The world of adults is really difficult.
Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “Hedgehog Commune” (ID: ciweigongshe) , author context , Edit Tim. Released with authorization.
“This is the first manuscript you have seen since the establishment of the public account, please be the last one.
Sorry, this time there is no movie-like picture, no carefully planned break-ups, or perhaps something that can touch you. “
On the evening of May 25, a public account called “Don’t speak out” (hereinafter referred to as “Adult”) announced its ” death “.
It was just 24 hours before the announcement. I saw them in the neighborhood near Qingnian Road in Beijing.
This is the office that friends temporarily lent to them. We are sitting in a conference room with only tables and chairs. On May 8, they laid off 11 employees in this room.
After meeting, there was no sorrowful atmosphere. I realized that the moment the “send” button was pressed, a miracle happened.
Prior to this, this public account has not received advertisements for 4 consecutive months.
Even one second before clicking “Send”, the three founders have been questioning whether they did something wrong, “because after all we failed and cash flow was cut off.”
For more than a year, they have been focusing on polishing content, thinking that content must be the core. Until they were beaten by reality and lost their ability to monetize, they laughed at the time they insisted on choosing “ideal”, “three stupid people who do not see the coffin and do not cry”.
But after the push that announced his death, their backstage was overwhelmed by more than 4,000 messages, and two or three hundred friends were added to the WeChat for business docking. The young man spoke.
“Is this a marketing event you planned?” I asked.
In the face of doubt, their response to the Hedgehog Commune was: “Being a public account is like raising a child. No one wants to use this kind of thing for marketing.”
Rise back to life, they have reason to confirm the previous choice, “If it is not what we did before, there will be no such situation today.”
The birth of “adult”
Big brother, dog braid and dog sister are the three founders of the public number “adult”, and sometimes they claim to be “three dogs”.
Before the establishment of the public account, three people worked in an Internet education company, responsible for the content of the company’s enterprise account. On September 5th, 2018, the long cartoon “The Day I Want to Resign” created by them was reprinted on the entire network, and I swiped the screen in the circle of friends. I read more than 4 million in the company ’s enterprise number alone.
Young people have a love and hate relationship with the workplace, and Tiaoman portrays a scene of wanting to resign, and at the last minute, persuades himself to stay.
The long picture of the comics also allowed them to receive an outsourcing project, earned a start-up capital for entrepreneurship, and also revitalized their minds.
Under impulse, the three resigned together.
“Three Dogs” boasted of “profound literature and art” and felt that the media marketing atmosphere at that time was very heavy. In Internet companies, content is only an auxiliary business sector and will not be particularly valued, and they hope to do some unconventional content independently.
Another reason is that when they made “Day 896 of Wanting to Resign”, they found that the comic numbers spread in the circle of friends are “all ugly”.
Under the premise that the output quality is slightly higher than the market level, they feel that a lot of content is not good enough, and they cannot be impressed. They hope to be able to make content that truly represents the values of young people, regardless of form, sense, or attitude.
Every office worker feels the same “Day 896 who wants to resign”
Now recalling their impulse to resign and start a business, they all feel a little “crazy.”
It is also this “crazy” that gave them an unexpectedly smooth start.
The name of the public account was conceived by three dogs. Social indifference, difficult life, as a bigMany people’s originally sharp edges and corners will be slowly polished away. People do not express, dare not express, nowhere to express, and then there is no way to deal with emotions and control interpersonal relationships.
“Adult” hopes to become an emotional outlet for adults to comfort young people with weights.
As a veritable zero-fan cold start public account, the first problem they face is how to enter the public eye.
Fortunately, seizing the “common adults” emotional commonality, they ushered in a good start.
The first post of the public account pushed “The Five Minutes Hiding in the Toilet”, and received “100,000+” under the condition of zero fans; the third post “The Night I Want to Give Up” is in the account Has read more than 600,000. Brother Gou recalled that “The Night I Want to Give Up” made the public account of less than 10,000 followers and increased more than 50,000 fans. The public accounts in the top 50 of the new list have basically applied for reprint.
Perhaps the night you wanted to give up
At the beginning of the establishment of the number, investors came to the door one after another, including investment institutions, MCN companies, and established media.
“We just do the content first, and let the capital do the rest.” This is their earliest simple idea. Even until the eve of writing the farewell letter, they insisted on building satisfaction on the right. Content creation, not company success.
They want to stick to their original intentions, and they also buried a “time bomb”.
Article: Content vs. traffic
At the beginning of 2019, the person in charge of GQ Labs, a well-known account, said at a meeting that in 2018, more than 280 “100,000+” articles were produced, and the revenue of a single public account reached nearly 200 million, becoming China The most profitable public account.
Tiaoman ushered in the spring. Under the general environment of decreasing the opening rate of the public account and the increasingly thin user dividends, I saw Xiaoyang Chun in the vertical track.
The feeling of “three dogs” is “like a mushroom, it seems that all the big and small horns have turned to a long road overnight.”
But not all public accounts are GQ Labs. Compared with the text content, it is more difficult and costly to make strips, and more strips are facing the test of survival.