Original Wang Yingli Kuaiwan Thinking
Tips: This article is about 3,620 words, and it takes 10 minutes to burn your brain. Wang Yingli, a journalist who plays chopsticks, sent it in Beijing.
Carpooling, maps, group buying, take-away, e-commerce, chatting, learning, games, music, reading, payment … Any new thing, if it can become the living habit of most people, will create a new platform opportunity.
Whether the catering and catering economy can become new platform opportunities depends on the flow, irreplaceable demand, capital operation and liquidity, etc. From the perspective of applet and App, the sub-category application did have corresponding platform construction earlier.
Previously, in the article "",some fans left a message that the economy will probably deteriorate in the end.
In fact, from the perspective of apps such as partners and rice friends, they have indeed become chat and dating software in the name of (rice) partners.
Chopsticks Playing Thinking (www.kwthink.cn) This article analyzes whether the (rice) partner can become a platform opportunity, but also needs to consider the practical problems. Why does the (rice) partner App deteriorate in the end?
Why do young people need partners?
Tik Tok, Xiaohongshu, Weibo and other platforms have millions and tens of millions of traffic about the content and topics of the partner, and the highest even reaches tens of billions of broadcasts. Young people’s main demand for partners is diet, and rice partners are the most common combination. However, no matter whether they are qualified partners or normal modern people, anyone’s demand is not limited to eating, except diet, travel, script killing, swimming, fitness, reading, and even fishing at work, it can be said that everything can be built.
Don’t think that it’s just young people who are keen on taking partners. According to the 2023 Social Research Report on Taking Partners, the number one job is civil servants, as well as retired people and students at school. Taking partners is not only for young people, but also for office workers and silver-haired people.
Interestingly, the report data shows that women need partners more than men, and it can even be said that partners are dominated by women’s economy.
The author has previously gone deep into the rice partner group and experienced four facts:
1) Partners are not only single people, but also couples and married people have additional needs, such as attending multi-person dinners and script killings.
2) Partner is not only a hobby to push, but some people look for partners just for curiosity or to pass the time.
3), partners are not to make friends, some partners are to have no human burden when having fun, and in group chat, the habit of not adding is set for most partners. For example, some couples traveled by car together for seven days, and when they came back, they not only didn’t know each other’s names (communicated by their net names), but even didn’t add WeChat (had group chats), focusing on a chance meeting, but the origin was together and the fate was separated.
4) You don’t have to meet each other. It’s also a sub-category game to supervise each other’s fitness and eating in the group.
From a realistic point of view, the partners’ interests are very strange. Some of them ask each other for self-study, walk the dog, stay in a daze, Pinduoduo cut a knife, or a few introverted people go out to walk in the street together. Even many couples have half-price meals and second cups. The partners only talk about companionship and AA system, and don’t talk about feelings at all.
Judging from the Baidu index chart, contemporary people’s demand for activities is stronger than that for parties and socializing, and the index of parties and activities has been rising for a long time (just to play for fun, not to play for socializing). For the behavior of partners, it emphasizes activities, but it is also related to parties and socializing.
Hidden above the activities is the great boredom and loneliness of contemporary people. Interestingly, contemporary people have no time to be sad. They prefer happiness. How can they pursue happiness? It seems that making friends is a broad solution. From this point of view, it is not surprising that some subclassing apps will become dating software.
Judging from the deteriorated sub-category App, if it is put into the social field, it is not cost-effective. Obviously, it is a new demand, but it must be close to a broken Red Sea.
Dating apps can’t solve the needs of partners.
Most dating software is actually feminine logic. In the conventional communication relationship, there is only one payer, which is contrary to the logic of partner AA. In other words, if we return to the traditional logic of making friends, the partner relationship will not exist.
In the previous article about the partner, some fans pointed out that the landing of the partner is actually that the active payer stops playing and returns to please himself from pleasing others. Not only men, but also women don’t like the traditional relationship. The traditional relationship is that whoever initiates pays the bill. If it is a high-quality relationship, rushing to settle the bill at checkout will also make the sponsors feel indebted, while if they are fair-weather friends, it will hurt their wallets too much.
Based on the dissatisfaction with the traditional relationship, this is the friendship between children. Everyone doesn’t need to invest in feelings, just enjoy the activity itself, and AA is enough when checking out. Everyone doesn’t care about each other and doesn’t owe anyone.
In dating software, it becomes: I pursue you, you accompany me, and I pay for your company. Reality has also proved that this kind of communication relationship can’t actually solve the spiritual emptiness and loneliness of contemporary people. Contemporary people have turned from emotional bondage to short and ruthless trading needs, returning to the basics of activities, playing together, and then paying their own bills and returning to their homes for happiness.
The original intention of the partner is not only to solve the financial problem, but also to lift the human bond. In the survey, the partner’s needs include helping Pinduoduo cut a knife, and also collecting orders and doing tasks. However, for such needs, most acquaintances will feel that the other party does not respect themselves. If they are partners, there is no such psychological burden at all. The partners of migrant workers also carry the burden on each other, fish together, skip work together, etc. Acquaintances will only refuse and dissuade them, and only partners will accompany them and do not need to return.
From this point of view, the friendship between children and traditional friends is almost a completely different track. What is needed to build a sub-category App is anti-traditional social gameplay, and all social apps can’t keep the real children.
Why can’t I do a subclass App?
The partner has no feelings and does not rely on his face.
There is such a case. In a boarding group, a boarding friend asked for a photo of the boarding partner before going out for a drink, and was finally kicked out of the group by the group owner, because such people need a group of friends, not a boarding group.
On WeChat, Julang creatively developed the "nearby partner" applet, ranging from rice partner, travel partner, street vendor to movie partner. The applet is also divided into Beijing partner, Inner Mongolia partner and Guangdong partner by region, among which game partner, travel partner and dinner partner are the most common, and the reading of a single message is around 5,000-20,000, but it may be too scattered and other reasons.
Perhaps it is true that the traffic on the sub-platform is insufficient. Some apps that were also serious about making partners earlier have transformed to make friends. At this point, the fact is probably that they have given up the business of building sub-category apps.
Judging from the total annihilation of App applications and the desolation of small programs, the demand for partners may not really support a single platform.
The rise and fall of economic behavior actually depends on the change of economic value, and perhaps the fact is that it is difficult to realize the positive realization of the economy.
1) Demand satisfaction is complicated, and ruthlessness is universal.
The partner’s age span is relatively large. From the post-80s to the post-00s, some people are old and naughty, and some are young and mature, such as reading partners to form a reading club. The sources of such channels include Douban, Little Red Book, Weibo, Tik Tok and acquaintances. The needs of the partners are precise and ruthless. After investigation, many partners will immediately uninstall the Douban App after they find an organization in Douban, including the 50-year-old uncle who is looking for a fishing partner in Xiaohongshu. As long as he enters the fishing group, the uncle will change hands with Xiaohongshu. It is an unloading.
Young people will also find partners from digital apps such as Cool ‘an. It is normal that cool friends can’t find people for ten days after they pay attention. The friendship of the people in the new era is that everyone doesn’t invest their feelings in it, and their interests come online. Bye-bye.
2) The commercial dilemma that cannot be ignored
Tik Tok, Weibo, Xiaohongshu, Douban, Kuan, WeChat and other platforms are all faintly visible. It is really difficult to make money from the partner.
Even if it is a group purchase, people used to buy coupons from platforms such as Tik Tok, Word of Mouth, Public Comment, Meituan, etc. In the past, partners found that there were almost no good things in the packages of merchants, which made their consumption tendency basically go to the store, which was beneficial to the entity business but not to the platform.
Some partners have also found that the prices of group purchase packages on many platforms are the same as the actual prices of stores, which also leads customers to get used to paying in stores. I don’t know if this is a cautious move or a helpless move (generally beneficial to businesses).
It seems that the traffic of the partner is just a formality. If the platform wants to make money on the partner, the past business model is almost completely ineffective.
To realize the value of partners, we must reconstruct our thinking.
Can a partner really fail to do a business? Or, can partners really not bring value to capital or brands? That’s not the case.
1), community reconstruction
Partners can be used by businesses, at least to empower the community.
In the past, the community was coupon thinking, and it was the logic of issuing coupons and asking customers to spend. With the passage of time, most of them have become dead groups. In some couples’ dry meals, the chatting energy of strangers is indeed the most abundant. By changing their thinking, bosses can join the partners’ community and spontaneously form a team to win customers for the brand, which requires neither discounts nor group purchases, and does not need to pay new drainage fees.
Bosses can also help partners launch activities and help partners recruit new partners. These are all ways to realize the flow of partners.
In the brand group, there was always the only brand in the past. For example, all the brands in the group talked about the same brand, which is also the reason why the brand group will eventually be silent. In the chopsticks thinking, bosses can initiate a partner alliance, such as multi-restaurants × swimming and fitness × camping brands × parent-child activities, etc., through multi-brand alliances, which is a way to revitalize traffic and can also form a brand consumption cluster.
2), functional reconstruction
It’s difficult to build a single platform, so it’s probably a good idea to embed the old platform to make the platform functional. For example, the four functions of comments are punching in, taking videos, sending photos and writing comments. In fact, a team function can be added to initiate the platform. When several people meet at the store for dinner, they can pay a deposit first and spend it at the store, which can not only bring new passengers to the store, but also facilitate the communication of the platform.
Compared with rebuilding the sub-platform, embedding the old platform and functionalizing it will be more efficient and practical.
In summary, it can be seen that the sub-category economy is not without economic value and flow play, but now most of them use traditional business models to deal with new play, and the failure of running-in naturally fails to see the value.
As for the partner economy, this article does not discuss and judge it too deeply. Partner is like a new business opportunity rising in Ran Ran, which is not only a new social problem, but also a new demand of social people. Only by paying attention to it can we gain benefits from it.
Original title: "Starting from a partner and then becoming a dating software, can the sub-category economy achieve new opportunities?" 》
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