"It's not just that!" Seeing Chen Shoufu's shocked expression, Huang He continued, "Contacting pirated disc manufacturers only dealt with home computer users, but for another user group, we were powerless!"
"You mean the internet café users!" Chen Shoufu suddenly realized.
Indeed, compared to home computer users, internet café users were the majority.
After all, it was 2001, and the ownership of home computers was only around fifty million units. The vast majority of these were used by adults who were not very interested in programs like QQ. The true target users for QQ were basically young people under 30.
Among these young people, not many could afford to buy a computer for themselves. Therefore, most of them had to go to internet cafés to go online.
The sales strategy of bundling pirated discs, though brilliant, was of no use to internet cafés. Internet cafés all had standardized systems maintained by professionals who generally wouldn't directly use methods like pirated discs. Even if they did, they would remove the bundled installations.
"Although we don't have enough data, a rough estimate is that 65% of QQ users are actually internet café users!" Huang He said. "If this part isn't resolved, we still won't be able to cast our net completely!"
"This is indeed very difficult!" Chen Shoufu nodded. "However, internet cafés also have an easy point to exploit, which is the café owners! The control of hundreds of computers in an entire internet café lies with the owner. So, as long as we win over the internet café owners and get them to proactively install QQ in their internet café systems, it will be much easier. However, this might cost a lot of money."
"That's good, Old Chen, you have quite a few ideas!" Huang He praised Chen Shoufu, who he thought was just a tech enthusiast with no business acumen. He didn't expect him to grasp the key to these problems!
"Yes, this is what Zhimeng has been doing lately. She has worked very hard these past few days, sometimes traveling to two cities in a day to recruit talent. We have finally formed our second team!" Huang He said with a look of relief.
"What? The second team!" Chen Shoufu's mouth gaped. He had no idea about a second team. When did the company get a second team?
"Yes, Old Chen, there's no need to be surprised. A carriage needs two wheels, and so does the company, otherwise, it can't run fast or steadily!" Boss Huang chuckled. "Moreover, our second team is mainly an offline team, distributed across major cities nationwide, a grassroots team."
"Zhimeng hasn't been in the office for several consecutive days recently. You might have thought she went out to play, but in reality, she has been to the capital, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chongqing, among other five major cities across the country. She has been working with some of our local employees to establish our Jiangnan offline promotion teams in those cities. Their main task is to recommend QQ to local internet café owners and get them to uniformly install QQ on all computers in their internet cafés." Huang He explained.
"Offline promotion teams, won't that cost a lot of money?" Chen Shoufu exclaimed in surprise.
"It's not expensive, not at all!" Leng Zhimeng said proactively. "Offline promotion doesn't require highly exceptional talent. Students doing part-time work from school are perfectly capable. Each person only needs 300 yuan per month. The labor cost for one city per month is less than 5,000 yuan."
"And their task is to contact every internet café owner in the city and promote our QQ policy to them. Two people can basically cover all the internet cafés in a city within a month, running 10 internet cafés a day." Leng Zhimeng added.
"But will these internet café owners be willing to listen to us and install QQ?" Chen Shoufu asked, confused.
"Of course they will, after all, we are willing to pay actual money!" Huang He laughed heartily. "Our policy for these internet café owners is very simple: for every computer that installs QQ and maintains it for three years without uninstalling, they will receive a basic subsidy of one yuan per computer. This is cash directly given to them."
"But this is just the basic subsidy. The key is that for every QQ user who logs in with their specific IP address in their internet café, as long as they are online for more than 1 hour per month, they will be subsidized by 1 fen per user. For every additional hour, they can receive another 1 fen. These can all be tracked through our backend data and paid to the internet café owners every month."
"In this way, at the maximum, each computer in an internet café can earn 2.4 fen per day if it's logged into QQ for 24 hours. For 100 computers, that's 24 yuan, and over 700 yuan a month. Tell me, won't these internet café owners be happy to install our QQ?"
"Let alone 700 yuan a month, even if it's just the basic 100 yuan, they would be begging to install it!" Chen Shoufu had been to internet cafés before and knew the mindset of internet café owners very well. They would never let go of any opportunity to make money.
Moreover, this way of making money required no cost, only that their customers logged into QQ.
"However, I'm worried that these internet café owners might play tricks!" Chen Shoufu said. "These owners could create their own program that automatically logs into QQ every time a computer starts up. Wouldn't that be ripping us off?"
"Oh, I wish they would rip me off!" Huang He smiled even more happily. "If their computers are running QQ, then the users of these computers will inevitably start using QQ as well. This is equivalent to us gaining a fixed user for free. I wish they would do that!"
"Chairman, your insight is remarkable!" Chen Shoufu had nothing to say. If Huang He was willing to spend money, he could indeed gain a large number of users. But in this way, once the scale grew, the monthly expenses would likely reach millions of yuan. Was spending so much money just to acquire users really worth it?
Chen Shoufu's thoughts were not unusual in 2001, but in 2021, he would be considered foolish. If any internet company in China knew that they could automatically log their program onto all computers in internet cafés nationwide for only a few million yuan per month, they would be crying and begging to spend this money. This was an enormous bargain.
"Then, Chairman, what is our final trump card?" With the second trump card fully revealed, Chen Shoufu became extremely curious about the last one.
"Old Chen, do you know what's behind our factory?"
"It seems to be a vegetable patch, cultivated by some residents nearby. We Chinese love to grow vegetables; it seems to be ingrained in our bones!" Chen Shoufu replied.
"That's right, that's our third trump card, and also our strongest trump card!" Huang He said with a sly smile.