text丨 Lieyun.com Lu Xinyi
" Douyin imitates Musical.ly from products to operation strategies."
In 2017, Yang Luyu, the founder of Musical.ly, was facing a hard nut to crack. At that time The Musical.ly platform quickly opened up the US market and gradually spread to the European market due to its 15-second lip-syncing short video gameplay. It became one of the most successful cases of domestic Internet overseas entrepreneurship in those years, but Yang Luyu discovered a thorny problem.
Yang Luyu, who wanted to return to China for development at the time, found that Douyin in the domestic market was almost a pixel-level copy of Musical.ly in terms of positioning, functions, opening interface and other dimensions. Moreover, Douyin has already achieved 18 million daily users with the traffic support of Toutiao. Facing the competitor Douyin, Yang Luyu found it troublesome.
But Yang Luyu’s troubles did not last long.
In November 2017, Bytedance acquired Musical.ly for one billion U.S. dollars. In August 2018, Musical.ly’s users in overseas markets were officially merged into the TIK TOK platform, so from this perspective, Yang Luyu can be regarded as TIK TOK is now the founder of high market share overseas.
Yang Luyu was also included in the ByteDance team. At that time, Zhang Yiming expressed to him that he hoped that the company could move from soft to hard, and from online to offline in the future. After Zhang Yiming revealed his development strategy of focusing on hardware, Yang Luyu took charge of ByteDance's education hardware business and completed the construction of the business from 0 to 1. Yang Luyu led the team to develop the powerful intelligent work lamp , which has also been favored by Zhang Yiming and Vice President Chen Lin. It has been repeatedly evaluated internally as a breakthrough in the education business. Although he is not a member of the founding team, Yang Luyu can be regarded as one of the core figures of ByteDance. Core figures like
have recently been revealed to have left ByteDance. From founding Musical.ly to being acquired by , Facebook, and ByteDance, to joining hands with Byte to develop educational hardware, and now leaving Byte, Yang Luyu is at the center of the changes in the short video industry and Internet education.
founded TIK TOK's "previous life" Musical.ly, and sold himself to Byte
Today, TIK TOK's success in overseas markets is inseparable from Musical.ly founded by Yang Luyu and Zhu Jun .
Time goes back to 2015, when Yang Luyu founded the college student entrepreneurial website Sino.com and the clothing customization project, both of which ended in failure. After two entrepreneurial failures, Yang Luyu seemed a little discouraged and started a normal working life. At that time, he joined Yibao Software in global business. When he went to the United States on a business trip, he happened to meet his old friend Zhu Jun. At that time, Zhu Jun was doing research on future education at SAP in the United States. After
communicated with Zhu Jun, the two hit it off and decided to leave their jobs and start a business. In 2014, Yang Luyu and Zhu Jun spent 6 months in Shanghai with the US$250,000 raised to polish an educational video APP called "Cicada". This APP mainly teaches knowledge points through short videos of 3-5 minutes recorded by experts. However, the user interaction cost of this APP is high and it is difficult to attract user participation due to the lack of interactivity. After several months of support, 8% of the $250,000 raised was left.
Zhu Jun was on a business trip and saw a group of children spending time in two ways, listening to songs and adding music to videos. He suddenly thought, what would be the effect if these two methods were combined? After the idea was born, he returned to Shanghai and explained his imagination to Yang Luyu. Within a month, Yang Luyu browsed APPs around the world at that time, and after careful study, he decided to make a short video APP. But at that time, the two had very little entrepreneurial capital left.
In 2015, Musical.ly quietly launched without publicity. Yang Luyu and Zhu Jun did nothing. They simply put the APP on the shelves and waited for the judgment of fate. A few months after
went online, a group of kids in Texas discovered Musical.ly and started spreading the word through their friends. The number of Musical.ly users continued to grow. The number of user emails received in two months was four times what Cicada received in a year of operation. Later, after being introduced at a party, Yang Luyu got to know Cheetah’s relevant personnel. After several communications, Musical.ly finally received life-saving money and received Cheetah’s Series A investment of 5 million.
With capital support, Musical.ly expanded rapidly and won the first place in the Apple Store on Yang Luyu’s birthday. Musical.ly also became one of the most popular social software among young people in the United States at that time. Musical.ly, which is growing rapidly, has attracted the attention of giants.
Zhang Yiming and Yang Luyu met under the recommendation of SIG, the B-round investor. At that time, ByteDance began to plan for global development, and domestic Douyin had just started for half a year. The two parties discussed the development of the short video business, but the communication between the two parties It’s just business-level communication.
Later, the exchanges between the two permeated into their lives. Zhang Yiming often cared and greeted Yang Luyu after he knew that Yang Luyu broke his hand while playing a balance car . After a period of running-in, Zhang Yiming proposed to acquire Musical.ly for US$1 billion, which was nearly half the price of Facebook. But Yang Luyu accepted the acquisition agreement because Facebook gave all cash and ByteDance gave cash and stocks. Secondly, Yang Luyu himself is deeply fascinated by ByteDance’s algorithm.
ByteDance brought Musical.ly under its umbrella and merged its users into TIK TOK. At the time of the merger, the number of overseas users of Musical.ly had reached 100 million, which undoubtedly provided huge opportunities for the development of TIK TOK overseas. of assistance. And this man from science and engineering who liked to look up at the stars during college also chose "sixpence" to enter a big factory and start a new life.
regained its education dream, and Byte encountered Waterloo
After Yang Luyu and Zhu Jun joined ByteDance, they took two paths. Zhu Jun chose to continue developing the short video business. In 2019, Zhu Jun became the person in charge of TIK TOK, and later began to be responsible for Douyin, reporting to Zhang Nan . In March 2020, Zhu Jun became the head of ByteDance's strategic investment, responsible for product strategy, company strategy and investment. At that time, Zhang Yiming specifically emphasized that "this year, I will work with Zhu Jun to improve ByteDance's global management team."
Compared with Zhu Jun, he chose to do the short video business that he is good at, while Yang Luyu found a new challenge for himself. Yang Luyu cut off his Eason Chan hairstyle and had a short haircut, losing the unruly flavor of the past. After changing his hairstyle, Yang Luyu "disappeared" in front of everyone, first working as an assistant next to Zhang Yiming for half a year. Until half a year later, Yang Luyu said in the circle of friends, "I have been in retreat for more than half a year, and I plan to do something hard for education."
At this time, ByteDance attached great importance to the development of the education industry. Zhang Yiming once said, "We will pay great attention to the education industry. Be patient for the long haul.” Chen Lin, the person in charge of the education business, also directly stated that ’s vigorous efforts in educating can make it unprofitable for three years. It can be seen that ByteDance was determined to redo education and fight a tough battle.
In ByteDance’s education business, Yang Luyu is mainly responsible for the intelligent hardware product line. Based on the attributes of smart hardware devices and education, Yangluyu chose smart desk lamps as the entry point. In his opinion, desk lamps are a common product on students' desks, so there is no user education cost, and the penetration rate of and is very high. It is said that within ByteDance, Yang Luyu proposed a vision: to use smart desk lamps to connect tens of thousands of students' desks to form the largest classroom in human history.
Source: Official website screenshot
In addition to desk lamps, Yangluyu also develops software and educational services, the three of which are collectively referred to as "triathlon". After two years of in-house polishing, the product was launched. In terms of products, Yang Luyu mainly highlights the word "autonomy". He hopes that Dali smart lights can help students drive themselves into learning, formulate study plans independently, control the learning process independently, and evaluate learning effects independently. Through artificial intelligence , we provide enough help and guidance to let parents rest assured about the students' learning results, so as to stay away from the students' learning space and allow students to be in an independent learning environment. After the product positioning of
gradually became clear, it inherited ByteDance's consistent style of putting it on the market - fast. In order to cultivate users' minds in the shortest possible time,
's team is determined to increase traffic but not volume, and places a large number of advertisements on Douyin. Yang Luyu once said, "The business we are doing is not a pure hardware business, so the unprofitable hardware is within our expectations. We are selling at a loss. Hardware is a service carrier."At this time, the team level was also expanding. Bytedance merged the Smartisan hardware team into the smart light team and reported to Yang Luyu and Chen Lin. So far, the team led by Yang Luyu in Bytedance has reached a scale of one thousand people. .
However, despite the marketing and expansion team, it failed to achieve the desired sales volume. The expected sales of Dali smart lights in 2021 were 2 million units, but only half of them were completed by the end of the year.
had not yet waited for Dali smart lights to start making profits. Yang Luyu’s vision, but the “double reduction” policy came quietly.
According to reports, “On August 31, Dali Intelligence held a small meeting internally. Yang Luyu was transferred and was no longer responsible for Dali Intelligence’s business. The next step. Yang Luyu is more responsible for the product strategy of Dali Education, including the linkage of its products, the exploration of innovative products, and the strategic planning of the entire product. "After Yang Luyu was no longer responsible for the Dali Intelligence business, the hardware business was handed over to Yang Kang, who was previously responsible for Qingbei Online School . One year after
transitioned to strategic planning, Yang Luyu chose to bid farewell to Zhu Jun, his friend who worked side by side in the past, and Byte Jumping. This serial entrepreneur who has experienced many failures may also be looking for the next battlefield.
According to Tianyancha information, Yang Luyu is currently a shareholder of many companies, including Zhejiang Super Brain Spacetime Technology Company. Served as a shareholder. This is a representative of the third-generation blockchain public chain system. The CEO is the former technical director of the security business group of Alibaba . In addition, there are companies such as Shanghai Intermedia Entertainment and Nanjing Mars Walking.
