After eight years of going around, Mushroom Street landed on the New York Stock Exchange with the cold current of capital, and Chen Qi, who realized his dream, finally gave himself an explanation.
But Chen Dandan was not so lucky. Tao World, the former "dark horse" of the e-commerce industry, was finally "killed" after being acquired by Mushroom Street for less than a year.
On August 21, 2017, Amoy World quietly shut down, and founder Chen Dandan almost disappeared from the public eye. The reason for the suspension given by the public relations department of Tao World is that "mainly affected by the policy of cross-border e-commerce, the head of the group believes that the profit margin of Haitao has shrunk." ”
Chen Dandan still couldn't escape the "law of the jungle".
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In the e-commerce jianghu, Chen Dandan is a very special existence.
In the words of the Internet that are very popular today, it is "internet celebrity". In the current Internet era when "internet celebrities" are popular, most people have become "traffic bearers" after they have achieved fame, such as Ma Yun, Liu Qiangdong, Lei Jun and others. But Chen Dandan did the opposite, she first became an "internet celebrity" and then started a business.
Chen Dandan began to embark on the road of "internet celebrity" in 2002, which can be regarded as the first generation of "internet celebrity". At that time, the word "net red" was not mixed with too many negative emotions, when the 22-year-old Chen Dandan went to the University of Munich in Germany to major in Western drama, minoring in foreign cultural exchange and Japanese studies, a reading was a full seven years, during that period, like most girls who love beauty, Chen Dandan began to do his own sharing homepage on some large websites, sharing things that are nothing more than some things that girls like to see study abroad and beauty, skin care experience.
In the era when Taobao had not yet taken shape and Jingdong was only a four-foot counter in Zhongguancun, overseas brands were very popular, and Chen Dandan, with his sensitivity to fashion and beauty, as well as his own natural advantages, quickly captured a large number of fans and became a fashion blogger who attracted much attention.
In the process of interacting with fans, Chen Dandan, who entertains herself, finds that girls are not only interested in beauty and fashion, but also eager to have a convenient and safe channel to buy overseas products, which means that the Haitao market is a good business opportunity, and over time, she began to become a buyer to bring goods to fans.
In 2010, when Chen Dandan got a master's degree in Western drama and returned to China, Taobao has long been popular in China, but Haitao has not yet become popular due to a series of problems such as tariffs, logistics, trust, etc. Zeng Bibo, who founded the Yang Wharf in the same year, is still using the garage of American classmates as a receiving point to sign his orders for twenty or thirty a day, and Chen Qi, who later has entanglements with Chen Dandan, has just sold his house and resigned from Ali to start Mushroom Street.
Chen Dandan, who stepped on the outlet, immediately regained his old business and immediately opened a Haitao purchasing store on Taobao. Chen Dandan's practice of opening a store is no different from most "Internet celebrities" now, which is nothing more than trying it out personally and then putting it on the shelves in the store.
With years of accumulated popularity, she quickly broke through the cookie-cutter market, and in less than two years, her global purchasing agency reached the crown level.
In those two years, she rented a house of less than four square meters in a startup company, and with a customer service, she fiddled with the Haitao store, pre-sale, packaging, and delivery, and was busy until late at night every day, and could only sleep for four or five hours.
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In 2013, a greater opportunity lay ahead of Chen Dandan.
This year, with the vigorous development of the Internet era, online shopping has become more and more mature, the state has begun to relax the policy on overseas shopping, and all favorable conditions have been tilted towards Haitao, and Haitao is in full swing in China. Mao Wenchao, a Stanford international student, pulled his college friend Qu Fang together to create a shopping guide platform Xiaohongshu, and many investors are also looking for opportunities everywhere.
In that small bungalow, Chen Dandan met her angel investor, Zheng Boren, the founder of Xinyuan Capital. At that time, the flash sale website Fab was very popular in the United States, and Zheng Boren wanted to invest in a similar website, looking for a circle down, he thought that Chen Dandan, who was smart and clever and could bear hardships, was a suitable candidate.
One day, he put this idea out of the tray to Chen Dandan, and Chen Dandan, who was deeply surprised, was a little entangled at first, because in her opinion, her Taobao shop business was good, and there was no need to toss it. But Chen Dandan quickly recognized the reality, similar competition abounds, and the Taobao business is not easy to do.
"People who do business are naturally more sensitive, at this moment this trade model is doing very well, but at a certain point in time it may not be good, realize that the work I do will not be so good to increase in the back, it is possible that the market situation will change in the environment, I must seek a variety of growth space and opportunities." Chen Dandan later recalled.
Chen Dandan, who finally agreed to start a business, did not actually think about what to do, until she was inspired when she was playing in the United States on National Day. One day, she was live streaming shopping in the circle of friends, the fan response was very fierce, a clever move, she found the demo of Tao World (Haitao one-stop C2C shopping platform), and hurriedly made a shopping platform on the WeChat public account. In 2014, the product was launched, but the user feedback bugs affected the experience too much, which forced Chen Dandan to form a professional team to make the App of Tao World.
Unfortunately, the product has not yet been made, the angel round of money has been used up, she forced her scalp to take the demo to raise funds, took the source code capital million dollars of A round of financing, and finally survived. It is worth mentioning that after two years of the merger of Tao World and Mushroom Street and Meili Said, Chen Dandan left Meilian to become the vice president of the investment department of Source Code Capital, starting another stage of life.
As for whether this can be done, in fact, Chen Dandan has no bottom in his heart. But when the monthly sales of several million yuan were achieved at the end of 2014, "it was not large, but the scale was up, and the entire business model was basically verified to be successful", and she knew that this road was clear.
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If it were not for the things that Chen Qi announced in his internal letter that Mushroom Street, Beauty Talk and Tao World merged, almost no one would have known that Tao World had been pocketed by Mushroom Street.
In 2015, e-commerce booming, Tencent, the e-commerce "spoiler", fostered a large number of e-commerce platforms, with Xu Yirong leading the beautiful saying and Chen Qi leading the mushroom street have been WeChat payment entrance, the two major platforms are inseparable, beauty said the main white-collar crowd, mushroom street is dominated by student population.
In order to "contain" Meili said, the ambitious Chen Qi began to look for allies, and when he saw that the Amoy World users who mainly targeted high-end people bought a unit price of more than 1,000 yuan and the repurchase rate reached 60%, he was shocked. Chen Qi decided to win over Chen Dandan, an ally, so he did not say a word about investing in the B round of tao world.
At that time, the Tao world, which was in a state of death with cross-border e-commerce such as Yang Wharf, Boluomi and Xiaohongshu, was in urgent need of a steady stream of guns and ammunition, but Chen Dandan finally failed to escape the "invisible hand of the capital market".
For a while, Ali, who rode the dust of its own business, failed to leave a "good reputation" in the investment community. It was once rumored that any company with some ideals did not want to be invested by Ali, because there was only one fate - to be acquired.
As an Ali entrepreneur, Chen Qi's investment strategy is the same as that of his old owner Ali. At the end of 2015, with the help of capital, the gossipy Beauty Talk and Mushroom Street were merged together at a 2:1 consideration, and at the same time, the ambitious Chen Qi also took the world under the bag.
In an open letter released in April 2016, Chen Qi talked about the merger, "Meili said that the user base needs to expand, and the main problem of Mushroom Street is the improvement of the customer base, which is one of the three questions that investors must ask every time I raise funds." Later, I sat down with Yi Rong and Dan Dan to think about this problem, everyone's understanding is more consistent, if the three of us can be together, the difficult problem just said will be solved, and the marketing budget that is consumed but ineffective can be completely eliminated, and the cost of competition can also be omitted. ”
However, less than a year after the merger, Tao World withdrew from the stage by stopping operations, and founder Chen Dandan embarked on another track.
Author: Li Ying, an e-commerce newspaper
(This article is the original author of the e-commerce newspaper, and may not be reproduced without authorization)