Four years ago, when telling her daughter the story of "Journey to the West" to coax her to sleep, former CCTV host Wang Kai may not have imagined that there are hundreds of millions of business opportunities in it.
Today, "Uncle Kai Storytelling" has grown from a self-media that can tell stories to a "childhood brand". It is not only a "sleeping artifact" familiar to many children, but also includes a rich variety of parent-child courses, mother and baby products.
On March 7, "Uncle Kai Storytelling" officially announced the completion of the B+ round of 156 million yuan financing. This round of financing is led by Micro Shadow Capital, Zhengxin Valley Venture Capital, Shanghai Kunyan Investment, and followed by Trusttrust Capital and Qianhai Fund of Funds.
How does parent-child content give birth to explosive IP? How to develop a variety of profit methods after the explosion? What experience and thinking has the team accumulated in the rapid development? With these questions, The list sister conducted an exclusive interview with Wang Kai, founder and CEO of "Uncle Kai Telling Stories".
Committed to taking children's content to the extreme
4,000+ stories played 1.9 billion times
In the recent popular variety show "Sound Immersion", Wang Kai regained his old business and stood in the position of host.
In March 2013, he bid farewell to CCTV with a Weibo post, "From then on, he was born with a question and lived with his nature." It's not easy to decide, but to say it is to blossom in spring. Before that, he was the host of CCTV's financial channel "Fortune Story Club", known as "Skinhead Wang Kai".
In addition to hosting, Wang Kai is also a professional voice actor, Optimus Prime in "Transformers", Van Diesel in the "Fast and Furious" series, beast in "Beauty and the Beast"... The Chinese voices of these characters are from him. These rich experiences in interpreting stories with sound also laid the groundwork for his later entrepreneurial choices.
Uncle Kai's daughter loves to listen to him tell stories, and he has to tell four or five times a day, and he has to record the sound in advance when he travels. After recording more, he shared a group of kindergarten parents, and the response was very good, so Uncle Kai registered Weibo and WeChat public accounts and posted the stories he told.
In this way, from the first batch of seed users to the increasingly large community, he realized that children listening to stories and parents coaxing them to sleep is a necessity. In April 2014, "Uncle Kai Storytelling" officially began operations.
Since its inception, "Uncle Kai Storytelling" has told more than 4,000 stories and content for children, played 1.9 billion times, with a total playback time of more than 155 million hours, and the number of activated users of the App has exceeded 8 million, and the number of daily active users has 600,000.
A variety of stories are divided into a complete category of the system according to age, function, type, etc. Among them, there are not only small stories in foreign picture books, but also the essence of traditional Chinese culture. For example, "Uncle Kai's Journey to the West", "Uncle Kai's Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "Sound Law Enlightenment", etc., are all products launched by "Uncle Kai's Storytelling".
Seemingly brisk children's stories, Uncle Kai and the team have spent a lot of effort to polish. For example, the story of "Journey to the West", from the first part to the fifth part, took three years to build. Uncle Kai said that they are not going to make good products, but to make extreme products.
New List: First of all, congratulations to Uncle Kai Storytelling for obtaining a new round of financing, what does this financing mean to you? What will be the focus of the effort after that?
Uncle Kai: There is more money in the pocket, which is a more realistic meaning. We will increase our investment in producing the ultimate children's content, and we are originally a company with relatively high input costs in the content field. Children's content can actually resist time, one of our content products can sell for ten or twenty years, so it doesn't matter how high the upfront cost is.
New List: How do you achieve "extreme" content? What does the production process look like?
Uncle Kai: Doing content is not only a financial cost, but also a time cost. We have a product that can sell tens of millions of sales, and there is no less than half a year of building time. In fact, it is still quite grinding.
Our recent "Uncle Kai's Romance of the Three Kingdoms" sold for more than 5 million yuan in three days of pre-sale. It took eight months for the product to go live, and the manuscript of the first episode alone was changed from the first month to the eighth month. Open the product manager's computer and you can see that the first episode has more than 30 folders, fine-tuned one at a time. The most solid foundation of content products is to grind, to change, and to constantly find the best state.
Whether it can be done to the extreme, the establishment of the evaluation system is very important. We have evaluation meetings of experts, which meet every two weeks. In addition, there are experience officers composed of children, who will issue them certificates and pay salaries to buy the content in the app.
On the surface, we sell tens of millions of products, but in fact, there are many stillbirths.
New List: You just said that a content product can sell for many years, how can we make content have sustained vitality?
Uncle Kay: It's important to know what's constant.
We have three words, the first of which is "happy." It sounds simple, of course, you have to be happy doing children's content, but can you really stick to it? Does your product deliver joy to children so that they can immerse themselves in it? It's very difficult to hold on to this, because you may constantly be pulled in other directions by interests. The core competitiveness of our company is that any content must be made to be liked by children.
The second word is "growth." If it's just fun, your competitor is Glory of Kings. And what parents expect from our products, and our mission as a producer of children's content, is to let our children grow. Each product needs to know exactly where it will bring growth to the child, and it is also necessary to evaluate what will bring them by collecting feedback.
Having "happy" and "growing" is a good product, but we are a company that makes the ultimate product. So there's a third word, "crossing." That is, can it resist time, can it sell for ten or twenty years? This can't be verified right now, but when you build this product and keep asking yourself this question, the product should last longer.
New List: How many people do you currently have on your team? Which departments are expanding faster?
Uncle Kai: More than 200. The rapid expansion is the content creation department and the technical department. Original content is the foundation of our existence, and we must continue to recruit. On the technical side, both Mini Programs and Apps need to continuously improve the user experience. Delivering the experience to users is also part of the content.
Annual revenue reached 200 million
Multiple monetization avenues derived from storytelling
Uncle Kai told the list sister that in 2017, the revenue of "Uncle Kai's Storytelling" reached 200 million, and it is expected to reach 400 million this year.
From children's stories, why can such a big business be derived?
The first is the paid story content product, which is the foundation of "Uncle Kai's Storytelling". Uncle Kai mentioned that a carefully polished product can reach sales of 10 million to 20 million that year.
Because of the popularity of story products, a derivative was born, that is, a story machine prepared for children, uncle Kai named "casual listening". Audio is generally played by parents with mobile phones to children, and with a separate hardware product, children do not have to pester parents to ask for mobile phones. The fifth part of "Uncle Kai's Journey to the West" was released on the first day of listening, and it sold 25,000 units.
With hardware derivatives, the e-commerce of "Uncle Kai Telling Stories" has also slowly developed, from picture books, maternal and infant products to now accumulating a rich SKU category, and more private brand products will be launched next.
There are also paid courses for parents and families. Since 2016, the "Mom Micro Class" has covered a total of 14.35 million person-times, nearly 100 sessions of the "Parent Training Camp", subscribed to more than 1,000 courses, and more than 80,000 parents have paid to participate in the training. Uncle Kai said that the benefits of the "parent training camp" exceeded their expectations and were almost catching up with the story product.
New list: Storytelling and parent-child courses are two different content product forms, what are the advantages of "Uncle Kai Storytelling" in parent-child courses?
Uncle Kai: First of all, the user base, in fact, it is the same group that gives children stories and learning lessons. Another advantage, or that word, is happiness. Many people with children have a common pain point and don't know what to do with their children when they go home. Our curriculum is not only for parents to see, but to create a scene for each family to learn and play together.
For example, our very good ukulele course sold more than 2.5 million (sales). At the same time, it can also drive e-commerce sales, and we also sell ukulele. There are also Sudoku and Rubik's Cube, which parents and children play together, and we not only see it as a lesson, but a gamified product to help families spend happy time with their children.
New list: In addition to listening to such self-owned products, there are many other categories of e-commerce products in your mall, what are the criteria for selection?
Uncle Kai: You will find that there will be more and more products from our own brands, such as Uncle Kai's stationery, school bags, lamps, children's furniture and so on. Not OEM, but their own design, open up the supply chain, and create their own products. Our e-commerce team is also undergoing a great transformation from an e-commerce channel to a "creator".
In terms of selection, according to the experience we have accumulated for so long in doing e-commerce, see which category sells best, and sells several times is very good, to see if we can grasp this supply chain, can we do the best in this category. I want the product to add value to the brand, not consume the brand.
New List: From online virtual content products to hardware and physical e-commerce, what difficulties have you encountered in this process and how to solve them?
Uncle Kai: I just don't know anything, learn from scratch. But our learning ability is very strong, of course, we must also find the blessing of big coffee in various fields.
New List: In terms of product promotion, what experiences can you share?
Uncle Kai: To promote this matter, we have not spent much effort on the promotion of content. We don't market, we don't have this gene, but we have the strength to make products. Whether it is said before that we do self-media, or later pay for content, in this wave of wind, we are not the loudest shouting.
In 2017, we have an explosive development in user growth and sales revenue, on the one hand, there is no threshold for mobile payment, everyone buys a 99 yuan or 199 yuan product online to listen to children, this psychological threshold is getting lower and lower.
Another point is that since its inception, the company has always been firm in creating children's content online. Why should a mother recommend Uncle Kai to tell stories to other mothers, she must have seen the changes in her children. We say there will be a period of explosive growth that will follow, because the changes in the first children have already occurred. Parents find it easy for them to recite a poem, and when they chat, an idiom pops up, and it is these changes that take time to accumulate that make users want to recommend it to others. Such a recommendation willingness can be clearly seen from the messages in the background and App, which is also a point that makes us very excited.
This is not achieved through the operation mode, you get a group purchase, group may not have such an effect.
Start exploring offline development
The vision is to be the biggest childhood brand
Offline store opening has become a trend in the content field, and the OMO (online and offline integration) era of content entrepreneurship has quietly begun.
After obtaining a new round of financing, "Uncle Kai Storytelling" will also carry out offline layout.
New list: "Uncle Kai Storytelling" will have some actions offline this year, such as offline sales, city partner plan, do you think there are any opportunities offline for content entrepreneurs?
Uncle Kai: We have signed partners in more than 50 cities, all of whom have deep accumulation in education, and recommend "Uncle Kai Storytelling" and our products in their own cities. Offline physical stores are also what we have to do, because selling online is certainly not the biggest scenario.
Each offline store is an eternal billboard, the cost of obtaining online traffic is getting higher and higher, most Internet companies if there is a possibility of offline development, in fact, will try to go offline. Efficient new retail must be made by enterprises with Internet genes.
New List: "Uncle Kai Storytelling" has been almost four years since its inception, what is your vision for this brand?
Uncle Kai: We have a particularly clear mission: to let more children have a happy childhood. So our vision is to become the biggest childhood brand in China.