Similar to the urban legends that circulated in the circle of Internet café owners after Luo Youyi and others returned to cities below the third and fourth tiers, there are many, many more.

Basically, the first batch of "Internet Café Owner 300 Warriors" who enjoyed Gu Kun's courtesy copied such a legendary story after they went back, stimulating the local Internet café to engage in game halls and even other small bosses who are not so related.

The joining online game companies led by Boss Bao's Zhonglian Games also gave the Alipay channel the largest discount service for recharging point cards - for example, a physical monthly card of 30 yuan, the cost of selling to the physical store channel of the newspaper kiosk was 278 yuan, and the bookstores at all levels above still had to leave a profit commission, so it is equivalent to 15% of the final price of the game point card, which is distributed to the channel provider, and the channel dealer is willing to help you bring some goods.

The biggest advantage of online shopping is that all the middlemen have been cut. Alipay's returnees directly connect with the owners of Internet cafes and give the owners of Internet cafes a clear price and conditions: now join Alipay, you can get a preferential price of 25 yuan per point card, sell it to players or 30 yuan, and the owner of the Internet café can earn 5 yuan per card.

Anyway, as long as the network manager sits there and is responsible for opening the machine, and sticks a game advertisement on behalf of the recharge on his back, people who want to play online games will naturally ask the owner of the Internet café to help him recharge.

And Alipay's local push staff also made it clear: join Alipay this year, in order to get the preferential price of 25 yuan per consignment card, if you survive the end of 2001, to 2002 New Year's Day, and then want to join it will become 26 yuan, if you come again after 03 years, it will become 27 yuan, which is a typical early discount and early rhythm of high V.

Those who follow up can see the curative effect, see the international recognition, and see the peers make crazy money, and the speed of follow-up is naturally very exaggerated.

As a result, Alipay's new user bottleneck once changed from "the sales speed of local push personnel" to "the installation speed of technical support personnel".

Fortunately, this kind of small problem is very easy to solve, Ma Feng has an iron army of Ahri Department, and urgently trains some technical support-related network security technical knowledge to each local sales staff, and it will be done in a few days——

Today's "Alipay", strictly speaking, is not at all the same thing as Alipay, which appeared three years later, but the name is similar. From a technical point of view, today's "Alipay" is closer to the legendary Shengda company in the second half of 2002 to get the legendary point card online sales platform.

Therefore, with the network security technology in 2001, in order to ensure the absolute security of the money stored in Alipay by the Internet café owners, and the absolute security of the payment process, it is impossible to use the open mode of "download a client for you on the website, and the user can install it if he wants", but must be closed and strengthen security access.

Every Internet café owner who wants to install it must be authenticated and bound by an Alipay staff with a USB-KEY that looks like a U shield, and bind the physical MAC address of the computer that the Internet café owner is about to use to pay. Only these additional sacrifices in terms of ease of use can be exchanged for the shortcomings of network security technology that are three years ahead of the previous year, so as not to collapse when Alipay falls into the tide of stolen numbers.

There is no need to go into the technical details, in a word, that is, from late October to early November, after the "Internet café owners 300 warriors" returned to China in just half a month, Alipay's user growth far exceeded the growth of the previous product in the first 45 days (six weeks)! And more than doubled!

At the beginning of October, when the group was opened and announced that "Alipay users go to the Lanzhou visa financial exemption" and other information, the total number of Alipay users in China was 14,000, and it reached 20,000 around October 20, and on November 10, that is, after the dividend of credit endorsement was fully released, the number reached 50,000!

You must know that today's Alipay only has a "seller side", not a "buyer side", so these 50,000 users are not just ordinary people, but 50,000 merchants.

50,000 consumers is not a big deal at all, but 50,000 stores have a terrifying influence. There are 3,000 or 400 prefecture-level cities and nearly 3,000 counties in the country, with an average of 20 businesses in each county, and they have been able to cover the Internet entertainment industry to a considerable extent.

After all, in 2001, there were not so many Internet cafes and game halls in the country, and the peak of the Internet café industry was around 2005. At that time, because of the entry of World of Warcraft into China, many players who originally bought computers at home could not be dragged by the old machine, so a game pushed the Internet café industry to the peak (more than ten years later, the transformation of Internet cafes was almost wiped out, and the life of the whole industry was continued by eating chicken, but it was still incomparable with the scale of Warcraft back then)

In today's developed areas, there are only a few Internet cafes in each street, but in rural areas, there may not be one in the entire township. Ma Feng estimates that as of the beginning of 2002, all the B-end seller users who can be pulled in have been pulled in, and hundreds of thousands will be up to the sky.

After all, point cards are virtual items, there is no logistics, early e-commerce payment tools can only stare at virtual items, and the rest must wait for the logistics system of the whole society to rise up and the supporting infrastructure to progress.

The reason why books can be sold now is also due to the fact that the value density of the book is okay, and it is not afraid of bumps and damage in the logistics process - the books sold online are at least dozens of dollars a book, and the book is a thicker document in the final analysis, which can be directly mailed in an envelope. The key to the value of a book lies in the content, and the material entity is only a carrier of its internal knowledge, so even if the cover packaging is dirty and broken, it can still be seen after wiping it, and users will not bother to return it.

Therefore, in the same way, the goods that can be sold online today that require physical logistics are, in addition to books, at most other audio-visual products, game CDs, and even all content products where "the body is not important, the soul is important". If any of the other physical goods dares to sell them in 2001, they will definitely not have long eyes and die one by one.

……

Ma Feng himself, about the weekend after the "Internet Café Owner 300 Warriors" returned to China and two weeks later, received the above-mentioned "Alipay" user growth report for the first time.

It was Sunday, November 11, 2001.

Ahri Baba and Alipay's headquarters employees didn't go to work, only the ground push team was running outside, Ma Feng was alone, drinking kung fu tea with Cai Chongxin, and Cai Chongxin helped him interpret the report.

After listening, Ma Feng sighed from the bottom of his heart: "Xiao Gu is so powerful, just relying on such 'international recognition', Alipay's early credit has expanded so rapidly, and it is not too much for him to take half of the shares in this new company." ”

Under normal circumstances, if he was to face Gu Kun, he would definitely have to call Mr. Gu, and occasionally call Gu Dong Gu Boss in front of outsiders. However, in private, he chatted with Cai Chongxin behind closed doors, and he called Xiao Gu directly.

This is also a trap on Cai Chongxin, to show that he does not avoid him.

As for the "Alipay was taken away by Gu Kun" mentioned in his words, this is also a fact, it was negotiated a few months ago when the new company Alipay was established, and with the strength of Ma Feng in 2001, he didn't feel that there was anything wrong with Gu Kun doing this.

At that time, Gu Kun injected tens of millions of dollars of early investment into the new company Alipay, and then bet that if the money burned out and the performance grew well, he would add money and further increase the shareholding ratio. (At the beginning of the angel round, it is definitely impossible to take half of it directly, it is according to the continuous capital injection gambling agreement, and it will be added to more than half in the future.) Because if you take half of it at the beginning, the people below will not even be motivated to work)

Gu Kun paid so much, and even the idea was that he teamed up with Boss Bao of Zhonglian Games and Ahri Mafeng to do this, shouldn't he take the lion's share?

Especially at this moment, history has proved that it is "international recognition" that has led to the sharp rise in the gold content of Alipay, and the early promotion is so smooth, what else can not be convinced? It is not an ordinary financial investor, but a resource-based investor who holds high-quality operational flow resources.

The money in the world is the same, but the resources of those who hold the money behind the money are different.

After Cai Chongxin listened to Ma Feng's emotion, he also thought it was true in principle, but he was engaged in finance, and he was more vigilant and sensitive in some aspects, so he didn't forget to remind Ma Feng while echoing it:

"However, according to the current trend, in three and five years, I don't know why Alipay will grow in the future. Now we have 50,000 or 60,000 Internet café owners, and tens of millions of online game point cards have been prepaid with us.

According to this trend, I am afraid that if it grows to an order of magnitude, there will be peers who will be jealous and think that we are absorbing savings in disguise. At that time, on the one hand, we must find a way to standardize, if the business is really big to that point, we must pay close attention to the license that should be spent on the resources, and get it at any cost.

On the other hand, I am afraid that Gu Ye's foreign investment status will have an impact on the company at that time. Once a company moves from internet services to financial attributes, foreign investment becomes tricky. If you have the opportunity in the future, when you report your results to Gu Ye, you must also make the ugly things clear in advance. Whether he will give up his Lanfang nationality in the future and join the Chinese nationality, or whether he will find someone to hold it on his behalf, or whether he wants to cash out at a high level, this is all a statement.

We definitely don't want to drive him away, if he wants to cash out, as long as our business is good enough, we will definitely have to pay him back if we cash out ten times and 100 times more than his investment. He burned 200 million in five years, what if he really got good results and paid him 20 billion, I'm afraid he won't be able to look down on 20 billion. ”

When Cai Chongxin said this, his tone was also very sincere, and he didn't want to reduce Gu Kun's equity, but considering that the company's development would get out of control, he had to have a plan in advance.

In fact, in the history of another time and space, Alipay was spun off separately after the delisting of Alibaba's Hong Kong shares, and then Alibaba went to NASDAQ to be listed, a large part of which was also due to regulatory pressure. Foreigners are not allowed to hold large shares in the first place.

Although Gu Kun is an old friend of the Chinese people, it cannot be denied that he is essentially a "foreigner" like Sun Zhengyi. ”

Ma Feng couldn't help but groan: "I will find a way to do this, Mr. Gu is so righteous, we can't be untrustworthy, if it really develops to that point, it depends on how Mr. Gu chooses himself, we all support it." ”