At 14:30 on January 27, 2016, Shen Si walked into the conference room to be interviewed by a reporter from the Beluga community, his eyes were full of blood, his face was with a shallow smile, and although he was tired, he was energetic. The next day, Papaya Mobile's company information was disclosed for the first time in the national SME share transfer system (hereinafter referred to as the New Third Board).
In 6 months, the company will prepare for 7 years of VIE structure splitting and restructuring of its domestic and foreign direct subsidiaries to complete; from the first disclosure to the official listing of the new third board, it takes only 5 months.
Shen Si, the high-profile beauty CEO, has once again become a hot topic.
In 2008, Shen Si resigned from Google and started a business with Qian Wenjie, a genius student in the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University, to establish Papaya Mobile, a company focusing on overseas business, focusing on the precision and programmatic delivery of mobile Internet advertising, involving mobile games, mobile applications, cross-border e-commerce, etc. As a result, the eight years of experience she has accumulated in the global promotion of mobile products, which she knows very well about Google, has created a keen judgment on the direction of the industry.
The traffic distribution is refined, and the service is provided to the products to go to sea
"Since 2013, China Mobile Internet Company has tried to step into overseas markets, and there have been many successful cases of pioneers and extraordinary performance, which has continuously inspired followers to join the international team more." However, not all companies can easily meet expectations by launching apps. Because successful APP not only needs a large number of users, but also requires a high degree of user stickiness, it is not easy to achieve these two points, especially application tool APP. ”
"People have asked me before, why don't we have self-developed and self-promoting tool apps"? Shen Si said, "In fact, Papaya has also tried to develop App tools for end users, but the characteristics of tool products are different from games, and users do not necessarily open the App every day and take the initiative to start some relatively single functions, which leads to the user stickiness of many tool products and the future traffic realization is more challenging than the life APP." ”
"Do a simple account: the average acquisition cost of a global user in 2015, the cost of a download/installation user is 25-30 cents, and if you want to import 100 million users into the product, it will cost at least $30 million." After that, the monetization of the product mainly relies on the advertising revenue obtained after accessing Facebook and Google. Limited by the user stickiness and use time of tool products, it is difficult to balance the income and expenditure of advertising revenue. ”
"So the strategy we thought about after that was that we didn't have to get together in the app development process, because there are already a lot of very good companies and products in China." Instead, we have leveraged our big data technology capabilities to focus on providing overseas advertising solutions for China's Internet peers. Helping them to achieve their international goals is also enough to achieve and validate their business model as a global marketing service for mobile Internet. ”
Speaking of the wave of China's mobile Internet going to sea, Shen Si said, "China's overseas application companies have many successful cases, if you want to talk about what advice to the new overseas followers companies", Shen Si continued, "we should pay attention to their App product functions, as well as the differentiation of the national and regional market segments, but also prepare sufficient funds, otherwise their future expansion road is not necessarily so smooth."
With a keen insight into the industry, Shen Si gave papaya self-value positioning, "In fact, we see the strong motivation of Chinese companies to go to sea and the future sustainable growth trend, we are willing to help more advertisers succeed in internationalization, which is the value of our papaya." ”
But then the problem arises. App developers are important customers of Papaya Mobile, if they encounter difficulties, won't Shen Si's dilemma also come?
Expand the scope of business and diversify services to cross-border e-commerce
The development level and business model of China's tool applications are in the first echelon of the world, and the future business monetization model of the product has long been considered. So, app developers who are struggling with monetization are just some of them. What these companies encounter is also the process that a new industry must go through from birth to perfection.
Shen Si is still optimistic about the development prospects of Chinese tool products overseas. But for a CEO with keen market insight, a company's business can't stop there for profit. Just as she started planning a global programmatic mobile advertising platform in 2008, in 2014, she began planning a big event much earlier than others.
In December 2015, the three themes at Papaya Mobile's annual sharing conference covered three areas: games, tools, and cross-border e-commerce. Yes, this big thing is to expand the scope of services to cross-border e-commerce.
"Launch some specific services for small and medium-sized e-commerce companies. They've been overlooked by many platform companies, but we'll care about them now. There are many small and medium-sized e-commerce companies in China who want to go to sea, what do they need? flow rate. However, they struggle to hire a team to help them optimize with $100,000 a day. So, what Papaya Mobile helps them is to make some tools that automatically help them buy every day, so that they can easily manipulate and calculate roI, and decide whether to continue to deliver. Shen Si gave a more specific example to illustrate what Papaya Mobile does for cross-border e-commerce, "There are many small e-commerce companies, his SKU (SKU is the abbreviation of Stock Keeping Unit, the smallest inventory unit, that is, the unique identification ID of each product of the merchant, the merchant SKUs, proving that the merchant has a variety of products) A lot, at least a few thousand. If it is very difficult for each product to do an advertising page, but also to monitor the price in real time, do promotions... All of these things, we can help them do. For example, one-click generation of all product promotion ads, the price can be set to dynamic, when the advertising main price adjustment, the system automatic promotion. ”
That is to say, the cross-border e-commerce team can buy through the advertising platform of Papaya Mobile, and only need to fill in some basic requirements in its own background.
Since 2016, the industry has exploded many cross-border e-commerce companies that have done well overseas. Their team is small, but the operating profit is high.
For example, Lu Liang, former general manager of Taobao Wireless and former CTO of Lanting Jishi, was founded to focus on serving the 5miles of the second-hand trading market in the United States; made a "Taobao" in Russia, mainly clothing and hat products, with some 3C, jewelry, auto supplies, home goods after the 90s CEO Feng Lin founded Tobox; carefully carved CEO Yang Xingjian to create similar to Wish, the main designer original, committed to connecting all the resources related to the original clothing design, Build a designer ecosystem platform for sharing and win-win, such as STYLEWE.
These rising stars in China's cross-border e-commerce industry are all cooperative or potential cooperative customers of Papaya Mobile.
The new third board is listed, and the papaya moving plate should be further advanced
In May 2016, at the thank-you meeting of Papaya Mobile's listing on the New Third Board, Shen Si affirmed that "the global mobile digital marketing market is still a blue ocean". At the same time, it was also officially revealed to the media that Papaya Mobile will launch a round of private placements to institutional investors in the near future, with a financing amount of about 250 million yuan.
"60% of the funds raised will be used to acquire papaya's mobile big data marketing business and assets in the United States, Europe, Russia, India, Brazil and other places based on the global layout of the industrial chain."
This sentence of deep reflection can be interpreted as:
On the one hand, Papaya Mobile will carry out endogenous expansion of the company. In the existing business layout, the budget of its san francisco, Bangalore, Hong Kong and other offices in the second half of 2016 will be increased by two to three times. That is, Papaya Mobile will amplify business actions in Europe, the United States, India, and Southeast Asia.
On the other hand, about 1/3 of the additional funds will be used for day-to-day working cash flow, or will be used for the next M&A strategy.
In terms of advertisers, customers of the three major types of tools, e-commerce and games will continue to be the main service objects of Papaya Mobile. "Continue to cooperate with Chinese giants such as BAT, 360, Vipshop, Perfect World and many well-known enterprises in the United States, India and South Africa." In order to ensure the quality of advertising, it will continue to maintain top-level partnerships with major traffic sources around the world, including Google Adwords, Facebook Exchange, Twitter, etc., as well as mainstream and personalized long-tail traffic around the world. ”
epilogue
On the evening of January 28, 2016, Papaya Mobile's company information was disclosed for the first time on the New Third Board, and after staying up late to release "Papaya Mobile officially applied for listing on the New Third Board, Baidu and 360 are its largest customers", I finally understood why her bright eyes were covered with blood.
This article was written after the release of App Annie's "2015 Global Application Market Review Report", before the review and disclosure of Papaya Mobile's new third board listing materials, and after the listing on the new third board, it took 5 months from planning to draft.
In those five months, looking back at the path taken by the global mobile advertising platform founded in 2008 has added to the admiration for the smart CEO.
On April 29, 2016, after the review of the New Third Board approved the listing of Papaya Mobile, the company was planning a private placement to expand its business line and corporate structure, under the leadership of this wise CEO, what kind of achievements will Papaya Mobile have in the future? I'm looking forward to it.