Ji Shisan on How He Sells CEOs' Time for a Few Hundred Yuan an Hour

If you want to book Ji Shisan himself on Zaihang, it costs just 1,000 yuan a session.

"I have 3,000 contacts on WeChat, but I probably deal with only about 100 of them regularly. If you wanted to book me to solve a problem the usual way, you might not get through even if you'd added me on WeChat. But on Zaihang, you can pay 1,000 yuan to book me to help you solve it. That's also a way of respecting my time," Zaihang founder Ji Shisan told me.

Not every personal problem has a standard answer you can find online or in a book, whether it is as large as your future career or as small as how to put together a work-day makeup look that suits you in 20 minutes. Ji Shisan thinks he has the answers, and the answer is his new app, Zaihang: a paid, one-on-one conversation service that connects you with someone who knows a given field.

The Zaihang team calls the people who share their experience "hangjia," or experts. According to Ji Shisan, Zaihang now has more than 1,400 experts, covering the internet, finance, fashion, design and other fields. Four months after launch, the service has spread to five cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Chengdu.

Ji Shisan says daily orders have passed 100, at an average of 350 yuan each, which means monthly transactions could reach 1 million yuan.

What Is It Like to Pay for Someone Else's Experience? We Tried It Once

Booking someone on Zaihang is simple: you find an expert in the app who might solve your problem, introduce yourself, request a meeting, pay, and meet. I tried it once, booking Qiao Qi, founder of the clothing brand Georgette.Q.

Because experts and users choose each other, when you apply to book an expert as a "student," you have to prepare a careful self-introduction and the questions you want to discuss (our test topic was "how should a slightly chubby person dress?") to improve your chances of being accepted. Qiao Qi accepted a few hours later and asked me on Zaihang when I would be free to meet.

This is where things get less convenient. Time and place are settled by trading text messages back and forth, rather than by simply picking a time slot, as you would when booking a hotel or an Airbnb.

Zaihang's expert booking and profile page

It took three rounds of messages, and we settled on a time only the following day. She chose the place, her studio. The fee was paid through Zaihang.

I met the designer Qiao Qi on a weekday, while she was working in her studio. My topic was "how should slightly chubby people in tech, whose wardrobes are mostly T-shirts and jeans, dress?" (don't laugh). She first took my measurements, then recommended brands based on the strengths and weaknesses of my build, my personality and skin tone, and my budget. She even pulled me over to pick out clothes on Tmall and order them on the spot. The session lasted a little over an hour; Qiao Qi answered every question, and the conversation went very smoothly. When we left at 6 p.m., the next user Qiao Qi had booked was already waiting in another corner of the studio.

This is the profile photo Qiao Qi uses on Zaihang

Qiao Qi is one of Zaihang's more popular experts. She offers a course on dressing for professional women and has met 8 people so far, quite a few of them senior women executives in tech, and every one of her ratings is 5 stars. But as someone trying it out of curiosity, I was not her target customer: her brand makes workwear for professional women aged 30-45, and most of the people who book her through Zaihang fall into that group. "Besides the social side, getting to know these people, they're also my database. Knowing what they need is important."

Our experience was interesting and pleasant. Without Zaihang, finding someone like Qiao Qi who could quickly give professional fashion advice would probably have meant asking a friend of a friend for an introduction. This time we settled it with 200 yuan and an hour. Afterward, I gave Qiao Qi the top rating of 5 stars on Zaihang, left a positive comment, and added her on WeChat as a friendly gesture, roughly meaning "we know each other now."

Not everyone's experience with experts is like this. QDaily also asked some Zaihang students and heard stories like these. One student, purely out of interest, booked someone from the antiques trade but, having prepared little, was lost in the expert's jargon. Another booked an expert on US stocks but, knowing the subject fairly well, felt in the end that the expert had offered little advice. The "expert" still closed the session by telling the student: you should give me 5 stars, that's the rule here; anything less than 5 stars counts as a bad review.

Not wanting to cause offense, the student gave 5 stars anyway.

These differences point to a hard problem in how Zaihang runs: how to guarantee the skill and credentials of its "experts." After all, this widely varied group of people answering questions determines the quality of what Zaihang finally delivers.

How Zaihang Works Behind the Scenes

In Zaihang's office near Langyuan in Beijing's Guomao district, more than 10 people are busy vetting applicants. They are called Zaihang's "expert advisers," and Ji Shisan calls the team "knowledge buyers." Whether an applicant is qualified to join Zaihang as an expert is up to them. A 10-person team may not look large, but it is already half of Zaihang. The company has a little over 30 people in total, and most of the rest are engineers working on the product.

So many "expert advisers" also reflect the service side of the product. The whole product is built to put experts first: as described above, experts set the price (though Zaihang suggests a lower trial price for the first three meetings), the meeting time and the place.

When Zaihang launched in March, it had only a little over 100 experts, all of them, Ji Shisan recalls, friends of his and of his team. Now most experts come through Zaihang's online sign-up. Wan Xinyuan, who runs marketing at Zaihang, told QDaily that as many as 500 people apply to be experts every day, but only 10% pass. "The number who finally get 'listed' will be even lower, because we go back and forth with them to make sure the person really wants to be an expert," Ji Shisan added.

Who are these expert advisers? Most come from the media, the Zaihang team says. The team includes executives Ji Shisan poached from The Bund Pictorial and Southern Metropolis Weekly, as well as people with years of marketing and sales experience. The point is that these advisers have seen many different people and situations and have some ability to judge people.

Applicants must also fill out a personal information form about as detailed as one on a dating site. Besides their social media IDs and a personal introduction, they must describe in detail the topics they want to share. "How they write about these topics also helps us judge, to some degree, what this person is capable of," Ji Shisan said.

The Zaihang team has indeed put a lot of effort into selecting and presenting its experts. One service it offers them is portrait photography. Every weekend, Zaihang's expert advisers take 20-30 experts to a café for a day of portrait shoots. These photos are how experts appear to users in the Zaihang app: healthy and natural, not over-Photoshopped, and not in odd, uniform suits and formal wear. Ji Shisan talked about the photos with obvious relish, saying the team took 3 months to settle on the current style:

"We refined it again and again to get the effect we have now. For example, should your background be white or colored, or should it be shot in a studio? How much Photoshop? The key is how to get the photographers in the 5 cities where we've launched to produce similar results. The experts' poses, the photo style, how heavy the makeup is: we've tuned all of it."

Zaihang's expert photo shoots have also become social occasions for the experts

Beyond the photos, the media-trained "expert advisers" also advise on course design and wording, and even have experts narrow their topics to something that can be resolved in a single session of 1-2 hours. But Ji Shisan says how well an expert does, from pricing and course content to user feedback, is ultimately up to the market.

There are some doubts here, though. Experts' specialties range from sports and finance to technology, and each field is a world of its own. How do you judge them and guarantee a minimum standard? Ji Shisan's answer was rather vague: for now, the judgment is made by people. But human review is itself prone to oversights and misjudgments, so there is still no way to ensure that every "expert" will give you a high-quality conversation.

Another question just as important to experts, and not yet settled, is the order in which they appear in the app. Screens are small, and human attention is even more limited, so an expert's ranking and visibility will become a major factor in their income. At first, the experts on Zaihang's home page were the ones Ji Shisan and his team knew well and considered more reliable; Qiao Qi, the designer we booked, was one of them. They have since changed the rules, and most experts on the home page now are those with more bookings or those newly listed.

Zaihang's expert topic categories

It is like Taobao deciding which shop gets the recommended slot on its home page. Ji Shisan hopes to solve the placement problem with e-commerce methods in the future.

"Zaihang is still fairly small, so this isn't a big problem. Later, for example, we can let everyone see a different page, and there will be personalized recommendations: after you book one expert, it recommends whom to book next..."

For now, Zaihang does not feel like a very efficient, "productized" service, at least to students. The meeting time, for example, still has to be confirmed back and forth rather than chosen from a set of options, and the expert has the final say. Ji Shisan says there is nothing to be done about it.

"Because our whole logic is 'experts first,' even though it causes students some inconvenience, there's nothing we can do. Many experts aren't in the service industry, and they may not know many days ahead when they'll be free."

An Unproven Market

The biggest question hanging over Zaihang is this: how many people actually want a service that sits somewhere between traditional teaching and consulting? How big is the market?

Ji Shisan says the size of Zaihang's market is still hard to calculate. He also calls Zaihang an "incremental market," meaning one whose room for growth can be created through marketing and sales.

"It's not an existing market like private tutoring, where you work out how big the market is and then we take 10%... Before Zaihang, this incremental market didn't really exist, but the behavior did. In the past, when we wanted someone to answer our questions, we had to take them to dinner; I had to pay in money, time and social obligation. Although we can't estimate the scale or the market, I believe it is a massive market."

Ji Shisan believes Zaihang does not fit any existing service or business model, because they are "reforming" an old behavior into a business, so its size cannot be estimated clearly. "We're taking slices of many markets: part of training, education and consulting, and even part of recruitment."

In fact, products built around one-on-one conversation and Q&A are not entirely new. We have seen traces of Zaihang in skill-exchange products and time auctions, and even Google once had a similar product, though it did not survive.

Google Helpouts page

In 2013, Google launched the Helpouts platform, which let users video chat one-on-one with geeks on Hangouts to get answers to engineering and technical questions. Apart from the two sides never meeting in person, it was like a tech-only version of Zaihang. But because it fell short of expectations, Google shut Helpouts down early this year.

Now Zaihang has broader topics, more experts and far less standardized product details. How can it grow this market? After all, according to the Zaihang team's figures, internet topics and lifestyle topics (such as fitness and beauty) still account for 90% of orders.

"Helpouts had no social element and nothing that spread by word of mouth, but Zaihang has both... Every expert, every meeting, there are stories everywhere," Ji Shisan says.

A Phone Version May Follow

Another doubt about Zaihang concerns efficiency. Meeting one-on-one offline takes a lot of time, so each order is slow to close for an internet company that needs to expand fast. When we met, Ji Shisan revealed a plan to launch a "phone service version" of Zaihang, though not yet: only after this first group of experts has been trained.

"Every project like Zaihang starts with phone calls, because they think phone calls are simpler and need fewer resources. 500 experts can serve the whole country without geographic limits; it's more 'internet,' and it's easier for a small team. But a phone call lacks the 'efficiency' of meeting face to face, it doesn't spread, and it has no stories."

In Ji Shisan's view, offline meetings are hard to get started but have more room to grow later, while phone calls look easy to start but are hard to get right. When a product is young, the first thing to think about is how widely it spreads. "The phone is a medium with an obvious service character; if it's purely phone consultation, prices would definitely have to go up. But phone conversations spread far less well than meeting in person, because once you've met, there's a relationship and a social side. Just look at how many people post about meeting experts."

"But once we've scaled up, done offline first and then online, this group of 'trained' experts will know how to solve other people's problems better, instead of just doing a high volume of phone calls," Ji Shisan said, adding that phone service may not be cheaper than meeting in person.

Before the phone version launches, Ji Shisan has something else to think about: how to keep these early "experts" serving Zaihang over the long term, and how to keep Zaihang ahead of competitors. Some professional networking products have already added phone and meeting features. Maimai, for one, moved so fast that it may have launched the feature before even asking users about pricing.

"Whether we can keep our experts will take time to tell. You're welcome to come back and look at this product in 6 months," Ji Shisan said. "Meanwhile, the copycats had better hurry up and start copying."