Click 'Read Original' for details At 1 a.m., the various livestream e-commerce groups I'm in started buzzing, all discussing the miracle of Qudian boss Luo pulling in 252 million yuan in a single day. I went to bed at 1:30, still thinking about writing an article on Qudian in the morning. Waking up at 6:30, I saw the group sharing an analysis of Qudian by Taihuo Liang boss, and I couldn't help but sigh: those smarter than you are working harder; the livestream e-commerce circle is incredibly competitive. Writing a WeChat article takes more time, so my colleague suggested I post a short video to ride the trend. At 2:30 p.m., I took 20 minutes to shoot a short video, and from 9 to 11 p.m., I did a livestream on WeChat Channels analyzing Qudian. I have to say, becoming a founder IP is a counter-intuitive decision. Without personal IP, the daily workload is enough to exhaust a normal person, and then you have to squeeze out two or three more hours for content creation. You'd have to be a bit masochistic to do that. First, let me answer a frequently asked question: Will Qudian become the next East Buy (东方甄选)? Last time, a similar question was: Will East Buy become the next Make Friends (交个朋友)? East Buy might become the next Make Friends, but Qudian boss Luo will clearly not become the next East Buy. Those asking this question haven't yet understood what Qudian is trying to do. Let's first analyze technically how Qudian achieved 250 million yuan in a single livestream.

  1. Lucky bags gave away 1,500 iPhones throughout the session, about one per minute. 2. Pre-cooked dishes like sauerkraut fish were available for 1 cent, with free shipping. 3. Celebrity Jia Nailiang appeared. 4. Massive ad spending; reportedly over 100 million yuan on traffic for this livestream. 5. Founder Luo Min personally hosted the entire session. I ask you: which of these points is sustainable? Giving away iPhones in lucky bags helps boost user retention metrics, and 1-cent sauerkraut fish helps create dense transaction data. These two metrics helped the livestream gain significant recommended traffic. However, both methods are unsustainable: first, due to cost; second, because they attract a flood of bargain hunters, messing up user tags. Of course, hiring celebrities is unsustainable—you can't afford it continuously. Founder involvement is also unsustainable unless Luo doesn't need to manage other Qudian businesses. From leaked ad screenshots, the ROI on ad conversions the day before was extremely low, reportedly only 0.07, meaning such spending is also unsustainable. Pre-cooked dish gross margins are below 50%, and store ROI typically needs to reach 2.5 to be profitable. Using multiple unsustainable tactics and massive capital to create a stunning 250 million yuan single-session output—why would you think Qudian has a chance to become the next East Buy? But Qudian doesn't even want to become the next East Buy. The afternoon after the 252 million yuan feat, Qudian held a pre-cooked dish strategy launch and franchise recruitment conference, claiming it would develop 100,000 agents. This clearly wasn't a spur-of-the-moment decision; it must have been long planned. Luo Min's recent livestreaming was just technically testing and clearing obstacles to blow up a livestream in one day; all the patience was for this day's triumph. As I said before, the three ways to monetize a founder IP are selling courses, private boards, and franchising. The famous Douyin knowledge monetization guru Haishen once said there are levels of difference between monetization models. The highest level of founder IP monetization is definitely franchising. It's said that Maomao (Muwanqing) and Xiao Zhanggui, closely related to Brother Shen, were both incubated by him. When Li Hao decided to become a founder IP at the end of May, he also fantasized that once his followers exceeded 3,800, he'd start franchising. After analyzing Qudian yesterday, I realized my vision was too small. Influence doesn't have to be built slowly through diligent writing. Is there an investor willing to give me 200 million yuan? I want to develop 100,000 Kashi Academy franchisees nationwide, so whether you want to become an e-commerce host or learn livestream operations, our learning centers would be everywhere—at your community gate or under the overpass. Through our efforts, the unemployment rate reported by the statistics bureau would drop by at least one percentage point. Thinking of this, I seem to see a new vocational education listed company with annual revenue of 10 billion and market cap of 100 billion rising. Hey, wasn't I writing? How did I start dreaming? Wiping the drool from my mouth, I continue to share a viewpoint I've been tirelessly instilling in bosses of 10-billion-yuan companies at various executive classes over the past two years. It's a bit like a fashion magazine editor earning 3,800 yuan a month, wearing 80-yuan Taobao clothes, teaching you, who earns 100,000 a month, how to be a trendsetter, but you have to respect my professionalism—I majored in advertising and have 21 years of marketing experience. Li Hao always says, Douyin is the best platform for mass brand growth since CCTV in the 90s. Over the past 40 years, the two most influential brand growth platforms were CCTV back then and Douyin now. With 700 million daily active users, Douyin's influence on users is no less than CCTV's was. If you're willing to spend money, like Boss Luo yesterday, spending nearly 200 million to bring 90 million views to the livestream, you'll find you can have your own Spring Festival Gala stage every day. But Douyin has another advantage over CCTV: back then, you could build a brand on CCTV—an unknown Qinchijiu could become household overnight with a bid king title, but you still had to lay out agents and channels offline one by one. Today's Douyin, WeChat, and Kuaishou are not only media platforms influencing hundreds of millions daily but also e-commerce channels selling billions in goods daily. This kind of channel that combines branding and sales has never existed before. At the beginning of the year, a beverage brand in the top five of its category came to us for Douyin agency operations, and I refused. Because they were spending over 100 million yuan annually on ads, all on CCTV, satellite TV, and subway/bus. I said if they put half their brand budget into Douyin, service providers would be fighting to work with them. Although Kashi Academy is a Top 3 training and certification service provider for Ocean Engine, this article didn't get a penny from Douyin, and I don't hold a single share of ByteDance. Friends who know me know that although we've been a service provider for various Douyin businesses for years, I often criticize Douyin quite a bit. But on this point, to be honest, Douyin is the best platform for explosive growth of new brands in mass consumer categories, bar none. Times have changed. Traffic has changed. Mass media is declining. WeChat, Douyin, and Kuaishou—these national-level apps, plus smaller-scale media like Weibo, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and Zhihu—are fundamentally social media and algorithmic media, or a mix. The underlying distribution logic is no longer the one-to-many, point-to-face path of the mass media era. Traffic has changed, and business models are changing accordingly. All businesses are worth redoing on Douyin—that's the famous saying of Brother Sickle. All offline businesses are also worth redoing on WeChat. Business models have changed, and so have organizational structures. Over the past two years, I've observed that to succeed in new traffic businesses, without fundamental organizational adjustments, it's basically hard to achieve. Throughout June, I was overhauling the company's underlying organizational structure; I won't elaborate on that here. New traffic, new business, new organization—these keywords are the core framework of the executive course I've been refining over the past month. Source: Li Hao's New Business Thinking (ID: haoyouquan1982) -END-