Text | Pencil Road reporter Jia Minjian
► Introduction
At the age of 23, he had just graduated from Northwestern University and had published several works. Later, he was written into the History of Modern Chinese Literature by scholars from Peking University.
At the age of 24, he was featured in Time magazine and was called "China's Youngest Best-Selling Author" and "Ghost Writer".
When his fame was in full swing, he suddenly stopped writing and almost completely disappeared from public view.
He was Pu Lizi, and his pen name at that time was Li Silly.
In 10 years, he has worked as a journalist, children's Internet, public relations, art park operation... By the time he reappeared in the public eye, his identity had changed from a writer to an entrepreneur. He almost stopped coming out to drink, talking about topics, from movie books and women, to marketing, technology, and from time to time turned to an article on how to make a product, and the enthusiasm seemed to change.
His enthusiasm was placed on the Friends' House app, "entering a world that was magical enough."
"Friends' Home" is C2C personal listing sharing, and in his definition, it is a cooler and more interesting social homestay booking platform. Here, landlords may be poets, painters, photographers, or travelers or musicians who sit in a Ming and Qing dynasty mansion, an old bungalow, or a Zen space.
Pu Lizi said that the poem in Tagore's "Birds collection", "My earth, I land on your shore like a stranger, I live in your home like a tenant, I leave your house like a friend", which is the atmosphere that "friends' home" hopes to create and the experience that it hopes to bring to users.
Since its official operation in November 2015, "Friends Home" has expanded the first batch of more than 2,000 sets of high-quality housing, distributed in more than 70 cities across the country, mainly in central cities such as North, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Wuhan, and hot tourist cities such as Lijiang and Dali.
Note: Pu Lizi has confirmed that the data in the article is true and correct, and Pencil Dao is willing to work with him to endorse the authenticity of the content.
10 years of ups and downs
After staying up for two all-nighters, Lizi finished writing a long draft by Jia Pingwa and sent it to Chen Zhi, director of the Culture and Information Department of Nanfang Daily. On the way to work the next day, I received a text message of praise from Chen Zhi: "It is written like freshly hardened steel." This way of praising is still very unreal to Pu now, but he still remembers the scenery on the road at that time and the happiness in his heart.
Such fragments are his most obvious memories of that 7 years of journalistic life, sometimes even more than the impression left by love: there is no other purpose, just to simply want to write a good manuscript, love and simply do one thing.
Just as all strong feelings inevitably turn flat, when writing and editing become more and more repetitive, a state begins to spread: every day is busy, every moment is very flustered.
Since the end of 2011, Lizi has no longer been a collection editor, but has tried all kinds of things in the newspaper: doing children's Internet, doing branding and public relations, pulling sponsorship, and doing art parks.
It's a painful shift. He went from a media person with a lot of ideas and no need to worry about implementation, to a person who must cut every cost and execute every detail; from going out to be received and served by others, to becoming a person who learns to receive others.
Docking the government, docking customers, docking the media, docking all kinds of people, for Lizi, although it will do well, but there is no heartfelt desire to do it.
So how can you find something you want to do, can do, and make money?
Late one night in June 2015, he made a list of about 30 things he wanted to do. One item is deleted, and the last two are left: writing, or making a product that is forced and profitable.
Cooler social B&B
In terms of products, he has thought about many directions. Once, drinking with a few friends, he proposed the idea of making a social homestay app.
He said that when he was in middle school and college, he often went to live with classmates and friends. Long talk late at night, until it's going to be white, talking about women and the elusive adolescence. Maybe everyone is not so used to being close now, but he wants to try, maybe he can find the feeling of being at a friend's house in a stranger's house. You'll meet all kinds of people and love some of them, "the best accommodation I can think of, it's like staying at a friend's house".
Lizi has experienced various homestay platforms at home and abroad, and some of them have left an impression on him by marketing promotions: he can find interesting people. But whether or not you can find it when you actually use the product is "mainly by luck". No platform can meet the needs of precisely matching personalized accommodation, especially emotional and experiential personalization.
In Pu Lizi's view, compared with the functional or cost-effective demand of simple housing, the demand of young people for a residence emotional, social and experiential is growing rapidly.
In September 2015, after leaving the newspaper where he had been staying for 11 years, he named the product "Friends' House". "It felt like meeting a strange girl who unbuttoned the three buttons of my blouse to me. I entered a world that was magical enough to give rise to a feeling of being swallowed up by happiness. ”
Like writing a novel late at night, he studied on his own and began drawing app prototypes in the middle of the night.
The idea was formed, Andizi began to investigate, and what he was most worried about was the supply of listings, and if there were too few listings in his mind, it would be difficult to form a transaction. Lizi went to various websites to search and found that personalized houses accounted for about 20% of the total.
This shows that personalized listings have accumulated and supplied to a certain extent, but the amount is still relatively small, what is the reason behind it? Through research and interviews with homestay and individual home sharers, he found that the biggest obstacle behind it is the issue of security and trust. "Strange tenant, will he have poor character, low quality, or even robbery?" The landlord has a lot of psychological guard. ”
What are the other platform solutions for this issue? Lizi studied and found that there are three types of schemes: verifying identity cards, and using sesame credit to buy property insurance for landlords.
But there are already so many ways, why is the vigilance still there?
His view is that China is a society of acquaintances, not a contract society. No matter how high the sesame credit score is, it can at most reflect that a person has money and is not bad, but what the landlord wants to know most is how good is this person, can it be talked about? More emphasis on perceptual cognition.
3 degree friend mechanism
The solution he came up with was to introduce the trust relationship of acquaintances in reality to the Internet and set up a sharing mechanism for 3 degrees of friends. Users who store mutual address books are automatically matched as one-degree friends, and then calculate the user's second- and third-degree friends, and the landlord can choose to open the listing to three-degree friends first, practice and familiarize yourself in this "safe mode", and then choose whether to open it to all users.
In reality, chatting with a stranger, even if you are very rich, will be wary. But if two people know a friend together, the two will have a foundation of trust, and can quickly find a topic to cut to, and the vigilance will be dispelled.
"The spirit of sharing of the post-80s and post-90s generations is already available, but many landlords who want to share the house are a little hesitant, and what we have to do is to help them dispel this hesitation and vigilance." Pu Lizi imagined that these landlords could try to share within the range of three degrees of friends, and after solving the psychological problem, most people might find it interesting.
Pu Lizi positions her friends' home as "people, social, stories, personalities". In his view, the function and cost performance of the house, just the standard of the house, personalized experience and social and emotional elements, is the advantage of the C2C platform to meet personalized needs. "Otherwise it would be enough to stay in a hotel and apartment."
At the end of September, the rough version of the Friends App was launched for internal testing. Lizi invited dozens of landlords through friends to quickly test iterative products.
◆ "Friends' Home" product interface
His products have attracted the attention of Zheng Nanyan, chairman of Plateno Group. "Plateno originally wanted to do non-standard accommodation and highlight social elements, but in the end it did not start, so after seeing this project, I was very interested."
The two sides met at the Chimelong Hotel, talked about 12 o'clock at night, and quickly confirmed the intention of cooperation. In December 2015, Plateno Group's angel investment funds were in place.
2000 units
In November, "Friends' House" officially promoted listings, "the order is very important, no house users will uninstall; quality is also very important, so we only choose high-quality listings."
There are three ways to push a house.
The first is the simplest, and the first common method of all new platforms in the early days: find a house on other platforms that matches your positioning and invite them.
The second is the spread of social media. They invite some branded listings, such as homeowners for some artists, model champions, etc., to share their stories and the personality of the house in the public account, and then attract similar listings to settle in.
◆ The owner who resembles Hu Ge has a mountain, drinking tea, eating vegetarian food, playing the piano, painting, practicing Meditation, and living like an ancient.
One of the homeowners named King & Wood Mallesons, the founder of Lijiang Homestay "Like a Hometown", Pu Lizi personally wrote her story on the "Friend's House" WeChat, with the title "I think she is the most able woman to do homestays in China", and finally got more than 50,000 readers.
The tone of its literature and art, through the promotion of social media, has been recognized by more landlords.
The third way is offline activities (concentrated in Guangzhou), organizing some landlord gatherings and sharing experiences, such as security issues, how to do cleaning, how to promote, how to deal with people and other considerations. "Such an event can be a brand and expand the landlord."
In March this year, "Friends Home" began to do user promotion, and the number of listings uploaded by users increased rapidly. For these listings, Friends Home has strict review criteria and processes. For example, how many pictures there are, what is the quality, the geographical location, and whether there is a story. If the host also has a post on other platforms, then upload the link and "friends' house" to see the review. Basically, the listing is located in Guangzhou, and the team will go to shoot. If it's out of town, ask the landlord to provide more pictures.
■ Fairy, the owner of Guangzhou, she moved back from all over the world to a home full of antiques.
In order to highlight the positioning of "people, social, stories, personalities", the "Friends' Home" App restricts every detail of the product, such as the home page is the owner's story instead of the listing, and the cover of the listing picture is not a bed but a public space or a photo of a person. "Because the bed represents sleep, it is the function, and the public space or people represents the social, the story." For example, the title prohibits the appearance of words such as hotels and large bed rooms, but may be similar to the sensual style of "old Beijing courtyard waste time".
In the same month, the "Friends' House" listing reached the set target of more than 2,000 units. But in April, Pu Lizi asked the team to shut down 20 percent of them. This practice has made the team members unable to understand, Pu Lizi's explanation is: "In the future, we will continue to cut off the non-compliant listings from the existing listings, and it is important to control the quality." ”
Also in March, Friends' House allowed hosts to open their listings to users other than friends three times. "Most of the landlords are already familiar with and have developed basic trust in the platform, willing to fully disclose, and only a very small number will be limited to three degrees of friends."
At the same time, Friends Promoted the first users. "Listing data can basically support 30,000 to 50,000 users."
Staying at a "Friend's House"
The first batch of users of "Friends' House" are limited to the circle level promotion in the literary and art circles, media circles, and Internet circles, and are only carried out on the WeChat public account.
"Friends' Home" partner Wu Peifeng's public account - "List", with 200,000 fans, and high-quality public accounts (such as One, Zhihu Daily, Liangcang, Lychee FM, One-Way Street Bookstore, Thumb Reading, etc.) after mutual promotion, bringing the first batch of high-quality users to the platform.
"Their quality is more in line with our tone, which is different from what other channels (such as ground pushing) bring." In addition, the price of the listing is expensive, which can screen out a group of people.
The Friends Home app is equally strict with users. Pu Lizi said that personalized accommodation is different from hotels, many landlords are pure individuals, and they cannot be as attentive as hotels. The experience they provide is a social, emotional and personalized space. So let the user know that he is not going to enjoy the service. "Some tenants, we would directly advise them to book a hotel. Because an unsuitable tenant can cause damage to the host's experience."
In operation, many tenants of "Friends' House" have become friends with the landlord, some landlords have sent letters to "friends' homes" left by tenants, and landlords have gone to another city to invite tenants who have lived in to eat.
presently. "Friends Home" expanded the first batch of more than 2,000 sets of housing, distributed in more than 70 cities across the country, mainly for the north, Upper, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Wuhan and other central cities, as well as Lijiang, Dali and other hot tourist cities.
"Our concern is not that we are not fast enough, but that we are not moderate enough." The idea of "Friends' House" is to find 300 to 500 people with stories in each city who are willing to share their houses.
Writer Wan Xiaodao told him in an article: "There is no shortage of great CEOs in the world, but there is a great lack of great writers." In this regard, Pu Lizi smiled bitterly: "Compared with making products, writing is a greater vanity, and it takes more courage to complete." Hopefully I will. ”
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