The man next to Luo Yonghao started a business again

The key reason why he wants to start another business is that he wants to win.

Respondents

Zhu Xiaomu started a business again, this time it was age-reducing coffee.

Counting Hammer Technology, this is Zhu Xiaomu's fourth venture. He used to be an employee of Hammer Technology No. 0001 and was "the man next to Luo Yonghao". In 2018, he left Luo Yonghao to start the e-cigarette brand flow. In 2020, he and Luo Yonghao did a live broadcast room together.

ButIn Zhu Xiaomu's past entrepreneurial experience, he seems to be a failureAnd the key reason why he wants to start another business is that he wants to win.

Wanting to win has always been a big proposition for me, which is particularly important, this win is not so much about money, but more about whether this time the majority of users can use my products for a longer time. Recently, Zhu Xiaomu said frankly in an interview with "Chinese Entrepreneur".

In the process of making flow e-cigarettes, Zhu Xiaomu once found this feeling of winning - one of the e-cigarette products has been popular for three months. However, Flow soon had to be suspended due to policy and regulatory factors.

The pain is hard to go away and it's addictive, so I want to do it again. Can you give me a few more years this time? Zhu Xiaomu reminisced as he looked at a place in the interview room, as if waiting for an answer.

In the nearly 4 years of making a friend and being an anchor,Zhu Xiaomu has handled more than 100,000 SKUs and served nearly 100 million consumersI've seen all kinds of new products in China in recent years, but none of them make him feel worth fighting again.

But he himself was unwilling. "I don't think influencer selling is an endgame for me, although I later found out that I had a talent for it. I'm making products in my bones, so I've been looking for (products) all these years. Zhu Xiaomu told "Chinese Entrepreneur". Eventually, he chose coffee as his latest venture venture.

Whether he is young and vigorous, or he chooses the wrong track, Zhu Xiaomu admits that he did make a lot of mistakes in his previous entrepreneurship and encountered many difficulties: he owed debts, he couldn't pay his salary, he had problems with his team, and he had problems ......with investorsHe encountered all the problems that should be encountered, and he admitted them.

But Zhu Xiaomu wants to prove his heart through products, and he has always been there. He has always been dissatisfied with the pits he has stepped on in his past life. If he refused, he had to do it, even though he was over forty years old.

Zhu Xiaomu self-report,His shaping of business, product concepts and many other aspects is 100% from Luo Yonghao"Including the earliest popularity, it was all given by him, if it weren't for him, I wouldn't be now."

Zhu Xiaomu and Luo Yonghao's relationship began with Niubo.com, when Zhu Xiaomu was still studying architecture in the United States, and later Luo Yonghao invited him to return to China to start a business as an English training school. But after returning to China, Luo Yonghao suddenly became interested in mobile phones again, and Zhu Xiaomu didn't work as an English teacher for a day, so he joined Hammer Technology.

From hammer technology to making friends, in the more than 10 years he has been with Luo Yonghao, Zhu Xiaomu is very grateful for the shaping of these experiences, and the heart that wants to make products is ready to move again.

This is the biggest addiction in my life, and you can understand it as vanityI just like this, I'm not so interested in anything else, and I'm okay with money or something. Zhu Xiaomu tried his best to prove it.

The entrepreneurship of Age-Reducing Coffee originated in early 2023, when Zhu Xiaomu heard an idea from his partner Yang Xiangji, that is, to combine coffee and health products. What impressed Zhu Xiaomu was that he felt that he was reliable, and that he had good ideas.

Yang Xiangji is the chairman of the well-known game company tap4fun, and has been an investor in Zhu Xiaomu, from Hammer Technology to Flow e-cigarettes, he has participated in investments. In recent years, Yang Xiangji has been researching the field of anti-aging and has invested in many biotechnology companies in Europe and the United States. Yang Xiangji has also been a researcher and practitioner in the field of anti-aging, and it was he who first proposed the commercial idea of combining coffee and health care products, and Zhu Xiaomu also felt that this idea was very good: "Coffee with health care products, fast with slow, high frequency with low frequency." ”

StillZhu Xiaomu did not believe in this product from the beginningI have also gone through the stage of questioning.

When Yang Xiangji first told Zhu Xiaomu, Zhu Xiaomu felt that this matter was too simple? "Sounds so good, often dreamy things you need to sleep and think about it the next day. Then I slept for a while, and after thinking about it the next day, I felt that there was really no problem, and I found that functional coffee was indeed a new growth point last year. ”

According to Yang Xiangji's description, on the basis of coffee, 17 ingredients such as dihydroquercetin, curcumin and various vitamins are added, but the taste of coffee is still maintained. For this reason, Zhu Xiaomu searched all the health care products related to Jingdong International and Tmall International, and found that the sales were very good.

In Zhu Xiaomu's view, this is a unique trackAnd one can make products, two can sell, three can manage the team, everything is feasible.

All I'm going to do is just put it out and people think, 'Wow, that's a clever idea,' and you might question, is it really going to work? A peerless good product is often like this, just like the earliest Tesla electric car and the first smartphone, not everyone thinks this thing is good at the beginning. Zhu Xiaomu said.

At present, the age-reducing coffee team is mainly scattered in the UK and China, with the research team from the University of Oxford in the UK and the product and commercial teams in China. In addition, Age-Reducing Coffee currently has an independent station overseas, with users in more than 30 overseas countries, and has a certain repurchase rate.

Yang Xiangji's experience in going to sea is what Zhu Xiaomu values. Tap4Fun, founded by Yang Xiangji, is one of the first game companies in China to go overseas, and 94% of the company's revenue currently comes from overseas. In Zhu Xiaomu's view, he has worked as a product manager, led a company, and worked as a salesman at the forefront before, but he is still short of the last piece of the puzzle - the overseas marketCoffee happens to be a super cross-cultural speciesAnd coffee is almost the strongest drink overseas.

In fact, as early as 2021, Yang Xiangji registered a company in the UK. Initially, it was mainly a team of scientists doing scientific research, and it was not promoted on a large scale in the commercial market. In his opinion, for a company to do well, it requires the efforts of both scientists and the ability of business operators. He found Zhu Xiaomu in the hope of starting from China, relying on Zhu Xiaomu's understanding of products, teams, channels, etc., to gradually open up the market.

This time to start a business, Zhu Xiaomu felt that he was differentHe's less arrogant and more data-trusting.

After more than three years of e-commerce live broadcast, a very big gain for Zhu Xiaomu is that the criteria for judging products are different. Before, as a product manager or designer, he was very confident in his judgment and thought that the product he made must be good, and if you didn't like it, it was your problem.

However, now Zhu Xiaomu doesn't dare to say this, he realizes that if consumers don't pay, it is his own problem and he has to improve.

In the past, I was either confident to the apex, thinking that this product must work, and I was the king; Or they are suspicious of the deep valley, and they don't know how this product is, and they are trembling. Zhu Xiaomu told "Chinese Entrepreneur". Now, after being slapped in the face a few times, he's starting to bow down to the data.

Zhu Xiaomu said that in the process of being slapped in the face by the live broadcast, the accuracy of judging a popular product will also increase. Now, in the process of live broadcasting, there are 7 screens in front of Zhu Xiaomu, which display different user reviews and background data, Zhu Xiaomu will focus on minute commissions while paying attention to GMV and total commissions.

I'm not even looking at how much commission a product has, because it may be a lot of commission, but it's not much in minutes. The flow rate represented behind this is a very important thing, and the flow rate is followed by a return rate, and in the end, whoever is the first, I will sell. Zhu Xiaomu showed his calculus logic to "Chinese Entrepreneur".

He said that this entrepreneurship was completely different from the hammer and flow, at that time, he was holding high and fighting, opening and closing, with the mentality of doing a job, and after getting a sum of money, he immediately wanted to prove himself in sales, and prove to investors that I was very good, and I could win a sum of money.

The current Zhu Xiaomu is very pragmaticContinuous R&D and testing, forming a core fan group, users are willing to pay, and continue to invest in R&D after making money, returning to the most traditional business logic.

is different from Zhu Xiaomu, Yang Xiangji often has to play the person who pulls Zhu Xiaomu back.

After many years of entrepreneurship, Yang Xiangji pays more attention to risk prevention and control. At the beginning of 2023, Zhu Xiaomu and Yang Xiangji registered their companies in China and completed food safety filing. On January 15, 2024, the first sale of age-reducing coffee in the Chinese market, Zhu Xiaomu deliberately chose the private domain channel, and did not use the energy of the live broadcast room of making friends, and the sales reached hundreds of thousands of yuan. The next day, the product appeared in the Make a Friend live broadcast room.

At the same time as starting a business to make age-reducing coffee,Zhu Xiaomu still maintains his identity as a friend and an anchor with goodsAnd combine the two into one. In his opinion, age-reducing coffee is a new product he started a business, and live streaming is an important sales channel, where he can understand market dynamics, constantly test his products, and find valuable clues hidden in the live broadcast room that affect GMV fluctuations.

Yang Xiangji is still the chairman of tap4fun, and its game business still has a considerable revenue scale every year. "So we probably don't need to raise money for a while, because we've already received good feedback from the market for our coffee, and we have enough cash on our books for five to 10 years. Yang Xiangji told "Chinese Entrepreneur".

In Yang Xiangji's view, the main purpose of starting a business in the past was to prove himself and find wealth and security - it only took him 90 days from the earliest decision to make games to his monthly income of 10 million yuan; Now the establishment of the Age Reduction Coffee,He wanted to pursue a more meaningful lifeSo that consumers around the world, for only $1 a day, can enjoy the research results of scientists for more than 10 years.

In Zhu Xiaomu's view, the anti-aging field where age-reducing coffee is located is a track with a huge market scale.

From the beginning of 2023, Zhu Xiaomu has been drinking age-reducing coffee until today: "I am 40 years old, and I can broadcast live for 6 hours every night until 1 o'clock in the morning. Although he used to work at this pace, he insists that the benefits of this coffee are indispensable. In between conversations,He also did not forget to show everyone one of his hairs that was turning from white to black.

According to reports, age-reducing coffee mainly integrates anti-aging ingredients into coffee through cold brew freeze-drying technology and achieves the best ratio. In Zhu Xiaomu's view, most consumers are not loyal to coffee brands, and new coffee brands are easy to gain a foothold, not to mention that the taste of age-reducing coffee is almost the same as coffee, and there are more effects.

Regarding questions about food safety, Zhu Xiaomu said that after experiencing the entrepreneurship of e-cigarettes, he is more sensitive to regulatory policies, and the products of age-reducing coffee fully meet all the requirements of national solid beverage food safety, and all the ingredients added are also in China's food white list, and the dosage also meets the requirements.

Human science and technology have been promoting the healthy development of human beings, and the life expectancy of human beings has been accelerating at a very high rate in the past 100 years. It is true that people live longer and younger, which is inseparable from dietary supplements. Zhu Xiaomu said. He thinksReferring to the degree of development of the medical aesthetic industry, you can know the future market space of this coffee.

For the venture, Mr. Zhu's office was filled with coffee products from competitors and a book called "Longevity" by David Sinclair, an anti-aging scientist and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

This time, Zhu Xiaomu wants to win, but also wants to win younger.

*: China Entrepreneur Magazine.