is no doubt about it. But whether this matter is smooth in business logic and whether it can bring value to society, Lao Luo did not figure it out at that time.
After reading this report, Lao Luo probably figured it out.
The first is business logic. Brands can also get some of the things they deserve, such as brand exposure, such as helping the store complete the cold start.
Another point, we did not understand, if the online is so cheap, what to do with the price of the offline store. Later, I also understood that (live broadcasting is) limited-time sale, which will not have a fundamental impact on other channels offline.
Then there's social value. Live e-commerce is equivalent to an online video version of group buying, directly removing layers of agents and improving an efficiency.
For example, iKang Guobin is a well-known domestic physical examination institution, their original distribution model requires all levels of provinces to run factories, run offline companies, but with live streaming with goods, we sell one night equivalent to its provincial generation one month of performance. This is the increase in efficiency.
An offline store may only have four or five customers entering the store a day, but in the brand live broadcast room, dozens of customers can be explained at the same time, so it is certainly efficient.
New List: Many platforms should have looked for you, right? What were the considerations for choosing Douyin at that time?
Huang He: What Taobao, Pinduoduo, Kuaishou, Tencent, Douyin, almost all of the platforms on the market at that time were in contact. Why do you value TikTok so much?
First, in addition to selling goods, Douyin can also precipitate some content. So Lao Luo hopes to output some content on Douyin, output some values, and then attract some new fans.
Second, Douyin is more in line with Lao Luo's original fan base, and the brand tone is also very strong.
Third, last year, Douyin did not have a head anchor. Taobao has Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi, and Kuaishou has Simba, but before we went, there was no one who could particularly get his hands on it and was particularly bullish.
According to the statistics of Xinjiao, "Luo Yonghao" has accumulated 5.367 billion yuan of goods (statistical time: April 1, 2020 - August 16, 2021), source: Douyin
In fact, there are several conditions given in the follow-up, but we have the spirit of the contract.
New list: There was a time last year, Zhu Xiaomu briefly went to Taobao to broadcast live, what was the plan at that time?
Huang He: In fact, it is also related to our growth bottleneck at that time. We wondered if we were going to try something else.
Of course, after in-depth communication with Douyin, they still hoped that we would not try too much on other platforms, so we did not try again.
New List: Speaking of bottlenecks, what key time nodes do you think are when making friends develop to the present?
Huang He: There are three.
The first was the Suning Tesco live broadcast on August 7 last year.
In fact, before that live broadcast, the sales of the live broadcast room of making a friend had been declining. Why? It is that we make the mistake that many celebrities make in the early days: only looking for the brand side, and charging a high pit fee.
If you do this, you will sell a lot at the beginning, but with the passage of time, there will be fewer and fewer brands that can afford to pay the pit fee, the heavy product rate in the live broadcast room will become higher and higher, and the price advantage will become less and less obvious.
The so-called debut is the peak. We always wanted to find a gripper and raise the GMV in the live broadcast room.
Later, taking the lead in letting Suning Tesco enter Douyin, we could sell almost all of Suning's self-operated goods, and suddenly opened up the richness of the product.
The e-commerce platform lacks traffic, and Douyin lacks pallets, so we will take the lead. While giving traffic, while giving goods, plus us, it is bound to ensure that the brand enters the first field is sold explosively.
Image source: Douyin
Taking advantage of the chase, later our cooperation with Yang Wharf, Vipshop, NetEase Yanxuan, and Xiaomi Youpin is all this idea, which is equivalent to opening up our cooperation with the e-commerce platform.
The second was to sign Qi Wei in September last year.
At that time, our supply chain overflowed, there were many beauty products, but Lao Luo was all male audience fans and could not move, so we urgently needed a female anchor.
In addition, at that time, we also found that Douyin attached great importance to traffic and hoped that there would be some representative talents. As soon as the reacher comes in, it gives traffic.
So we managed to sign Qi Wei. It is also based on this idea that we signed a bunch of talents such as Li Chen and Li Shi, so that more people can share our pallets.
Since september last year, a bunch of celebrities have come to us. Originally, we could have expanded it very large, but it felt meaningless, so it was better to do the hanging and do the fine, and then copy it. This is our second turning point.
The third is to start the agency operation business in February and March this year.
In fact, we have been slow to react to the operation of the generation, and we have not started until February and March this year. At that time, there was a family that did a hundred million yuan during the New Year, and then we felt that this could be done.
It makes hard money, but it's a worthwhile thing. We are thinking that since Baozun can do so big, Douyin e-commerce is not worse than Taobao, and it is also promising to grow another Baozun on it.
Ambition is relatively large.
It is also because of the operation of the business, let us start to sort out the company's business, we belonged to each business before actively participated, do not fall behind, first do not want to be right, first do it. The result was a plate in the last four or five months, all right.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="136" > MCN has no imagination, and the business is getting more and more valuable</h1>
New List: Have there been any new changes in the business planning of making friends from last year to now?
Huang He: At the beginning, we wanted to make an MCN organization, but after a long time, we felt that the MCN organization might not have much imagination. So now we want to go in 4 business directions: MCN agency, brand agency operation, self-owned brand, and live training. The goal is to make every business profitable by the end of the year.
New List: What do you think is the advantage of making a friend to do these 4 businesses well? These businesses actually have no small threshold.
Huang He: These 4 businesses are essentially based on our 2 cores: one is a pallet, and the other is a SaaS system.
From last year to now, we have cultivated about 10,000 brands, plus the cooperation platform parties of NetEase Yanxuan, Vipshop, Suning Tesco, plus channels such as Jiuxian Network and 1919, which constitute our pallet.
The entire pallet will be imported into our SaaS system, including settlement, contract, qualification review, etc. are completed on it, and the anchor comes directly on the system to select it, the efficiency is improved, and the goods are also assured.
These 4 businesses are actually mutually adhesive, organically combined, and mutually reinforcing.
For example, independent brands, which category runs well, which category sells well, which category has the highest gross profit, the pallet can provide some more certain directions, we can customize some products according to the depth of the pallet, which is equivalent to reducing the cost of research and trial and error.
If we do our own brand, we can sell it directly in the live broadcast room of making a friend, at least the first wave is there.
For example, brand operation, for MCN business, agency operation can supplement our pallets, so that talents can broadcast more products; for the training business, it is a talent outlet; for independent brands, it is equivalent to we can learn from each brand more deeply.
Originally, we only cooperated with Banana with two products, but after operating the service, it gave us all the SKUs.
New list: MCN agency, now make a friend a total of how many star anchors signed?
Huang He: There are too many, and now there are more than 20 broadcasts at the same time, and at least 40 of them have been piloted. It's also a two-way selection process. We think you can broadcast, and then you have to be motivated, right?
It doesn't make sense to sign a bunch of them like some companies, we try them extensively, and then leave artists who are willing and willing to spend their minds.
New List: How do you sign up for a celebrity when you make a friend?
Huang He: They all found it themselves, or recommended by Douyin.
In Douyin to do live broadcasting, the most reliable is still us, because we have done a lot of real work, and we have invested hundreds of games.
For example, in this piece, we have spent hundreds of dollars in real time, each of which is hundreds of thousands of large investments, although there are still places that can be improved, but we are indeed recognized by the industry as the best in the industry, and even the vibrato to do the delivery also let us come.
Many so-called investment experts talk about how to invest on Douyin all day long, but they have not spent a lot of money, maybe a 100,000, 200,000 on the top of the sky, but we can probably spend hundreds of thousands of small 1 million, and it is continuous hundreds of games to spend.
This is the experience of real money and silver spent.
In addition, there are some things that happened before (referring to the "rollover" incident such as the mis-sale of fake cardigans in Luo Yonghao's live broadcast room), you know, so we have established a perfect qualification review and approval system, before each broadcast, we will have a legal qualification review, which requires our business and business to upload relevant authorization links and various qualifications.
I think our selection may be more stringent than TikTok.
Many people are willing to give us pit fees, because our quality is very strict, to put it badly, even for the sake of our selection, the last time we were here was worth it. Of course, this is my personal judgment.
New List: Are there any criteria for a celebrity anchor who makes a friend and signs a contract?
Huang He: We are more inclined to look for stars who have national recognition but have faded in recent years. He himself will do this as a career, there will not be so many shelves, so high expectations, but also can sink his heart. I think this type of person is very easy to succeed.
Many stars will be extremely impetuous at first, I must smoke how many pit fees, must smoke how much income, but in fact, you will find that if you really want to do, at this stage can only slowly deepen in a segment.
Green, vertical is meaningful, brush out tens of millions of dollars is meaningless.
For example, Li Chen, at the beginning also wanted to sell more, when the first game was broadcast with him, sold for 10 million yuan, but it was meaningless, many products are not profitable, equivalent to subsidized products.
Later, I talked to him and wanted to sell things in a down-to-earth manner. The second show sold 1 million, but he did not lose confidence, continued, and finally tried out that his conversion rate in clothing, especially men's fashion clothes, was very high, his interest was growing, and we continued to cooperate with him to adjust the way of grouping and live broadcasting.
Up to now, his Douyin fans have grown from hundreds of thousands to more than 1 million, and live broadcasting can also be stable to millions.
Qi Wei and Li Chen are the two most satisfactory star anchor cases in Huang He at present. Image source: Douyin
New List: What is the cooperation mechanism between making a friend and star artists?
Huang He: It's the commission, the stars take the big head, we take the small head. The overall logic is that everyone can make money to continue to do it.
We only sign contracts with celebrities, and do not restrict him from receiving short video ads, so we are a very Nice company.
They (celebrities) find the industry very impetuous. Only our company is one of the few who are willing to sink their hearts and do it well, and have the patience to do it.
Do you know how some typical agencies do it? First come up and collect a pit fee from the brand side, the first few times of hard knocking, no matter what the star will do in the future, and then sell well.
Now many people want to knock a one or two strokes to finish things, but we don't have a star business and make money, so we are more willing to do the volume and accompany the stars to explore more models. We are very Open, and we will make the stars ready for long-term work and long-term earnings.
New List: How is the brand operation of making a friend progressing now?
Huang He: At present, there are more than 30 brands operating on behalf of the agency, and there should be more than 100 in total. It's a constant double-selection process, there won't be many in each category, and one or two will just run out.
For example, the well-known NetEase Yanxuan, Vipshop, Suning Super Buyer, Banana, Youku, and even Douyin's Dou+ mall are also operated by us.
I think the bigger ones are all operated on behalf of us. These things are actually invisible to the outside, and I don't want the outside to see them.
New List: How does making a friend think about private labels?
Huang He: Before the end of the wave of dividends on Douyin, we must precipitate some of our own brands, otherwise it is just a channel.
Doing channels is relatively stable, but the imagination is very poor, it is not something that is more and more valuable, and as long as one day other channels are cheaper than you, more convenient than you, more efficient than you, you are eliminated.
Huang He in the live broadcast room. Source: Make a friend
Not having a threshold is very insecure. There is only one thing that is getting more and more valuable, and that is the brand.
Now doing independent brands is basically divided into three steps: find 1,000 tail masters to do grass, find 100 central masters with about 1 million fans to do video tape, and then find the head masters such as Lao Luo and Qi Wei.
We may try more than a dozen brands together, but in the end we can run out of a few consumer goods brands similar to Daxidi and Xinliangji, and I think it is already very valuable.
New List: What about live training business?
Huang He: Our training business has not yet started the official enrollment, it belongs to the internal testing stage, so there is no data at present, but I am still more confident, because we have 3 pieces of business to digest.
One is our live broadcast room, one is our talent business, and the other is our agency operation business.
These brands are reluctant to use many wild anchors on the market, and they will feel that the form of crazy orders and shouting with rhythm is not appropriate enough. How to say? This kind of shouting live broadcast, although grounded, but some brands are to have brand tone.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="242" > 2021 small goal of making friends: Luo Yonghao's GMV accounted for 30%.</h1>
New List: How many people are making friends so far, and roughly what departments are there?
Huang He: At present, there are between 600-700 employees who make a friend, which is almost double that of Beijing, and the post-90s are the main force, and the ratio of men to women is about 5:5.
Among them, there are more than 80 people in selection + business, more than 80 legal affairs, more than 130 artist teams, more than 200 people in agency operation, more than 100 people in SaaS systems, dozens of people in private brands, and more than 30 functional departments.
New List: Who are the core teams at the beginning of making a friend? How is the division of labor?
Huang He: Our core team mainly has 7 people, Lao Luo and Zhu Xiaomu are the anchors, in addition to being the anchors, I am also responsible for the selection of products and own brands, in addition, Fang Xiang is responsible for operations, Bai Yongliang is responsible for business development, Tong Wei is responsible for the supply chain, and Cao Wei is responsible for publicity and content.
(In Bazaar Men's article "Make Friends with Luo Yonghao on the Road to Entrepreneurship", the founding team of Make Friends each shared their own and made friends story.) ）
New List: Moving from Beijing to Hangzhou, has the salary of employees been adjusted? Some insiders have complained that Hangzhou's salary is a bit inflated.
Huang He: Because we are from Beijing, the salaries of employees are also shifted, so it is fine.
Regarding the inflated salary, it may also be divided into situations, such as traders and anchors may be more expensive, but we have our own set of standards for these two pieces.
We rely more on the iterative SOP to do, the dependence on people is not so strong, even if you change a person, you can ensure a stable output. But if it's always routine work, you'll never be able to run out of something new.
So in the whole company, everything is project-based.
New List: How does this project work?
Huang He: We will continue to encourage the team to become a small project team, such as Qi Wei's project, at the beginning will temporarily build a team, run for a period of time, smooth, on the fixed post and salary of several people to serve Qi Wei, what kind of KPI each month, what kind of service process, into a routine work.
Young streamers on live streams. Source: Make a friend
Some people are very energetic, then keep doing new projects, it doesn't matter, we have targeted bonuses; if you want to stay in the project and constantly improve the SOP, after normalization, things are less, less tired, and there will be a reasonable income expectation.
Why some people's salaries are inflated, is because a project to hold people up, just emphasize this person, I normalized the project, all the work follows the process, normalization, departmentalization, corporatization, this is reasonable.
Many companies basically go all the way to the black, and it feels completely chaotic.
New list: In addition to Luo Yonghao's account, do you plan to make a matrix number if you make a friend?
Huang He: At present, we plan to do 10 vertical class numbers, and implement 7× 24-hour live broadcast of the sun in August.
We don't say to do a bunch of internet celebrity numbers and apprentice numbers, we may make a friend drink number, make a friend beauty number and a bunch of sub-accounts.
Source: Make a friend
We rotate people constantly during the matrix number, so everyone remembers the number and not the person. People have this uncertainty, it doesn't matter, my number is still there.
Now making a friend is mainly about making a friend ip, not someone.
New List: What is the cooperation mechanism between making a friend and young anchors?
Huang He: It's an artist appointment, there's a basic salary, and then it's divided.
In addition, there is a competition mechanism inside, there is a level assessment, and different levels have different divisions.
Li Zheng, made a friend of the first female anchor. Source: Make a friend
I also don't have a requirement for the number of young anchors, as long as it meets the needs of the business, there is no limit.
New list: Luo Yonghao's account, from last year to the present, what changes have been made to the fan portraits in the live broadcast room?
Huang He: It turned out that he was a male fan, when he first came (Douyin), 95% of them were men, and now about 67% of male fans and 33% of female fans. In addition, most of the fans are 25-40-year-old users in first-tier cities, almost all of them are a group of people with purchasing power.
Unlike the fans who rely on the short video circle, this is a real shopping fan, which is very valuable. Many people will chase us when they are targeted to the stream.
If you end up streaming, the proportion of shopping fans is very important. If we had done a paragraph or something at the time, we might have more fans now, but we thought it through very clearly at the beginning and knew what we were going to do as soon as we came up.
Before Zhu Xiaomu used his own account to broadcast, 70,000 fans, sold 2 million yuan after a live broadcast, and the fans also rose to more than 100,000, but when we cooperated with an Internet celebrity with 6 million fans, we provided a supply chain, Zhu Xiaomu did the broadcast, and only sold 700,000 yuan a night.
So you see, 6 million fans sold 700,000 yuan, and Zhu Xiaomu's 70,000 fans sold 2 million yuan.
Zhu Xiaomu's fans are all from Lao Luo's side, and you can imagine how valuable Lao Luo fans are.
New List: In today's speech, you mentioned that Luo Yonghao's GMV ratio has dropped to 40%?
Huang He: We want to be a healthy company, and our goal is to reduce the proportion of single big influencers to 30% of GMV, or even lower. At present, Lao Luo has reached about 40%.
I think we are a very small number of companies in the influencer company. (For example, some companies) a single Internet celebrity accounted for at least 80%, anchor he dare not broadcast for a day? To put it mildly, if the anchor loses his voice one day, or more seriously, the entire company's GMV will click down.
If Lao Luo has a very important social interaction, as long as there is no commitment to the brand side on the day (it must be Lao Luo broadcast), he can take leave.
Image source: Chief character view
He's confident.
To exaggerate a little, for example, after a few years, Lao Luo returned to the field of science and technology, do not panic, why? Because at that time, Lao Luo's GMV accounted for only 20%.
New List: Making a friend is also fully prepared for this?
Huang He: It's not to make adequate preparations, but a company should not rely on a person so much, if it depends on a person so much, the risk is extremely high, and we want to be a healthy enterprise.
In addition, Lao Luo is also more entrepreneurial, will not say that he will always dominate his own account, and even see other Internet celebrities in the company.
He knows how to say that when he doesn't broadcast, he spends time doing other things, like talking about supply chains or whatever, and (and believes that this way) can have more benefits.