Since they are reborn, they must be supported by the school beauties.

Chapter 212 Pre-sale Opening Success
For Chen Cheng, whether or not to accept Yan Chengbin's investment, or even whether or not to accept it at all, is still an unknown.

For him, there are two prerequisites for raising funds: one is that he doesn't have enough money, and the other is that the competition is too fierce.

Originally, he was worried that Tencent was a huge competitor, but after Lu Youyou gave him some pointers last time, he suddenly realized the inherent constraints that Tencent faced in creating Xiaonei.com.

Judging from the development direction of the previous generation, Tencent is not Xiaonei.com's formidable rival; Xiaonei.com itself is.

Based on this analysis, Chen Cheng felt more confident. At least, Tencent was taking a detour in developing its alumni directory, while he not only avoided that, but also had tens of millions of yuan in cash on hand. In addition, memberships and Campus Show were about to be officially launched, so he couldn't be sure what would happen next.

In fact, most successful entrepreneurs have taken things one step at a time. No one can accurately plan everything for the future at the beginning of a business. Chen Cheng is no exception. The key to his success is his ability to adjust his strategy in a timely manner according to the actual situation.

Yan Chengbin didn't know Chen Cheng's true intentions, but he felt that Chen Cheng was quite principled and kept his promises. Since someone had taken the first step, he would wait for the time being.

The trial period for campus network members is only a few days, and most users have given very positive feedback.

Although everyone is a member and can't experience the special privileges yet, the other features are already very pleasing.

Interestingly, "You Exist in My Song" has already become very popular in society. Although people can only hear a short part of it, it doesn't stop the song from being very catchy.

Because the source could not be found anywhere, and only a short background music clip could be listened to on Renren (a Chinese social networking site), this strange operating model became the subject of much discussion.

Chen Cheng's official account received numerous private messages from people claiming to be from record companies. Some wanted to buy the copyright to the song, some wanted to sign up for a full compilation album of the song, and others wanted to buy the performance rights to the song for their signed artists to sing.

Chen Cheng didn't have the energy to verify the authenticity of these people, so he politely declined them one by one. These songs couldn't be released in full in a short time, so he used this incomplete beauty to whet the audience's appetite.

At midnight on the 31st, Chen Cheng posted a message on Renren.com, officially opening the pre-order channel for Renren.com memberships.

From this moment on, all merchants' back-end systems were officially empowered, allowing users to pre-charge their campus coins without having to wait until the 1st to make a purchase.

Xiaonei.com currently has over four million registered users, and Chen Cheng's ideal membership rate is 10%. In the twenty-four hours from midnight on the 31st to midnight on the 1st, five million three hundred thousand Xiaonei coins were sold.

There are more than 350,000 users who have made payments, with an average of about 15 campus coins per person.

Of these 350,000+ people, around 200,000 had pre-registered for November, while the remaining 150,000+ had mostly used their recharged campus coins to purchase campus shows.

Some internet cafes with high customer traffic quickly exceeded their credit limits. In order not to affect sales, they settled the pre-sale commission of 850 yuan as soon as possible. Many even chose to prepay several thousand or tens of thousands of yuan in advance to save themselves trouble.

On the 31st, the payment received was 2.3 million.

This far exceeded Chen Cheng's expectations. If this trend continues, the revenue in the first month after the members went online is very likely to exceed ten million.

Without hesitation, he decided to officially start building his own computer room for the campus network on November 1st, and to build the largest computer room in the province within a year.

The trial period for members officially ended in the early hours of November 1st.

The numerous privileges of members were immediately apparent, and the trial of Renren Show officially ended. From this moment on, as long as a user was not using the system's default Renren Show, they had definitely paid for it.

Even more exciting is that the background music on the member homepage has been updated.

In addition to "My Song", snippets of three other songs, "The Best Arrangement", "Say Goodbye When You Want", and "Decent", have also been officially released for users to choose from.

"The Best Arrangement" is suitable for couples in love, but couples who have broken up prefer "Say Goodbye When You Want" and "Decent".

These are all time-tested hit songs. I wouldn't dare say how high their artistic merit is, but like "Mice Love Rice," they were all wildly popular hits.

The school's intranet only released four background music tracks, and young people consider each one a classic.

Many people who weren't planning on getting a membership changed their minds immediately after hearing these songs.

You know, when young people get a little repressed, they'll definitely seize every opportunity.

Among these factors, choosing which songs to listen to is one of the key channels for expressing a repressed, unsophisticated personality.

The songs played as background music in a space are not just randomly chosen; they are carefully selected and have profound meaning.

How did QQ Music grow so big? It's because it allows your QQ friends to see what songs you're listening to.

This instantly set other music software apart by a whole era, a feature that other music software could never possess.

Therefore, many Renren users also hope that their friends, or a friend in particular, can hear a background music they have chosen when visiting their homepage. For this, it's worth paying for a membership.

At noon on November 1st, the total sales of campus currency reached 7.35 million. Chen Cheng rented a 3,000-square-meter empty computer room with dual power supply near the current cooperative computer room. This is a science and technology park that Jiangcheng is building in imitation of Zhongguancun. However, not many companies have moved in yet, so the rental cost is also very affordable, only 70,000 yuan a month.

He then began looking for a suitable server provider.

Currently, the server brands with the highest market share in China, from lowest to highest, are HP, IBM, and Inspur.

Among them, Inspur is a domestic brand, and its development trend is getting better and better, eventually becoming the server brand with the highest market share.

Later, Inspur successively incubated three listed groups with a total market value of over 100 billion yuan.

Currently, Inspur is in a phase of rapid development, and its cost-effectiveness is the highest among the three brands. Moreover, its service is the most considerate. If the purchase reaches a certain quantity, the manufacturer will provide a one-stop service including delivery, installation, and debugging.

Chen Cheng was inclined towards Inspur. He felt that HP and IBM were overpriced and also suffered from the arrogance and bloat that are inevitable in large enterprises.

So he told Inspur's sales representatives online that he was the founder of Xiaonei.com and that he needed to build his own dual-line data center in Jiangcheng. He said he would build a server with tens of millions of users in one go, and reserve space to upgrade to twenty million users next year.

Many of Inspur's technical staff are also users of Xiaonei.com. When they learned that Xiaonei.com intended to cooperate with them, the entire company attached great importance to it. The boss even decided to take several core staff members from Jinan, Shandong to Wuhan the next day to meet with Chen Cheng.

Also on the 1st, the second floor of the expanded Sichuan restaurant officially opened for business.

Several core team members recruited more than fifty new employees from undergraduate and graduate students. These new employees were directly assigned to the current development departments based on their respective strengths.

With its R&D capabilities greatly enhanced, Chen Cheng began preparing for the next phase of the Xiaonei.com product.

So he convened an internal meeting and, in front of dozens of senior students, proposed his next plan: "I plan to focus my efforts in November on enhancing the chat function for friends on the school's intranet."

The current friend chat is completely like an internal message. It's fine for temporary emergency communication, but if you really use it to chat, the experience is still very poor.

Chen Wei and Xiao Peng were immediately excited when they heard that he wanted to enhance the chat function.

Xiao Peng asked him, "Mr. Chen, are we going to develop a client application for Renren.com, like Tencent QQ or Sina UC?"

Chen Cheng waved his hand: "Why bother with a client? It's too much trouble and thankless. What I'm thinking of is embedding a small floating window in the webpage. The floating window contains a friend list. When a friend sends a message, their avatar will flash immediately. A hotkey or mouse click can bring up a floating dialog box, allowing you to complete the interaction directly on the page. That way, you don't need a client. It can be considered a lightweight application."

People don't quite understand the logic behind lightweight applications. In fact, lightweight applications are just mini-programs.

Before the advent of mini-programs, developers had to create their own apps on Android and iOS architectures, which was costly, had high barriers to entry, and was slow, making it very unfriendly to small entrepreneurs.

However, WeChat has developed its own architecture. You don't need to develop an app on Android or iOS. You can develop your own mini-program using the various tools and templates provided by WeChat within the WeChat architecture. In fact, it is not much different from an app, but the cost and threshold are much lower.

Of course, once you choose to develop a mini-program within the WeChat framework, you implicitly agree to rely on WeChat's ecosystem for survival.

This is actually very suitable for some small applications and games, such as "Sheep and Sheep". If you develop a standalone app, it is impossible to promote it. No matter how you promote it, users have to go to the app store to download the software, verify their account password, and authorize the software in various ways before they can start playing. This chain is too long and enough to filter out the vast majority of users.

But mini programs are different. They can be promoted directly in Moments, or through friends and group chats. You don't need to download, verify, or authorize them; you can play immediately just by clicking on them.

What Chen Cheng wants to do now is to create a mini-program for web pages, but it's only at a relatively basic level.

Lightweight apps have both obvious advantages and disadvantages. Their advantage is that they can be used immediately after logging in, without the need to download a client.

However, the disadvantages are also obvious: the response speed of web-based products is not as fast as that of client-based products because the functionality of products developed based on web technology is severely limited and cannot be customized as deeply as client-based products.

After listening to Chen Cheng's ideas, Xiao Peng pondered for a long time and said, "Mr. Chen, the page has another major disadvantage, which is that it is very easy to accidentally close the page and accidentally clear the page cache. If a user accidentally closes it, or if the browser crashes due to too many open windows, all the data may have to be cached again when logging in again, which is not as stable as the client."

Chen Wei, the most technically skilled, also spoke up: "I also suggest making a client. Actually, that kind of client isn't too difficult for us. Once we develop the client, it might be able to replace Tencent QQ's functions to some extent. At the very least, it could take away some of QQ's instant messaging needs."

"No."

Chen Cheng rejected the suggestion, explaining earnestly, "Senior Chen, developing a client-side application is a desperate measure. If we do it, it's tantamount to directly declaring war on Tencent. There's no need for that."

"Tencent's user base, cash flow, capital reserves, and capital relationships far surpass ours. Competing head-on with them will only force them to deal with us with all their might. Their capital has already staked everything on them, and once they encounter a crisis, their capital will do everything in its power to help them overcome the difficulties."

"Look at how Sina UC is doing. When UC first came out this year, the profit-driven QQ was still pushing paid registration. You had to pay to register for QQ. Because UC was free, it was indeed very popular at first. But QQ quickly adjusted its strategy and completely stopped the paid registration policy. As soon as QQ went free, UC's development immediately stagnated. This is the backlash caused by undermining Tencent's foundation. We are still young and inexperienced. Why should we go against them directly?"

(End of this chapter)