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Kurian wants to start a network disk business. This is not part of Zhou Buqi's plan, but it is not surprising either.

Large-scale cloud computing has been launched. Building a small network cloud disk can be regarded as maximizing the use of resources and adding a revenue-generating business.

But the account book plan is more innovative.

The so-called ledger is actually a domestic idea. In order to cultivate college students' ability to keep accounts, calculate accounts, and manage accounts, Zhou Buqi acquired two online ledger companies two years ago and integrated it into a new one called "Weidian". "Ledger" product.

This product was relatively cold in the early days and there were not many users.

However, after Ji Zian became the president of the school business group, because the Micropoint Ledger product was in line with his own values, he upgraded and revised the product, adopted a new promotion model, and gradually gained market recognition. .

At present, the total number of users of the web page and client of Weidian Ledger has exceeded 15 million.

When Kurian went to China for inspection, he discovered this product and thought the idea was very good. When he returned to Silicon Valley, he started working on making a similar product!

However, the two countries have different national conditions and their products are definitely not the same.

The first thing is that the positioning is different.

What we play in China is a free product, and what Kurian wants to do is a paid product.

Products with cloud attributes are generally relatively high-end. Even more than ten years later, middle and low-level users who make up the majority of the social population may not know what "cloud" is.

This means that the volume of cloud products will not be too large, which means that the model of relying on free sales and earning advertising fees may be difficult to achieve.

It just so happens that mid-to-high-end users have strong payment capabilities, which means that it is more reasonable to develop such products in a paid model.

Secondly, the names are different.

The name "Weidian" sounds nice in Chinese, but how to translate it in English? Directly translated as "Weidian", or "Wedian" or "Wepot", these are all interesting English names.

Just like the English name of WeChat in the previous life, "Wechat". From a Chinese perspective, this name is really good. WeChat and Wechat have similar pronunciations.

But Wechat is not a trendy English name at all.

Just like naming newborn babies in China, outdated names such as "Jianguo", "Tiezhu" and "Yuan Korea" are no longer used. This is not in line with the trend of the times.

The first thing Kurian had to do was decide on a name for the new product line.

Not a tiny bit.

UC is actually quite good. This is a common expression in English and means "yousee". But UC series products are all free, which conflicts with Kurian’s payment philosophy.

So a new brand is needed.

It just so happens that Ziweixing International has such a beautiful brand name. Two years ago, Zhou Buqi led Ziweixing International and invested in a project called Evernote, taking 80% of the share. The Chinese name is Evernote.

Kurian feels that the "Ever" brand is very powerful. In English, "ever" is often used to express an emphasis.

The Chinese translation of "Impression Account Book" is actually very beautiful, but many times language translation is like this. There is often a loss of word meaning, and the charm of the original version is lost.

"Ever" means "once" and can be translated as "impression". But "ever" also means "forever" and has an emphatic expression.

Evernote, in fact, is more of an emphatic attitude, expressing the meaning of "forever recorded", which has a sworn meaning. This is a product name that can make people remember it in a short time.

Kurian liked the name very much and chose it.

Then, he began to play his best mergers and acquisitions operation, convincing the founding team of Evernote to spend US$6.5 million to complete the acquisition of the remaining 20% ​​of the equity.

Since then, Ziweiyun has a new cloud-based paid product line brand "Ever". In addition to Evernote, there are also Everdrive and Everbook.

In addition to the differences in payment and name, the product designs of Impression Ledger and Micropoint Ledger are also different.

Domestic demand for bookkeeping is not that strong.

Because the country’s thousands of years of tradition has formed a culture of spending as much as you earn, it doesn’t actually mean much to keep track of things. But the situation is different in the United States, where consumption in advance is popular.

This requires American families to calculate every bill clearly, where every money is spent, make a budget, and control expenses. If you fail to calculate it properly, you may not be able to repay your mortgage or car loan, and the bank will take it away. This requires a powerful ledger.

There is a more important point, which is to file taxes.

Common people in the United States need to calculate their monthly income by themselves, then deduct the tax credits and deductions. They also need to calculate the taxes clearly according to complex tax rate calculation formulas and submit them to the tax bureau.

This makes it impossible for ordinary people to play.

Therefore, two very popular industries were born. One is accounting firms, which have professional accountants to help you calculate; the other is financial software, which allows you to input relevant data according to prompts and have the computer calculate it.

In comparison, financial software is of course cheaper and more suitable for individual users and home users.

But it’s not that cheap either. For example, the popular home versions of financial software Xero and Quickbooks cost more than $200 per year.

For Zhou Buqi, this was a brand new field, at least he had never encountered it in China. He was very interested and started some exchanges with Kurian.

Kurian said: "Those financial software on the market are auxiliary calculation software. Users are required to list every income and expenditure in the corresponding table as required before the results can be given. However, the federal government's policies The changes are too fast, the tax rates are changing, the amount of free and tax credits is unclear, and it is also unclear whether it is more cost-effective to pay taxes as a family or as an individual... Even different states have different tax rates and policies. Relevant terms. Traditional financial software is general-purpose software with more calculation functions and does not undertake analytical functions."

Zhou Buqi understood immediately, "We have artificial intelligence!"

Kurian said: "In the short term, it can be data analysis. Tax filing is very complicated for individuals, but from a macro perspective, it is actually very simple. 100 million people may be divided into 100 major categories, and each There are 100 sub-categories under each major category. When a user needs to file a tax return through Impression Ledger, he only needs to fill in his personal information, and the cloud can perform data analysis and find tax return cases similar to his in a large sample, and then Provide intelligent guidance to his tax filing process. This is the function of the cloud, which traditional financial software does not have."

Zhou Buqi felt more and more that this was a capable person, "Very good, this is the cloud I want."

Kurian smiled and said: "In terms of professionalism in financial processing, those financial software are definitely better. They all have decades of history. In addition to individuals, they are also working for many large and small enterprises. Provide services. Impression Ledger is mainly an account book for individual users, mainly for accounting functions. It can use the more convenient tax reporting function to steal the individual user market from traditional financial software vendors."

If you don’t know it this week, you won’t know much about it. This is no longer the Internet industry in the conventional sense.

If it is free software, it is considered the Internet industry, and it uses the methods of the Internet industry; if it is paid software, it is more of the software industry, and it uses the methods of the software industry.

Because the problem of piracy cannot be solved in China, the software industry cannot develop at all, which indirectly leads to the entire industry's lack of operating experience, backward operating models, and insufficient innovation capabilities.

The United States has different national conditions. Kurian comes from the software giant Oracle, and he has no experience in playing free software. What he is best at is playing paid software.

This field was far beyond Zhou Buqi's cognitive scope. He couldn't give any advice even if he wanted to. He could only ask with a smile: "When will it go online?"

"Early May."

"What about the charges?"

"It's US$7.99 per month. The price shouldn't be too high." Curry settled for a moment and was very confident. "In my opinion, the initial development of Impression Ledger will be better than that of Impression Cloud Disk. Ledger has more favorable and convenient features. The tax filing system also has the daily function of accounting, which is a necessity for every family. The demand for cloud disks is not that strong, and more time is needed to promote it."

Zhou Buqi put a little pressure on him, "Is there an expected goal?"

"We will strive to reach 1 million users this year." Kurian was more cautious and added, "Evernote has been developed for three years and now has 6.7 million users in the United States, with a total of 1.35 million paying users and less than 90 real-time paying users. Ten thousand."

Zhou Buqi saw that he seemed to lack confidence, so he encouraged him a few words and promised that in this large cloud computing division, even if he had the final say, Lu Qi could only perform his supervisory duties.

Lu Qi’s past work experience was also in free products, and he didn’t understand the paid software model.

With the endorsement of Boss Zhou, Kurian feels more at ease and confident.

I dare to have greater challenges.

This time, he focused on Weishu, a strategic product of Ziweixing.

Kurian said: "In the past few days, I have read all the design concepts and market analysis materials about the Weishu product. I think... I think this is completely wrong."

"What?"

Zhou Buqi thought he heard wrongly.

All wrong?

Is this person crazy?

Even if he is confident, he is too confident.

It would be fine if only the employees of Ziweixing were praising the product, but in fact, this product has also been applied to a number of companies in China such as Sohu, JD.com, Youku, Bajixing, and Asda.

The feedback is very good.

Weishu is a collaborative office product. On February 1st this year, the official version was launched in China, and it soon attracted the use of many technology companies, large and small.

The current number of daily active users has reached 40,000, covering at least 150 technology companies.

Is this completely wrong?

So what is right?