CEO of Gong Haiyan Jiayuan. Become the first matchmaker in the network.
Gong Haiyan, a Hunan girl who is willing to endure hardships, paved her future and found her happiness unconsciously with her own pursuit and persistence. "No pain, no pain, no pain" is a description of her present situation. Speaking of it, her success still stems from the combination of "self" and "ID".
I once dropped out of school to work for a living.
Gong Haiyan [1], whose net names are "Little Dragon Girl", "Xiaoxiang Swallow" and "Pepper", graduated from the Chinese Department of Peking University, with a master's degree from the School of Journalism of Fudan University. On June 8, 2003, 10, she raised funds by herself and set up a dating website for college students: Jiayuan. The aura on her head today is inseparable from her little-known hard childhood.
Gong Haiyan was born in a poor peasant family in Jiaqiao Town, Taoyuan County, Hunan Province. He has been strong since he was a child. "From the second day of junior high school, I sell popsicles to earn tuition every summer vacation."
1August, 992, Gong Haiyan experienced great joy and great sorrow: first, he got the admission notice from Taoyuan No.1 Middle School, a provincial key middle school, and a few days later, he had a car accident, resulting in a comminuted fracture of his right leg! She was selling popsicles when she had an accident. This car accident left the poor Gong family with a foreign debt of more than 3,000 yuan. Gong Haiyan chose to drop out of school until the last semester of her sophomore year in high school. At that time, her performance ranked second.
She persuaded her father to borrow more than 3,000 yuan from relatives and opened a student goods store near the township primary school. She went to the wholesale market in Changde city alone to purchase goods, and she guarded the store alone, earning more than 7000 yuan a year. It suddenly occurred to her that money is easy to make. A year later, with longing for the sea and youthful dreams, Haiyan went to work in Zhuhai. In Zhuhai Matsushita Company, she worked as an editor of the company's internal newspaper from an ordinary working girl with her own literary talent.
Although work and life are going well, the most fascinating thing is books. 1996165438+1On October 23rd, Gong Haiyan returned to Taoyuan No.1 Middle School to study in Grade Two. At this time, she is almost 2 1 year old, and the age line of the national college entrance examination is 24 years old, "just in time for the last bus."
1In July, 998, the girl who dropped out of school for three years was admitted to the Chinese Department of Peking University with the highest score of liberal arts students in the county. After graduating from undergraduate course in 2002, she was sent to the School of Journalism of Fudan University for postgraduate study.
Set up a dating website during graduate school
Because he dropped out of school for three years, from high school to university and then to graduate school, Gong Haiyan has been older than his classmates. "My personal problem has become a long-standing problem. My mother is so anxious that I have to start getting married. " At the mention of this matter, Gong Haiyan smiled without any wriggle.
Gong Haiyan told the author frankly that he was cheated by the matchmaking website twice during his graduate studies. It was these two deceptions that made her start a serious dating platform for the purpose of marriage and love. "I didn't expect this to happen at the time. I studied media management myself. At first, I just wanted to practice my hands through the website, and also provided a platform for myself or the graduate students around me. "
Gong Haiyan kept his word. At that time, she was still studying at Peking University and accumulated nearly 40,000 yuan as a tutor. So, she took out 1000 yuan, made a simple web page, and began to lobby people around her to send her messages. "In the beginning, they were basically my friends and classmates. Web pages are also very simple, one after another. At first, she was a female master of Tongji Medical University, and later a male doctor of Shanghai Jiaotong University. Even if Jiayuan is open. " Gong Haiyan recalled.
800, 1000, 10000 ... The number of websites has increased geometrically, and Gong Haiyan can't stop. On February 15, 2004, at the request of members, Gong Haiyan held a friendship meeting in Beijing and Shanghai at the same time, and even earned more than 10,000 yuan. At that time, she registered and established Shanghai Huaqianshu Information Technology Co., Ltd. ..
This website not only made Gong Haiyan gain material wealth, but also helped her find the other half. "Ha ha, he is actually a member of our website. He met me at the meeting and sent me an invitation online. When we met, it felt good. " Gong Haiyan smiled when talking about her husband. "After more than a month, he used a bicycle to carry me through the marriage registration, which only cost * * * 9 yuan. Our friends laughed at us because the old house caught fire and burned quickly. "
To win the market seriously.
At that time, the Internet was full of various dating websites, but because of the low threshold, almost all of them were full of unhealthy dating information such as one-night stands and extramarital affairs. Gong Haiyan has taken a different approach and implemented the membership system, positioning its members with college education or above, and requiring them to submit true identification materials.
Her initial idea was to help older and highly educated friends around her find suitable partners. Unexpectedly, by the end of 2005, the number of members of Jiayuan had reached 320,000, and she had been ranked first in Baidu dating site for several months. At the beginning of 2006, it was rated as the first dating website by iResearch Market Information. Nearly 600,000 people have found their other half online since jiayuan was founded more than three years ago. Although there were no advertisements and publicity expenses, the positioning of "serious marriage" and strict appraisal system quickly won the market for Jiayuan.
In April 2007, jiayuan received an investment of 40 million yuan from Xu Xiaoping, Wang Qiang and Qian Yongqiang, the founders of New Oriental. In fact, this is not the first venture capital that Gong Haiyan has obtained. In May 2005, Gong Haiyan received an email from Lao Qian. This old money is Qian Yongqiang, vice president of New Oriental. In his letter, he said that he thought Jiayuan had a bright future and hoped that Gong Haiyan could concentrate on this website.
A few days later, Qian Yongqiang flew from Beijing to Shanghai. "We talked for an hour in the coffee shop on the 54th floor of Jinmao Building and didn't sign any agreement. After he returned to Beijing, he invested 2 million yuan on the website. "
Old Qian's visit strengthened the hesitant Gong Haiyan. When we make this website, a server and several computers are enough. With the rapid increase of membership, Gong Haiyan's investment in servers and bandwidth has also increased dramatically. I spent my own money and invested my husband's money. She works longer and longer, first 8 hours, then 12 hours, and then often stays up late. "I used to be fat. Because of this website, I lost 28 pounds."
After getting 2 million yuan, Gong Haiyan rented an office in Xuhui District, and the art department, technical department, customer service department and marketing department were established one after another. Gradually, the prospect of Gong Haiyan is brighter and brighter: from April to May, 2007, jiayuan successively received 40 million RMB angel investment from three elders, namely New Oriental, Xu Xiaoping, Wang Qiang and Qian Yongqiang, and the famous venture capital company Qi Ming Venture Capital100000 USD.
Grow up in a difficult situation
According to the prediction of relevant institutions, the online dating market in China will reach 653 million yuan in 2008, with a compound annual growth rate of 106.2%. According to Alexa's traffic statistics, jiayuan's website views are second only to Match.com, the world's largest dating site. On the MSN homepage, Jiayuan has also accounted for 58% of the total traffic, exceeding the total traffic of other MSN partners. "Venture capital always wants you to serve the people for a reward, so it is my goal to achieve social and economic benefits." Gong Haiyan said.
However, how to effectively reflect the service characteristics of the website and truly achieve profitability is a difficult problem faced by all domestic dating websites at this stage. Match. The world's largest dating network earned more than 2 billion yuan in 2006, a large part of which came from charging admission fees. In China, almost all dating websites, including jiayuan, are providing free services for netizens because they are used to free. Finding a reasonable and effective profit model has become a difficult problem for the whole dating website industry. In this case, Gong Haiyan began to set up an independent wedding website, using the huge resources of 6.86 million members to develop downstream of the marriage and love industry and develop more value-added charging items. Besides websites, jiayuan has also developed mobile phone partners, such as Nokia and Pocket News. It will be a long process to wait for China people to get used to charging for online dating services. Before that, Gong Haiyan still has a long way to go.
At present, jiayuan has 6.5438+0087 million registered members, and 2 million people have found the other half here, so Gong Haiyan has won the reputation of "the first online matchmaker in China".
Due to the free membership system, jiayuan's main income comes from online value-added products and offline activities. The former includes virtual gifts and VIP membership services. , the annual gross profit is about 2 million; The latter is all kinds of blind date meetings. Last year, more than 300 blind date parties were held, and this year it will reach more than 400, with an estimated income of about 3 million.
Next, Jiayuan will enter the wedding market with an annual consumption of 300 billion yuan, and its independent wedding network will be officially launched in May this year.
Comments:
Characteristics are opportunities.
Although Gong Haiyan has been regretting her decision to quit school and start a small business, she also admits that it was that experience that made her more tenacious and practical, which was one of the main reasons why she was attracted by many venture capitalists. Second, the biggest advantage of the website is that it has always adhered to a serious concept of marriage and love, which is the main reason why venture capitalists are willing to invest.
In addition, "Jiayuan" found its accurate positioning at the beginning of its establishment, and also hit the nail on the head in this industry market-high-end, serious. Jiayuan's requirements for members are "harsh": at least 18 years old, single; College degree or above; Seeking pure love is the purpose of making friends. It is precisely because of the original intention of the "serious" website that it is not difficult for her to attract the attention of more venture capital companies.
Now, her new wedding website operation mode has been set, and it will become a B2C platform for the wedding industry. Traditional offline weddings and wedding-related companies, such as photo studios, can set up their own sales platforms on the new website. And jiayuan will share it with them. This model is a bit like Alibaba in the field of wedding.
In fact, the biggest advantage of the new wedding website still comes from the single registered users with Jiayuan exceeding100000-this is the most direct potential customer of the wedding website. It is reported that through the acquaintance of Jiayuan, an average of nearly 60,000 couples need to have a wedding every year. If each couple spends an average of 20,000 yuan, it will provide a huge potential market of 65.438+0.2 billion yuan. However, because China Internet dating users are not used to paying membership fees, jiayuan has not been able to achieve outstanding results in terms of profitability. Jiayuan's entry into the "easy-to-make-money" wedding field may reduce the pressure on Gong Haiyan.
So far, this bitter Xiangmeizi hasn't bought a car or a house. She said that she has no special requirements for material life and must seize this opportunity in her life.
/archives/success people/060 1260 12009 . html
/view/2326459.html？ tp=0_00，/job/system/2009/03/04/0 1047 1424 . shtml