All of this starts with a man who makes Byte beat.
In 1983, a family in an ordinary public institution in Longyan City, Fujian Province welcomed a new member. His father is a staff member of the Longyan Municipal Science and Technology Commission, his mother is a hospital nurse, and he is Zhang Yiming.
It is in such a relaxed family background that Zhang Yiming has been able to choose to do what he wants to do since he was a child and understand what he wants.
Anyone who is familiar with Zhang Yiming should know that he is a person who is not good at talking and has a calm personality.
The most intense sentence to express one's emotions is "How could this happen!".
His methodology is to first clarify what he wants, then list all possibilities, and finally eliminate them one by one to select the optimal solution.
It sounds like a set of algorithms from Toutiao. It is simple, efficient, and hits people's hearts, but it seems so cold.
In 2005, the Internet industry began to recover after experiencing a cold winter.
That year, the number of QQ simultaneous online users exceeded 10 million for the first time. Since then, Ma Huateng and his "Tencent Doll Factory" have achieved 100-fold growth in less than 5 years.
Baidu, known as "China's Google", also went to the United States to list on NASDAQ that year. On that day, Baidu achieved the highest gain for a new company listed on the US stock market in the past five years. Robin Li was dazzling at the closing ceremony.
Overnight success only exists in inspirational chicken soup.
Zhang Yiming, who was just starting out, also sensed the general trend of the rise of the Internet industry. Developed an IM collaborative office system with two senior colleagues.
Due to the lack of market research and inaccurate product positioning, it was too far ahead of its time in 2005, and its failure was understandable.
In 2006, Zhang Yiming joined the travel search website Kuxun and became the company’s No. 5 employee, mainly responsible for search research and development.
Zhang Yiming’s talent slowly began to be revealed here.
In early 2008, Zhang Yiming went to Microsoft, the world's largest software company, with the purpose of learning the management of a large company.
After staying for a few months, Zhang Yiming came to "Fanfou" (a social networking site similar to Twitter) founded by fellow countryman Wang Xing as a technical partner, mainly responsible for search, news Backend system directions such as distribution and hot word mining.
In October 2009, Zhang Yiming set up his own business and founded the vertical real estate search engine "Jiujiufang".
In 2011, Zhang Yiming resigned from his position as CEO of Jiujiufang and prepared for his next entrepreneurial project in 2012.
I vaguely remember that those were the two years when the mobile Internet experienced explosive growth.
Overseas, Facebook has officially listed on Nasdaq, with a market capitalization of US$115.2 billion, becoming the largest technology IPO in history. Psy's song "Gangnam Style" has become popular all over the world, with a sales of 1 billion on YouTube. The number of clicks broke the world record.
In sharp contrast to the decline of Nokia and the sudden death of copycat phones, the iPhone is selling well and Xiaomi is rising. Smartphones have begun to become the mainstream choice for the public, and some visionary figures have begun to lay out the mobile Internet.
WeChat, which was launched in 2011, became extremely popular. The number of users quickly exceeded 100 million. Zhang Xiaolong, known as the "Father of WeChat", also became famous.
Zhang Yiming, who noticed the trend of mobile Internet, started his fifth business.
This time, Zhang Yiming named the company ByteDance.
Afterwards, he analyzed the names of the top 100 APPs in the App Store and decided to name the first APP he launched - Toutiao. On the cover, he defined Toutiao as a "new media based on social mining and personalized recommendations."
Zhang Yiming believes that in the era of mobile Internet with the explosion of information, people will be at a loss when faced with such a variety of information.
It is precisely because of the extremely "addictive" method of machine recommendation that Toutiao quickly became famous.
In 2012, ByteDance received financing one after another and became one of the fastest growing companies in the mobile Internet.
Of course, Zhang Yiming did not slow down because of this. Instead, he continued to launch new products based on his own product concepts and product lines, based on recommendations and assisted by intelligent matching, and expanded his "byte territory" ".
But Zhang Yiming firmly believes that "big efforts can produce miracles" and believes that if you try all possibilities, you can always find the optimal solution.
From our perspective today, Zhang Yiming has found it, and that is——short video.
In 2016, with the popularization of 4G and the increasing shipments of smartphones, the opportunity that Zhang Yiming had been waiting for for 4 years came. Bytedance has incubated three short video projects: Huoshan, Xigua, and Douyin.
When it first started, the most inconspicuous and least favored of the “three brothers” was “Douyin”.
Because its team is too young.
In this team, the vast majority of people are born in the 1990s. There are even many members who have just left campus. This is their first time typing code, first time making products, and first time doing design.
Although this young team, which is deeply trusted by Zhang Yiming, is full of hard work, their main competitors have already been on the short video track for some time.
Meipai and Xiaokaxiu have successfully penetrated into the urban youth market. Kuaishou, on the other hand, was deeply involved in third- and fourth-tier cities and had already gained tens of millions of daily active users at that time.
At that time, they took stock of more than 100 short video products on the market and found that none of them covered a duration of about 15 seconds. From the perspective of user portraits, they found that young people, especially those born after 1995 in first- and second-tier cities, lacked an exclusive product. Therefore, we decided to bet on this group of people and decided to present it in a vertical screen format for 15 seconds.
Operations and early users are like friends
We often have hot pot appointments privately when there is nothing to do. When users encounter academic and emotional problems, they will also seek operation consultation. The only science major in the operation team student, and also helped users with advanced math questions.
After accumulating the first batch of users in this way, Douyin also paid to send them wigs, glasses and other shooting props.
What really transformed Douyin from an "ugly duckling" into a "swan" was the bath dance.
At the beginning of 2017, before Douyin was launched on the market, a large number of "bath dance" videos appeared outside the site, and then the magical song challenge #一猫# became popular on major social media. In May, it exceeded 1 million daily users, completing the cold start goal.
Subsequently, Douyin sponsored the popular variety show "China Has Hip Hop", and the hit song "Ci Mile Ci Mile" became popular. The unique product tonality made Douyin a popular culture community.
On the eve of New Year’s Day in 2018, Douyin launched the dance machine function and became the top Chinese App Store champion in one fell swoop...
How popular Douyin is now, go to the subway to check it out Just know.
Of course, the number of daily active users (DAU) data can explain everything better. As of July 2019, the total number of global daily active users of ByteDance's products exceeds 700 million, and the total number of monthly active users exceeds 1.5 billion. Among them, the number of daily active users of Douyin has reached an astonishing 320 million.
In other words, one out of every four people in China uses Douyin every day.
How terrifying is this set of data?
You must know that Sina Weibo took 10 years to launch and only has 211 million daily active users. At this time, it took less than three years for Douyin to reach 300 million.
While major Internet companies are lamenting the disappearance of China’s Internet dividends, Zhang Yiming and his ByteDance are making great progress, swimming against the current.
Since then, China has had an addictive APP called “Douyin”!