He has done a driving platform and smart parking, but in the early stage of entrepreneurship, he was acquired by investment giants for more than 100 million yuan, and later ventured into the game at the most anxious time of the red and yellow war of shared bicycles, and was ridiculed by everyone and waited to see how he "died".
What is surprising is that he not only did not "die", but in the chaos to kill a blood road from a small city, boldly proposed a deposit-free, bicycle fixed-point delivery policy, bid farewell to extensive development, and promote the process of industry standardization.
In 2018, red and yellow bicycles have withdrawn from the market, Hu Weiwei took money to leave, Dai Wei left the market in debt, this year he led the Halo bicycle into Hello travel, the development layout of "two wheels + four wheels" was formally formed, the market value exceeded 2.5 billion US dollars, and he himself was named the outstanding business leader of "Cbn"2018 and the annual business young leader.
He is Yang Lei, the founder of Hello Travel, a man who laughed to the end in the shared bicycle market. Before him, there have been two giants in the field of shared bicycles, Hu Weiwei and Dai Wei, but unfortunately, after 2018, Hu Weiwei cashed out 1.5 billion people, and Dai Wei was restricted from spending high into "Lao Lai" and was also asked for a deposit by 16 million people.
The resume of Yang Lei on the Internet is very simple, he graduated from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, graduated from college and began to start a business, did love driving, car keys and other projects, in 2016 Yang Lei encountered a bottleneck in the car key project, so he looked at the shared bicycle market.
However, at this time, the price war between Mobike and Ofo is already full of smoke, and the success or failure of the two people holding billions of dollars has not yet been determined, while Yang Lei only has tens of millions in his hands but wants to risk entering the game, and many people at that time were not optimistic about his decision.
But Yang Lei insisted on entering, but at that time, his chances of winning were not large, and the only thing he could get his hands on was a strong entrepreneurial team.
From the early days of entrepreneurship, Yang Lei was different from other peers, he did not start from scratch with some like-minded friends, but soberly found four partners who were older than him.
At the same time, he also knows where his ability is and where it is limited, so Yang Lei has not always emphasized control, but learned to know people and make good use of them, and there is a very important person here, that is, Ali's predecessor HR Charlie.
Charlie's reason for coming to Yang Lei is very simple, that is, to be able to spend more time with his family, and his arrival has also made Yang Lei's team lean.
Charlie has been doing HR in Alibaba for more than ten years, as soon as he entered Yang Lei's team, he saw the shortcomings of the team, in order to avoid his rapid unemployment, Charlie began to take the initiative to help Yang Lei self-check and correct mistakes.
He poached Han Mei, who was pregnant with a second child, from Alibaba, and then recruited Jiang Wei, the CTO who was jumping ship, and Jiang Wei brought his old leader Li Kaibei after he joined the company.
On the surface, none of these people are celebrities in the Internet circle, nor do they have many beautiful resumes and top projects in the industry, but each of them has their own area of expertise, and later they all played a key role in the development of Hello Bicycle.
In fact, Yang Lei's sensitivity and precision to talents largely determined his later success.
After the car keys ran for more than a year, Li Kaiyi was the first to find that the project could not be done, angel investment was not interested in this, no one invested.
At the same time, Mobike began to lay out the trend in Shanghai, ofo has completed the first round of financing, and major investors have also targeted this emerging industry.
Therefore, Yang Lei also wanted to enter this field, but at that time, many people were not optimistic about his decision, after all, it was too late to re-enter the shared bicycle market at that time, and Mobike and Ofo had already taken shape.
Fortunately, in the matter of sharing bicycles, Li Kaijie and Yang Lei are a hit,away, although Han Mei still feels that the car keys can be saved, but when she finally went deep into the market again, she also admitted that the cake of sharing bicycles is really fragrant.
Therefore, in July 2016, Yang Lei led a team of only more than 60 people, with 30 million yuan of funds, to join the most expensive shared bicycle market.
At that time, although Yang Lei was optimistic about this market, he still had a lot of worries in his heart, so he set himself a six-month window period and immediately retreated once it did not work.
In this way, Hello Bicycle came into being at the most intense time of the red and yellow war, and in terms of products, they borrowed the form of Mobike, using smart locks and tracking and positioning systems, while in the commercial layout, they were promoted synchronously in several ways.
Han Mei is the best at "Kaesong", so she has been a trapeze artist for more than two months, going to different cities every day, grading each city, and finally targeting second- and third-tier cities, not that they don't want to enter the first line, but they don't have money to burn.
Jiang Wei moved from the office to the workshop, and it took two months to create the first batch of products, while Han Mei squatted in front of the factory with a truck and waited to receive the goods.
With a seamless and perfect fit, Hello Bicycle became the third oldest to enter the shared bicycle after Mobike and Ofo, but what they did not expect was that they soon encountered trouble.
Positioning is there, the product is there, and the next step is to put it on the market. At that time, they chose the first stop in Suzhou, where the geographical conditions, consumption capacity and pace of life are very suitable, but the bicycle launch was only less than a month later, and the Suzhou government banned the sharing of bicycles, until now Suzhou has not opened the sharing of bicycles.
After the first stop was frustrated, Han Mei did not wait for a minute, loaded the car and transferred to Ningbo, fortunately it was stable here.
In fact, this is not the biggest problem that Yang Lei encountered, at this time his biggest trouble is the lack of money, Han Mei and Jiang Wei on the front line have already pulled the lead, but the grain and grass in the rear have begun to be tight, but Li Kaiyi and Yang Lei do not dare to leak at all, for fear that the front will mess up the hearts of the army.
At this time, the first thing that warmed Yang Lei's heart was Fu Jixun, who had invested in car keys, and at the critical moment he invested 5 million yuan in Yang Lei, and later asked the reason Fu Jixun said that he felt that Yang Lei was very transparent, he was not a radical idealist, he clearly knew what he wanted.
Subsequently, Fu Jixun introduced Hello to Sha Ye, who also valued not only the project but also a team with strong execution and rapid response.
Because Yang Lei was the first entrepreneur not to talk about himself in front of him, but to praise his partner incessantly, such a sense of trust and cohesion made Sha Ye both moved and reassured.
Therefore, in April 2017, Sha Ye became the capital leader of halo bicycle B round financing, this investment also let Yang Lei get a breather, successfully survived, and then halo bicycle with Ningbo, Fuzhou, Xiamen, Dongying as a breakthrough to officially open the war.
In June 2017, Sha Ye matched Yang Lei with the CEO of Ant Financial, and soon Ant Financial disbursed the first bridge loan to Halo Bicycle at an unprecedented speed, and then promoted the merger of Yong'an Low Carbon Technology and Halo Bicycle.
Since then, Hello Bicycle has received tens of billions of financing in just 8 months, and Ant Financial has led three rounds of investment.
With money, it is natural to vigorously compete for the market, originally Hello Bicycle started from the second-tier cities, and then laid out the third- and fourth-tier cities, so that it can avoid head-to-head confrontation with Mobike and Ofo.
But their heels have not yet stood, Mobike declared war strongly, followed by the layout in second- and third-tier cities, began to expand the concept of life + sharing, joined hands with Baidu Map, Shenzhou car to establish a link window, to create a traffic social circle, and ofo bought a satellite with great wealth to provide space selfie functions, and the road is playing more and more wildly.
However, at this time, Yang Lei was not flustered at all, but he was very sober, since Mobike and Ofo were still radiating on the plane of sharing bicycles, why did he have to go hard with them?
Therefore, Hello Bicycle put forward the concept of three-dimensional transportation, taking the distance as the interception point, cycling within 3 kilometers, mopeds from 5 kilometers to 10 kilometers, and sharing electric vehicles for more than 10 kilometers.
Yang Lei used this three-dimensional travel concept to reach intelligent transportation cooperation with more than 40 cities, thus opening his own era.
In January 2018, Hello Bicycle entered Beijing to tear up the gap in first-tier cities, and took over the baton after Mobike and Ofo successively cancelled the one-yuan monthly subscription policy to strive for market share with one yuan monthly subscription.
Subsequently, Hu Weiwei sold Mobike, Dai Wei embezzled user deposits, and Yang Lei boldly introduced the deposit-free policy at this time, since the launch of the policy in March, the user growth of Hello Bicycle in only two months has reached 70%, and the daily order volume has increased by 100%, exceeding the total daily orders of Mobike and Ofo.
In June 2018, Ant Financial increased its capital by 2 billion yuan again, pushing the market value of Hello Bicycle to 2.3 billion US dollars, at this time, Hello Bicycle not only held the big tree, but also made it form a three-legged situation with Ofo and Mobike.
At this point, Yang Lei led Hello Bicycle to overtake in the corner, and the attitude of the latecomer reversed the battle situation, and the disadvantage that was not optimistic at the beginning became the key to success.
Because of insufficient funds, choosing a second-tier city to start not only avoids head-to-head confrontation with Mobike and Ofo, but also has enough energy and time to develop products and plan the market to avoid being too risky and making wrong decisions.
At the same time, the fierce competition between Mobike and Ofo will expose the problems of the entire industry, and Halo Bicycle is followed by accurate lightning avoidance, and when Mobike and Ofo have recovered preferential policies because they cannot afford it, Halo Bicycle will then launch a deposit-free policy to quickly take over customers and grasp the battlefield to reverse the mess.
In fact, now it seems that Hello Bicycle can survive under the attack of the two giants of Mobike and Ofo, in addition to the maturity of the time and the correct decision of Yang Lei to start from the second-tier cities, the most important thing is their killer strategy: deposit-free.
At that time, the shared bicycles on the market needed to provide a deposit, Mobike needed 299, ofo needed 99 or 199, and Hello Bicycle achieved customer deposit-free through cooperation with Sesame Credit and Alipay, and the platform could restrict users through credit.
In this way, users can operate easily and do not have to worry about their deposits not coming back, and the platform does not have to worry about not regulating customer behavior without deposits.
In fact, this is also one of the reasons for Yang Lei's success. Since his inception, he has always had a very clear idea, if you want to do the sharing economy, you can't play the idea of a deposit, and Hello Bicycle is just a beginning, and the sharing of the entire ground market is his ultimate goal.
As a result, after the stabilization of shared bicycles, Halo Bicycle has successively developed businesses such as shared mopeds, shared power exchanges and Hello rides, and officially changed its name to Hello Travel in September 2018, and in October, Halo Bicycle achieved net profits in more than 100 cities across the country.
In December of the same year, Led by Primavera Capital and Ant Financial, the G round of financing was completed with a market value of more than US$2.5 billion, and the development layout of "two rounds + four rounds" was fully completed.
On December 20, 2018, Halo Travel hosted the "Technology Travel, Win-win Future" Industry Chain Conference, at which Yang Lei announced in a high profile that after Halo Travel launched the credit free riding, a total of 161 million users were exempted from deposits of 32 billion yuan, and the cumulative number of travel users reached 500 million, and the future development will focus on the transformation from the purchase of transportation to the purchase of transportation services, and always adhere to the development strategy of cost leadership, technological innovation and quality assurance.
At this point, the era of pure burning money for shared bicycles has basically come to an end, and product technology upgrades have become the main means of competition, continuous and stable vehicle updates, effective user constraints, and vigorous advocacy of civilized cycling have become the mainstream.
At the same time, the government's participation in market management has gradually increased, and tendering and dynamic assessment have been carried out through legal cooperation, so as to standardize the order of market competition, achieve efficient integration of government and enterprise co-construction and co-management, and shared travel has become a part of urban public transportation, and finally developed into a stable living state.
To this end, Haro Chuxing took the lead in proposing the "shared bicycle 3.0 era" in 2020, and after many exploration attempts, it formed a "four carriages" with the help of Haro bicycles, Haro mopeds, Small Ha power exchanges, and hitchhiking cars.
As of August 2021, The two-wheeled business of Halo Travel has been stationed in more than 400 cities across the country, with an average daily order of 20 million; Hello Ride covers more than 300 cities, more than 10 million car owners are registered and certified, and nearly 300 million times of shared travel has been completed; Xiaoha power exchange covers more than 300 cities, providing hundreds of thousands of power exchange services per day, and the cumulative safe and stable operation time exceeds 20,000 hours.
Based on good performance, Hello Travel has become the darling of capital, net profit has grown steadily, from 2018 to 2020 the loss margin continues to shrink, although there are still many voices in the industry that Hello Travel is still burning money, profitability is out of reach, but backed by the big tree of Ant Financial, Hello Travel can still win the trust and support of capital.
In addition, the user's loyalty is also getting higher and higher, many people have forgotten the former Mobike and Ofo, Mobike sold to the Us group, but it is clear that the bicycle is only a branch of the Meituan sharing economy, not the main business, has not been able to set off the storm; and the former ofo small yellow car has also withdrawn from the historical stage, Hello travel has become the winner of the laughter to the end.
The once three-legged situation seems to have ended, and now Hello Travel has established a fairly large shared transportation network, completing Didi's dream when he held hands with Ofo.
The same founder, Hu Weiwei cashed out, Dai Weicheng Lao Lai was recovered by 16 million people for the deposit, and then Yang Lei, who entered, laughed to the end, is he more powerful than them?
In fact, Yang Lei was not much stronger than Hu Weiwei and Dai Wei, he just made fewer mistakes than his opponents.