Super Rich from Winning a Lottery-Chapter 383 - 258: The Frenzied Money-Burning War (Part 2)

Why is Tuanbao so overbearing? Where does its confidence come from? Clearly, it's also an unstoppable general in the group buying battlefield.

After all, it claims to be the only group buying website that turned a profit in 2010.

With such a positive growth momentum, why would I need to announce to the world about cooperation or selling out? I registered first, so it's mine. Just wait and watch me slaughter the competition!

As it goes, Groupon, Manzuo, and Tuanbao—these three companies, each with their strengths—took the lead as soon as the starting gun fired, bringing the new trend of group buying to domestic consumers.

Although these three started early with strong backgrounds and high ambitions, the domestic internet industry is a brutal arena. If you're not careful, you'll be sniped down by rivals emerging from nowhere.

Within six months of Manzuo's founding, the track quickly became crowded, with companies like Lashou, Wowo, Meituan, Nuomi, and others springing up like bamboo shoots after a rain, squeezing onto the track. Behind these companies, thousands of others were vigorously chasing, like a massive army.

When entrepreneurs flocked in, capital rushed in crazily as well, and thus began the first elimination race.

One group buying website became favored by capital, even being hoisted to the position of the big brother—it was Lashou.

Lashou's founder is Wu Bo, a returnee with a sharp mind.

Lashou's ability to secure large financing and look down on rivals in the middle of the race is inseparable from Wu Bo's management and innovation.

For instance, Lashou was the first to introduce a check-in feature, encouraging users to check-in at a restaurant offline, sharing their location to earn badges or even coupons.

This novel operation quickly became popular, prompting everyone to imitate it, enhancing user stickiness.

Just as it was founded in April 2010, Lashou immediately secured $5 million in Series A funding, received $50 million in Series B funding eight months later, and obtained $111 million in Series C funding four months later.

Flush with cash, Wu Bo proudly declared: "I could burn money one bill at a time and wouldn't finish in a year."

After securing large financing, Lashou aggressively expanded offline, continually opening new cities, bringing one city after another under its umbrella.

In major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, even with multiple group deals launched in a day, many merchants were still queued waiting to get listed.

Thus, Lashou straightforwardly launched Group Buying 2.0, allowing merchants to publicly release group buying information themselves.

With the opening of this gate, the number of merchants and categories on the platform rapidly expanded, and Lashou's scale grew unprecedentedly.

Under Lashou's overwhelming offensive, the leading trio was pressed hard.

Groupon stuck to overseas experience, failed to timely adjust strategy for the Chinese domestic market, and was the first to falter, with market share dropping rapidly.

Manzuo, a player particularly fond of first-tier cities, insisted on its high-quality positioning.

It invested heavily in large-scale advertising across subways, buses, newspapers, and outdoor spaces, aiming to occupy the high ground in big cities and attack rivals from top to bottom.

However, doing this requires continuously pouring massive expenses into offline advertising in first-tier cities without ample returns. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

Soon enough, this specialized veteran player couldn't hold on.

Tuanbao, an "iron man" who refused to return a domain name registration, faced Lashou's storm unflinchingly, playing the role of aggressively expanding into large, medium, and small cities.

When Lashou had opened around 200 cities, it externally claimed to have conquered 324 cities, declaring itself as covering the most cities.

It's evident that Tuanbao's strategy is winning by scale, attempting to use the Matthew Effect to quickly strike and eventually have the winner take all.

But the problem is, you didn't secure as much financing as Lashou. Competing head-to-head with Lashou is a death wish, isn't it?

Sure enough, the faster you expand, the quicker you bleed, ultimately running out of steam and going bankrupt.

In just one year since the "thousand group" war began, the market dynamic completely flipped.

The initial trio fell behind, and Lashou, as a latecomer, stepped atop the dying trio to establish its own empire.

Nevertheless, Lashou's grand offensive wasn't effective against all companies. Some hard nuts endured, like the honest player Mituan.

Mituan's founder is Wang Xin. In the community, people prefer to say Wang Xin is a serial entrepreneur, but that's a high EQ statement. With low EQ, you'd say he's a serial entrepreneur with consecutive failures.

Each time he started a venture, it failed, turning into an endless series of setbacks, rife with failures.

From Youzitu, Xiaonei to Fanfou, Hainet, each showed some progress but ultimately collapsed.

Before founding Mituan, all of Wang Xin's entrepreneurial experience was in social products, suddenly jumping to the heavily offline Mituan track, you could call it a crossover or poorly executed chaos.

So initially, few people were willing to invest in Mituan, and the investment was meager. But fortunately, despite his repeated failures, Wang Xin's entrepreneurial team didn't disband.

These people were highly capable and, through past entrepreneurial experiences, they worked well together. Despite not succeeding, they trusted each other.