So, Wu Bo, the owner of Lashou.com, came up with a solution: "Hey, it's so slow for you to talk to each merchant one by one. I'll let the merchants take the initiative to post group-buying information on my platform. It's not just group-buying websites that want to do business; the merchants want to make money too. I only need to take a small percentage of the merchants' transaction volume, which is time-saving and labor-saving."
Merchants saw that this was fast and that they could upload group-buying links from home, collect a portion of the profits from each sale, and then just wait for customers to come to them. So they all chose Lashou.com.
When Lashou.com was launched, its novel business model immediately attracted the attention of investors, and a company immediately invested $5 million in Lashou.com.
For the next period of time, Lashou.com began to burn money like crazy to seize the market, subsidizing consumers and merchants. Anyway, I have money, let's all compete to burn money.
With group-buying websites fiercely competing, Huasuan.com has been extremely busy. Since its launch, Huasuan.com's group-buying channel has been diligently updating the deals from various group-buying websites, with a particularly high refresh rate recently.
Today, Manzuo.com subsidizes 10 yuan, and tomorrow Lashou.com will subsidize 20 yuan. Consumers don't care which website it is, as long as they can get a better price, so everyone goes to Huasuan.com to compare prices and choose the cheaper platform for group buying.
At the same time, Lin Chen also asked Zhang Yiming to take advantage of the group buying opportunity to promote Mixin's sharing function on Huasuan.com. After all, most of the food purchased through group buying is for multiple people, so they can share it with their friends with one click and make a group. This move greatly increased the activity of Mixin users.
When those group-buying websites saw this, they thought, "Huasuan.com is a great platform. Our website just launched the latest subsidy policy, and users can find it through Huasuan.com right away, saving us a promotion fee."
Immediately, a clever group-buying website owner thought, "Why don't I give some money to Huasuan.com to improve its ranking? Isn't that what Baidu does?"
As a result, they all contacted Huasuan.com. Zhang Yiming has extensive experience in search ranking, having done the same thing when he was at 99fang.com. Therefore, he is very professional in providing a one-stop service for money.
Furthermore, Zhang Yiming took the opportunity to test the big data precision push function he had been researching during this period, accurately pushing promotional information from various websites to their loyal users.
These group-buying websites were very satisfied with the traffic they received from Huasuan.com. They had spent money, and the effect was immediate. However, why did their market share remain unchanged? After analyzing their own group-buying data, they found that while the number of users attracted by Huasuan.com had indeed increased significantly, the number of users attracted by other channels had decreased considerably. Why was this?
Lin Chen listened to Zhang Yiming's excited report in his office and was in a great mood.
"Mr. Lin, you're absolutely right. In just the past two weeks, our group-buying channel on Huasuan.com has received over 30 million yuan in advertising fees. I'm numb to seeing so much money now."
"Haha, don't get excited, there's more money to come. In the end, there will only be one winner in this group-buying battlefield. This is just the beginning. After major capital firms enter the fray, the money will only keep burning."
Just then, Lin Chen's phone rang.
"Hey, Jun-ge, you're back?"
Lei Jun has been recruiting people outside during this period, and the mobile phone R&D team has been basically assembled.
"Hey bro, come up to the 27th floor, we're discussing the phone's design."
"Okay, I'll be right up."
When Zhang Yiming heard that Lin Chen was about to leave, he took the initiative to say, "Then Mr. Lin, you go ahead with your work. I'll continue with my work."
"Okay, thank you for your hard work, Mr. Zhang. We must continue to work on big data-driven precision push; this is definitely the future trend."
"OK."
Lin Chen arrived at the conference room on the 27th floor. Everyone sitting in the conference room recognized him: the second-in-command of Xiaomi Technology, the boss of Huasuan.com, and a multi-millionaire who was still a freshman in college.
"Hey bro, look, these are the three phone designs we just picked out. Which one do you think is better?" Lei Jun said, pointing to the three pictures on the computer.
Lin Chen took a look. The first one was like the HTC T-Mobile G1 with a slider keyboard. The second one was like the Blackberry, with a large screen on top and a full keyboard below. The third one didn't have a physical keyboard. Instead, it was based on the design of the Samsung S i9000 that had recently been circulating online, with a large screen and three physical buttons below.
With a sigh, Lin Chen shook his head and said, "When it comes to making smartphones, we only have one competitor: Apple! Does anyone have paper and a pen? Give them to me, and I'll draw a couple of diagrams."
Someone handed Lin Chen two sheets of paper and a pen, and Lin Chen sat down and started drawing. A group of people gathered around to watch Lin Chen draw.
First, Lin Chen drew a picture based on the iPhone 4. Although his drawing skills were not very good, someone immediately said, "Isn't this the iPhone 4? I've seen spy photos of it online."
Lin Chen said, "That's right, it's the iPhone 4. If we're going to copy, we shouldn't copy HTC or Samsung. We should just go straight for the iPhone. At this stage, the iPhone is undoubtedly the king of smartphones, without any controversy."
Then, Lin Chen started drawing a second one. This time, everyone fell silent because the phone Lin Chen drew, although still similar to the iPhone 4, had no home button. The only physical button on the front of the iPhone was gone!
After a while, someone still couldn't help but ask the question.
"Mr. Lin, where's the home button?"
Lin Chen looked at everyone and said, "Home button? Why is a home button necessary? The brother who just asked the question, can you answer what the function of the home button is?"
"The home button is mainly used to return to the main screen, and it can also be used to force a restart when the phone freezes."
"That's right, but if I just need to return to the main screen, why do I have to use the home button? Can't I design a gesture instead?"
Upon hearing this, everyone felt a jolt. Indeed, since it's a multi-touch smartphone screen, why can't we return to the home screen by touching it?
Another person asked, "Mr. Lin, what if the phone freezes?"
"Hey buddy, tell me, besides the home button, what other physical buttons does the current iPhone have?"
"There's also a power button and volume buttons."
"That's right, we know that the button to force restart an iPhone is the home button plus the power button, so why can't it be changed to the home button plus the volume button?"
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