The post-90s generation earns tens of millions from Bitcoin

Wan Zhicheng, 26, started two businesses after leaving Smart FUN in 2013. The first time, he and several partners developed a bitcoin mining machine, which made tens of millions of yuan in profit a year. After founding the fashion community e-commerce platform SEE in February 2015, Wan Zhicheng and his investors discussed a question: in today's entrepreneurship, is it heroes who make the times or the times that make people?

Making tens of millions a year from Bitcoin

     Wan Zhicheng's answer is that the times shape people. He believes that everyone is an ant of the times, and you can't change much, but you are lucky enough to seize this opportunity.

     Therefore, Wan Zhicheng decided to enter both of his entrepreneurial ventures after seeing that a new thing had entered its golden period of growth.

     Wan Zhicheng's first pot of gold came from Bitcoin. This is a digital currency proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. It is not issued by a specific monetary institution, but is generated through a large number of calculations. The value of the currency cannot be controlled artificially through mass production. Because of its limited quantity, Bitcoin was hotly speculated around 2013.

     Wan Zhicheng joined the company because he saw a concept product of Bitcoin in the Smart FUN coffee shop. After studying it, Wan Zhicheng found that it was still a blue ocean, so he found three partners to develop a mining machine for mining Bitcoin.

     In the crazy years, this product of the dream myth made their team earn a lot of money. But after a year or two of craziness, the Bitcoin market fell sharply. Wan Zhicheng felt that "it was difficult to resist this downward force" and decided to withdraw.

Grabbing a piece of the cross-border e-commerce pie

    What inspired his second business venture was a travel suitcase. In 2014, Wan Zhicheng saw a foreigner's travel suitcase at an American airport and found it very good-looking. He took a photo of it and searched for the same one online when he returned to China. What puzzled him was that he couldn't find it in an era of rapid information transparency.

    This made him question the current e-commerce business model. Why can't e-commerce solve the demand after so many years of development? Of course, the travel box was just the trigger that prompted Wan Zhicheng to decide to start a business again, and the trend of overseas shopping, cross-border e-commerce and the upgrading of consumption in the Chinese market were the big backgrounds he was interested in.

     Wan Zhicheng wanted to solve the pain points of the scene he encountered and make what you see is what you get a new shopping model. After analysis, Wan Zhicheng positioned the e-commerce category as women's clothing with high search frequency and large consumer market. More specifically, Wan Zhicheng is targeting young consumer groups born after 1985 and 1995 in first- and second-tier cities. He believes that Taobao women's clothing almost covered the consumer groups in first-, second-, third- and fourth-tier cities, and shopping guide and recommendation e-commerce products such as Meilishuo and Mogujie also occupied a position in the second- and third-tier consumer groups. On the contrary, there is no dedicated platform to serve those consumer groups in first-tier cities who pursue fashion.

     2015 happened to be the first year of the explosion of cross-border e-commerce. Tmall focused the theme of this year's Double Eleven on global shopping, and e-commerce platforms such as JD.com, Vipshop, and Jumei also put overseas shopping in the first place. Even the smart and fun Koala Overseas Shopping also delivered a brilliant achievement in its just-released financial report.

     Wan Zhicheng felt that the opportunity had arrived. The group of people he was targeting was the first consumer group of cross-border e-commerce, with a global vision. In February 2015, after leaving his previous startup, Wan Zhicheng called several colleagues from Smart FUN to start the photo community e-commerce platform SEE.

Can I avoid the giant by looking for the same item in the picture?

     However, there are too many competitors in the cross-border e-commerce market, including powerful e-commerce giants such as Alibaba and JD.com. How can a small startup compete with Alibaba, which has a market value of $200 billion?

     Wan Zhicheng never thought of rushing straight to Ali with an egg against a rock. He chose a path that he thought could bypass the giant.

The main problem that SEE solves is how to achieve the "what you see is what you get" purchasing method, which is the pain point that Wan Zhicheng encountered with travel luggage. SEE's approach is that after users see clothes they like on the street, online, or in TV dramas, they take a photo and upload it to the SEE app. After simply adding a few tags such as "outerwear, rivets, Europe and America", they can publish it to the community.

In the future, thousands of service providers in front of SEE will identify and classify pictures and find product links of the same or similar clothing around the world, and feedback to users who submit pictures. SEE will publicize it externally and get feedback within 10 minutes. After checking the details and prices of the products, if the users are satisfied, they can directly complete the purchase in SEE.

    Wan Zhicheng compared this to a sharing economy model similar to UBER, which is C2C in the field of clothing e-commerce. SEE provides a core platform, better image recognition processing technology and professional service providers.

     In addition, SEE wants to build a community e-commerce platform based on finding the same style. In addition to users actively posting pictures to find the same style of clothes, SEE will also recommend several themes to users, such as celebrity styles, clothes in film and television dramas, and hot brands. The brands that cooperate with it now include ASOS, Topshop, Shopstyle, EMODA, GRL, Keds and dozens of others.

SEE makes money by earning commissions from the transactions between users and service providers. SEE, which was launched in June 2015, currently has 300,000 users and thousands of service providers. Founder Wan Zhicheng told iHeima that the number of young people in first- and second-tier cities he is targeting is around 50 million, and there are about 100,000 professional buyers who are capable of providing services.

     What SEE wants to do is to bypass the traditional e-commerce model by having users generate demand and then complete the purchase, and to establish consumer connections between as many as 50 million consumers and 100,000 service providers as possible.

     In August this year, SEE completed a multi-million dollar Series A financing round, with investors including IDG, Morningside Venture Capital and BAI. The current team members are mainly from Smart FUN, plus the operational staff previously poached from JD.com and Alibaba, with a total of 30 people.