Is it possible for students of twenty years of age to become bosses with invested money? The answer is yes, and there are two such practitioners from SYSU. Inspired by the popular American website “Groupon”, they introduced its operation style featuring parity price trial into China. With their trendy ideas and keen insight, these young students got 20 million of seed money in April.
Becoming bosses by imitating famous American collective action website
Zeng Shixiong, a junior student majoring in information science from SYSU, was attracted by “Groupon” with its increasing popularity. The website promotes a company’s product with super-low price on each day; there is no cost of advertising for the company and the website make interests through commission. Customers, the website and companies all benefited from this.
"So on-line trade can operate like this!” They see the business opportunity in China as there was no such domestic website at that time. A Chinese website like “Groupon” was then launched by Zeng and his classmates. By introducing and improving the operation style into China, the young student became the Board Chairman of the company, experiencing for the first time how iit feels to be a boss.
Adopting the foreign website with Kaixin001’s style
In just a few months, several students specialized in network technology copied groupon’s framework. But then the problem of sales and cooperation appeared. Pan Wenwei, a student from SYSU, also the CEO in charge of the website’s operation, found it hard to open up the market merely through copying. He changed the strategy by extending single item team buying to “all items” team buying. They also applied web 2.0 virtual community including “top buyer of the day” and “mobile phone consumption map”, which all adopt the Kaixin001 game’s style.
In April, their idea caught an investor’s attention, who invested 20 million in their website. Currently, the entrepreneurial team has 21 members, of which he Board Chairman and the CEO are university students.