Internet company “insider Center” troubles and challenges
Editor’s note: This article is from the micro-channel public number “pole Business” (ID: jdsy2020), Author: Liu Shanshan, Editor: Zhu Zhu.
As a workplace social platform, Maimai must prove that it can guarantee the security of users’ posts. But at the same time, as an anonymous social platform that is widely followed by the Internet circle, it also has the responsibility to ensure the authenticity of the content posted by users, otherwise it will become a place for rumors.
As the “inside center of major Internet companies,” Maimai might not have thought that she would be swept into the center of the storm of public opinion.
On January 10, an employee of Pinduoduo was fired for posting an anonymous message in Maimai, which triggered heated discussions. Some netizens questioned whether Maimai had leaked personal information of users. In response to this, Maimai responded on its official Weibo that it will not provide any third party with any form of post user information, and will provide extremely strict and complete security protection for personal information.
However, Maimai has set a user setting of “cannot comment” in response to Weibo. In nearly 4,000 reposts so far, some users have questioned “Who would believe this response if they dare not even comment”, “Believe you a ghost”, “Really? I don’t believe it” and so on.
“As a workplace social platform, Maimai must prove that it can guarantee the security of users’ posts. But at the same time, as an anonymous social platform that has been widely followed by the Internet, it also has the responsibility to ensure the authenticity of users’ posts. Otherwise It has become a place where rumors spread.” A senior Internet observer said to “Extreme Business.”
Related information shows that Maimai is one of the few survivors on the social circuit of the workplace. According to iResearch’s data, as of June 2020, its user registrations exceeded 110 million. In addition, Maimai announced in April 2018 that it had completed a $200 million Series D financing.
According to the plan of Maimai founder Lin Fan, Maimai may seek to go public in the United States in 2019 and reach a target market value of 10 billion yuan. In the longer-term dream, Maimai will be a billion-dollar company.
As of January 2021, under the wave of IPOs of new economy companies in the past two years, Maimai has not yet officially told its IPO story. Behind it, what challenges and troubles does it face?
01
Internet World “Inside Center”
Maimai, founded in 2013, first imitated the foreign workplace exchange platform LinkedIn (Linkedin), but failed, and then used anonymous community + real-name authentication as a dual content engine to attract professionals from large companies such as the Internet to settle in and build With the “Second Space” network, it has become one of the largest workplace information exchange platforms.
“Maimai makes good use of workplace desires compared to other social platforms that use psychological desires to attract users.” An Internet observer said.
The anonymous community made Maimai become the center of big companies’ breaking news and made it famous. For example, the King of Glory team year-end bonus 100 months salary, Alibaba’s acquisition of Youku Tudou, star wardrobe arrears with employee salaries, Meituan’s acquisition of Mobike, Panda Live being sold, Lu Qi’s resignation from Baidu, etc., are all from the pulse The pulse burst.
In August 2018, relevant departments jointly interviewed Maimai and ordered to close its anonymous section. After that, Maimai said that the “anonymous” section was upgraded to “professional speech”, and the main adjustment was that the “professional speech” anonymous persons were matched and displayed a unique ID-in fact, almost all the functions of anonymous speech were continued to be used.
It is worth noting that the randomly generated ID is fixed and cannot be changed. In Pinduoduo’s response, an employee was expelled for posting an anonymous message in Maimai. It was through this that the employee’s past anonymous posts were searched.
Because of fierce competition in the workplace and internal volume, a large area of workplace anxiety has been caused. “Zhiyan” became the source of workplace employees’ complaints, wishes, wait-and-see, and broke the news. Since then, this kind of information has “broken the circle” from the pulse, and continues to ferment and spread on major platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, Tieba, and Hupu.
“Human nature is dark. For many front-line and even middle-level and high-level employees of Internet companies, many people like to stay in the pulse area.” Employees of many Internet companies said: These workplace insiders, gossip News, let oneself relish, can’t stop.
According to a Zhihu netizen, most of the content of these workplace gossips and complaints can be summarized as follows:
A company has 996 all days without life; A company calls for caring for its employees all day long, but I can’t feel it at all;The boss of a company is stingy and the salary is terribly low; A certain company has laid off its staff again, and still does not give N+1;A certain company’s year-end bonus is compared with the next door Pitifully small;Working for a few years, the income is not as good as the current year;Performance 3.25 impulse I am tired of not being able to find a job after resigning;The annual income is 1.8 million, why I still want to leave;
……
It can be said that in the pulse, from giants such as Ali, Tencent, Huawei, Baidu, ByteDance, Pinduoduo, Meituan, and JD.com, to relatively small Internet companies, no one can escape complaints, complaints and complaints. show off.
“This can be said to be the’inside center’ of major Internet companies. Internet companies that have not been complained about or broke the news mean that they have no status in the industry.” A technology media reporter who has been in Maimai for a long time said, This is also one of its own news sources.
He said that especially the “violent feed” incidents of some major Internet companies are more likely to ferment and spread. Whether it’s the “Huya being carried by the client” who claimed that he suffered cold violence from his immediate leadership and was taken out of the company by 5 people by HR, or “I was taken because I saw my colleague being carried into an ambulance. “A lot of expulsion” has become a hot topic of concern throughout the Internet.
Perhaps, this is what Mai Mai wants. With the fundamental purpose of exposure and eye-catching, Mai Mai has become a topic of concern throughout the Internet, and Mai Mai will naturally “go up.”
The problem is that although it is called “Professional Words”, everyone who speaks anonymously here has real-name authentication behind them, but anonymous postings are always true and false-compared to everyone watching a lively gossip. , It is difficult to verify whether some “violent materials” that have had a great impact on Internet companies are false or true.
“We encourage real users to speak truthfully; at the same time, Maimai will also cooperate with law enforcement agencies when necessary to deal with illegal acts such as malicious rumors and slander.” On the issue of authenticity, Maimai said.
Whether Maimai does this is questionable. Take the dismissed Pinduoduo employee “Wang Taixu wray” as an example, according toPinduoduo officially responded that Wang was terminated by the company not because he posted “ambulance photos” in Maimai, but the company’s subsequent investigation found that Wang had repeatedly posted “extreme remarks” with significant malicious in this anonymous community. , Such as: “I want XXX to die”, “Pull the ashes of xxxx rabbit” and so on.
“From a legal point of view, such irresponsible remarks not only clearly violate the company’s relevant regulations, but also constitute defamation of the company.” A senior Internet lawyer said.
Apparently, Maimai has not dealt with this apparently extreme statement. From this point of view, even if “Wang Taixu wray” was expelled without revealing his privacy, he still has the responsibility-at least as a platform, it has not fulfilled the responsibility of content review, screening and management.
02
Is it safe to post in Maimai?
Maimai founder Lin Fan
Maimai founder Lin Fan, born in the 1980s, graduated from the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University. He was a member of the core founding team of Sogou and worked with alumni Wang Xiaochuan for seven years. He once said: “Anonymous social networking is just a product form. Anonymity can also be positive and positive content. Tonal control is not entirely determined by the product, but by the operator.”
Reviewing the development of Maimai, it is not the “positive content” that really made Maimai’s reputation.
In August 2014, during the B round of financing, Maimai had only 800,000 users; in 2016, Maimai had a total number of user registrations of approximately 20 million; by 2018, during the D round of financing, Maimai had more than 80 million users; By June 2020, its user registrations exceeded 110 million.
The most critical factor for the rapid increase in the number of users is anonymous complaints, black belly, and complaints. The outside world once thought that “the pulse function is left behind and broke the news” and regarded it as a “workplace gossip” platform.
In an article reviewing the failure of Chitu, Shen Boyang, the founder of Chitu, stated that Maimai was on the verge of an anonymous social network with “self-contained traffic”. “No matter how many stories Maimai tells, in fact, at its core is a Secret (an anonymous social app) wearing a LinkedIn coat)”.
For Maimai, as of now, it has never announced the news in the anonymous revelations. How does the platform distinguish the authenticity. And, what information can be retained on the platform, and the standards that need to be discarded.
This has made Maimai become the source of the “inside”, creating a huge volume of sound, and at the same time, there are more and more controversies.
In 2016, the anonymous community of Maimai was sued in court for illegally grabbing and using Sina Weibo user information; in 2017, ofo filed a lawsuit with the People’s Court of Haidian District, Beijing, suing Maimai and the Kejixun website for alleged infringement. After that, I was hungry and went to court.
In addition to more and more Internet companies dissatisfied with Maimai, some old users are also “escaping from Maimai”. “In the current pulse, a lot of content is complaints, complaints and rumors. If you read too much information, it is easy to feel loss and injustice, which affects work and even life.” An employee of a major Internet company said that he has not gone for a long time. The pulse is gone, “The above content is too negative now.”
Even the seemingly intriguing “high-paying recruitment” content is suspected.
A netizen who knows the truth said that, for example, most of the hype about salary in the pulse is about corporate recruiting HR or headhunting. “They hype or even talk nonsense about the salary level of some companies, and the purpose is to create a high salary. You have a very low atmosphere, and those who are weak-willed start to want to change jobs, they take the opportunity to enter, offer you positions, and complete their KPI assessments.” He gave an example of a company that he used to have a T4 salary. The pulse hype up to 40k for a month, the actual situation is that most of the T6 ranks do not even have 30k.
What’s more serious is that, in the eyes of the industry, Maimai has the risk of exploding at any time for vulnerabilities in content review, screening and management.
“In Maimai, the rumors do not need any cost. Even if the rumors are reported and deleted, the time space is enough for the rumors to spread. I am a victim personally. I was inexplicably spreading the rumors by Maimai anonymous users on three occasions and reposted by friends I saw it and found Maimai and told me to wait for the complaint review.” said a certified Sina Finance blogger.
According to previous news from Maimai, it has established an audit team in Tianjin Binhai New Area. Judging from a recent recruitment information, the requirements for “content review specialist” are not high, with a college degree or above, and the basic salary is 3K-5K/month.
In addition, Maimai’s infringement of users’ personal privacy has also been questioned. According to previous media reports, Maimai requires the address book to be uploaded and uses the user address book to continuously send harassing text messages. Even if Maimai is uninstalled, you will continue to receive SMS harassment.
In October 2020, the website of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released an APP notification about infringements of user rights and interests. Maimai was notified for collecting personal information in violation of regulations. Later, Maimai responded to “rectification”, but judging from the latest experience of “Extreme Business”, it still requires the address book to be uploaded.
What’s more, now Tucao companies may also be identified by company investigations. In this regard, “Vista Watching the World” stated that although Maimai did not leak or sell information to the outside world, being able to search for past speeches through a fixed external ID and human flesh is enough to scare many people.
Therefore, judging from the poll results of the recent “Do you usually post in the anonymous community?”, the number of people who chose “do not believe that any platform is completely anonymous” and “consider the platform selling their own information” is the choice ” “Meeting” is nearly three times the number of people.
Lin Fan is also clearly aware of the huge risks after the decline in trust. For this reason, he posted on the social platform: Today an employee of a certain company was fired for publishing real and public content. The online transmission is a leaked information. Over the years, in order to protect the right of employees to speak up equally, we have rejected countless investors and CEOs’ requests to delete posts/check information, and therefore have received countless lawsuits.
03
The story of a hundred billion dollar dream is difficult to tell
In 2019, in a conversation, Lin Fan mentioned the future plan of Maimai, and wanted to be a 100 billion dollar company.
At that time, Lin Fan believed that LinkedIn had created a company with more than 20 billion U.S. dollars (Editor’s note: LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft for 26 billion U.S. dollars in June 2016, but after entering China in 2014, There have been many symptoms of multinational companies’ dissatisfaction in China), “We have a deeper understanding that not only people can connect with each other, but we enable everyone to communicate actively and achieve their own growth.Goals and professional goals. This is a greater value than LinkedIn. “
What Lin Fan wants to do is vertical social networking. “First form a central effect in the Internet population, and then use PGC to drive UGC to break the Internet circle, penetrate into other fields such as finance, real estate, and media, and finally achieve industry-wide coverage.”
But for Maimai, how to establish a more long-term and stable business model is the key to achieving its dream of 100 billion dollars.
Related information shows that Maimai’s product architecture is divided into three major businesses: social business, content business, commercial business, and personal-related modules. This has brought the “troika” of revenue-advertising, membership and recruitment, which accounted for 40%, 40% and 20% respectively. According to Lin Fan’s previous disclosure, it achieved breakeven in 2016.
Advertising and recruitment are the B-side, and members are the C-side. “Maimai’s idea is to form a closed business loop from C-side to B-side by expanding contacts, job recruitment, business cooperation, etc. in the workplace.” A financial analyst said.
For this reason, after the D round of financing of 200 million US dollars in 2018, Maimai released the “Ladder Program”, with an estimated investment of 1 billion yuan, and in-depth cooperation with 1,000 partners in various industries to achieve Career growth once again provides strong empowerment.
The plan is that most small and medium-sized enterprises do not have the financial, energy and professional capabilities to build a career growth system for internal employees. Maimai can help companies make up for this shortcoming-to some extent, this is to WeChat, DingTalk, knowledge payment platform, Q&A platform and other SAAS platforms compete.
From the perspective of Maimai’s current revenue composition, the challenge is quite large. In the advertising business such as open-screen advertising and feed streaming advertising, there are too many competitors and limited room for growth. Coupled with the existence of the anonymous disclosure area of ”Professional Words”, Maimai always faces the choice between the truthfulness of the content and the interests of customers.
In terms of recruitment business, although Maimai has launched functions such as “Enterprise Account 2.0” and “Can Chat”, it currently accounts for only 20% of Maimai’s entire revenue, and faces direct employment by boss, Lagou, and Zhilian. Recruitment, 51job and even 58.com are threats. “Maimai has too many negatives against the company, and user feedback is very slow. We will not regard it as the main recruitment channel.” said a PR of an Internet company.
In a previous interview with “Chinese Entrepreneur”, Lin Fan also admitted the above two points: In the past, at every meeting, the person in charge of advertising and recruitment had to fight with the person in charge of job speech, and the advertising department would think, “Because of the negative job words, advertisers don’t invest budgets!” The person in charge of the recruitment business will also complain, “The company’s HR is recruiting people, but there are so many negatives here, how do they recruit?”
In terms of viscosity, Maimai is not as good as LinkedIn. In an Internet analyst report in 2015, LinkedIn mainly provides companies with recruitment solutions for posting jobs and searching global talent pools, which accounted for more than 60% of total revenue, but the current pulse is only 20%.
“The LinkedIn user community is more elite and higher in quality than that.” Some analysts said.
Membership has two profit models: Maimai Member and Maimai Class. Maimai members are similar to LinkedIn members and can view the contact information of specific groups. The C-side membership fee ranges from 58 yuan per month to 1880 yuan per year, and the annual membership fee for entrepreneurs is 16,800 yuan.
Wang Qian, the co-founder of Maimai Business Strategy, once explained: “The membership system of 58 yuan and 1880 yuan is built for the rigid demand of sales and HR. Ordinary users can add six people per day on the platform. See limited information. But by becoming a member, you can better reach the target group and you can also see more complete information.”
From the observation of “Extreme Business”, Maimai’s C-end membership system is also quite controversial. At present, there are 615 complaints about Maimai on Black Cat complaints, most of which are around “automatic deduction without reminder” , “Automatic renewal” and other issues.
The effect of paying to find someone is not good. “Maimai claims that it can provide extremely fast contact pulses after opening a membership, but there is still no feedback for almost a week after I contacted, and it has not reached the function of contacting the other party. And the other party has not used this software for a long time.” Another user is also On January 12, the complaint stated that the speed contact voucher increased from 1 yuan to 8 yuan, “It feels not only unfair but also completely false.”
For Maimai, even if these controversies are set aside, it is almost impossible to surpass the two mountains: C-end social networking in the workplace has WeChat, and B-end workplace functions are nailed. “Through Maimai, I also met some interesting people, but in the end we all chatted through WeChat.” A Maimai user said.
In fact, if social software cannot be integrated into users’ work and life, then it is basically a short-lived one, and its popularity is just to drain traffic for other software. Before Maimai, there were Secret and No Secret, the same two main anonymous social networking products that quickly became popular, but eventually became anonymous.
For Maimai, how to establish a more long-term and stable business model? ItemThere is no clear answer before.
At the same time, after the U.S. IPO plan failed in 2019, Maimai has experienced a series of high-level personnel turmoil since the second half of 2019: Ling Jun, vice president of human resources, Li Zhener, head of government cooperation, and co-founder Zhang Wei, vice president of business, Hu Chen, co-founder and chief marketing officer, Yao Jinyi, chief technology officer, former co-founder CTO Jiang Youxin, and senior director of content advertising Cui Yao left.
“Building a credit endorsement for the talents of every workplace person, so that individuals and enterprises can achieve more efficient and sustainable development.” Lin Fan said in his speech at the 2019 World Internet Conference.
Now, after users dare not post in the “Internet Insider Center”, is there still a chance to realize Maimai’s “hundreds of billions of dollars” dream?