From Zaihang to Fenda: Step by Step, Guokr Walked Away From Guokr

It left popular science behind and found money. Either way, a commercial company's search for ways to make money from knowledge has begun.

Word has been going around inside Guokr lately that the company may be about to change CEOs. Three sources inside Guokr, speaking independently of one another, told QDaily that the current CEO and founder, Ji Xiaohua — better known by his pen name Ji Shisan — may no longer lead the popular-science community company he has run for six years.

Guokr officially denied the change to QDaily, calling the reports "not true."

Still, it is not surprising that such talk circulates inside Guokr. Of Ji Shisan's various businesses, the hot ones — the ones closest to making money — are Zaihang and Fenda, and neither has much to do with the science education Guokr was built on.

A new company was set up last year for this purpose. Business registration records show that "Beijing Guokr Online Education Technology Co., Ltd." completed registration last August, and that its legal representative, like that of Guokr's main entity, "Beijing Guokr Interactive Technology Media Co., Ltd.," is Ji Shisan. The difference is that its businesses include Zaihang, the one-on-one, in-person consulting service launched a year earlier.

You have probably already seen this new company's hottest service, Fenda, flooding your WeChat Moments.

On June 8, the Fenda team said the company had closed a Series A round. It did not disclose the amount, but said the valuation had reached "$100 million."

A Hit That Went Far Beyond Ji Shisan's Own Expectations

The new product, which absorbed the entire Zaihang team's manpower, launched on May 15 inside Zaihang's WeChat service account. Askers pay anywhere from tens to thousands of yuan, and the person answering replies with a one-minute voice clip. Every question and answer is displayed publicly, and anyone can pay 1 yuan to "eavesdrop" on the answer.

Pushed along by celebrities like Wang Sicong, Zhang Ziyi, and Shi Hang, Fenda caught fire fast.

Wang Sicong answered 32 questions on Fenda. In less than a week, more than 600,000 people had listened and he had pocketed 240,000 yuan.

Judging by what followed, Fenda's success far outran Zaihang's own expectations. Ji Shisan called off every interview he had already arranged, saying he was too busy, and sent Wu Yunfei, assistant to Zaihang's CEO, to handle visiting reporters.

Wu Yunfei said Zaihang's engineers moved into a courtyard house before May 1 and built Fenda there, shut away from everything else. Since launch, staff have worked overtime for weeks, shipping "two to three iterations of Fenda a day."

That is not a common way to work. To avoid disturbing people who are using the product, most companies push new versions late at night. Two or three a day means updating the servers in the middle of the day.

Nearly a month after Fenda launched, its iPhone app was still in review. An app is a more direct channel than a WeChat account, and better at holding on to users.

There is no guarantee how long Apple's App Store will take with a new app — even products from big companies have dragged on for three months or more. So when a company expects a hit, it usually clears review first, gets to the point where it can release at any time, and only then starts promoting.

Fenda ads are already running in elevators. Moving users from a WeChat account to an app is hard, and every extra day of waiting loses some of them.

The way the "Fenda" and "Zaihang" WeChat official accounts swapped identities also shows how sudden all of this was.

That is, users who had followed the Zaihang account suddenly found that it had turned, with no explanation, into Fenda. Wu Yunfei's answer was that this was done for a complete, unified user experience.

Another possible reason is a technical limit. A WeChat account with fewer than 100,000 followers can serve at most 10,000 voice-clip downloads a day. Fenda launched on a new account subject to that 10,000-download cap.

In the six years since Guokr started, this is the first time Ji Shisan has made something that caught on far beyond his own team's expectations.

The product has little to do with the popular-science communities Guokr and the Science Squirrels Club spent years building.

But It Blew Up Because of Internet Celebrities

"If you don't believe in marriage, what do you do when your girlfriend gets pregnant by accident?"

That is the question Wang Sicong was asked on Fenda. The asker, Zhang Yu, paid 3,000 yuan for it.

More than 15,000 people have now listened to that exchange. Of Wang Sicong's other 31 answers, at least 13 have been "eavesdropped on" more than 8,000 times each.

This is Fenda's model: the asker pays hundreds or thousands of yuan for an answer; the answerer takes the fee after a one-minute voice reply; and the crowd plays the cheap "eavesdropper." Pay 1 yuan through WeChat Pay and you can hear the answer anonymously.

The asker also takes a cut of the eavesdropping: each 1-yuan fee is split evenly between answerer and asker. So while Wang Sicong was making more than 200,000 yuan, half of his 32 askers got back more than they had paid to ask.

A small fee, an easy way to pay, content as light as a one-minute voice clip from a real celebrity, and the more people listen the more both asker and answerer earn... all of these rules of the game point to one thing:

they encourage askers to come up with more eye-catching questions, so that the answer becomes a one-minute vocal performance.

That is why the most popular questions on Fenda are always about privacy and gossip, whatever kind of celebrity is answering. For example:

Asked of Jiang Fangzhou: What are your criteria for choosing a partner? Name a few, briefly.

Asked of Zhang Ziyi: What do you think has been the most widespread unwritten rule in show business in recent years?

Serious, science-minded questions rarely draw anything close to those listener numbers.

The Fenda team is torn about being driven by internet celebrities, and would like to change that impression of Fenda. Wu Yunfei told QDaily: "The fan economy gives the whole business of monetizing knowledge a push. It isn't an either/or thing."

At the same time, Fenda screens what appears on its homepage, and most of what is there now comes from knowledge-oriented writers, such as Zhou Guoping. "We don't want to chase so-called gossip and entertainment; we'll also recommend some serious questions," Wu Yunfei said.

Fenda Is Ji Shisan's Latest Attempt to "De-Guokr" Himself

Someone on Fenda, pointing to all the entertainment content, asked Ji Shisan whether "knowledge" on the platform would keep shrinking. Ji Shisan answered that "knowledge" has a much broader definition and is not simply an ivory-tower affair: "I'm happy to call what Fenda and Zaihang do time e-commerce."

That is a different relationship from the one Ji Shisan first had with the Science Squirrels Club and Guokr.

The Science Squirrels Club was founded in 2008. This group blog by grassroots science writers was closer to a nonprofit.

From 2009 on, Ji Shisan began meeting investors and decided to pursue commercial goals, setting up "Guokr Media" separately as a company in 2010. The Science Squirrels Club stayed a nonprofit.

Guokr, which had set out to become "China's Discovery Channel," kept an editorial team and later added Q&A and other features that let users contribute their own content, running it as a science community.

That was when Guokr grew into the country's largest community of science enthusiasts, the place that explained scientific phenomena and knocked down rumors whenever news broke.

For most of its life, though, this science community stayed a small crowd. It published books and held conferences the way a media company would, but in Ji Shisan's own words, "Guokr has always been doing things that are very far from money."

Only in 2013 and 2014 did they get a bit closer to money. MOOC College, a site that steered users toward online education, brought the company a $20 million investment from IDG and TAL Education.

After that, Guokr went through a fast stretch of trial and error: it turned Guokr's "Xingqing" project into an app called Zhixing, and built an air purifier called Xiaodan.

MOOC College also worked with the foreign online-education platform Coursera, insisting on bringing in online courses from relatively high-end universities abroad.

None of it produced lasting influence.

Zaihang, the in-person meeting service that launched in April 2015, became Ji Shisan's first attempt to "de-Guokr" himself.

Zaihang lets you pay a few hundred to a few thousand yuan to sit down with an "expert" who knows an industry and have your questions answered — whether the question is as broad as where your career is going or as ordinary as how to put on everyday makeup. In short, it is pay-per-session consulting, with discovery, booking, and payment all done online.

To build it, Ji Shisan put together a new team independent of Guokr, hiring an entirely new set of people: engineers, marketing, operations.

In-person meetings are limited by geography and inefficient, and a single session routinely costs hundreds or thousands of yuan. Despite a round of promotion that included offline ads, Zaihang's model never spread widely, and its influence stayed mostly within tech and startup circles.

Meanwhile the money problem grew more urgent. The Zaihang team has still disclosed no funding. And two years had passed since Guokr and MOOC College's last round — that $20 million.

It was at exactly this point that Fenda arrived: more entertaining, more native to the internet.

"You can think of it as the retail version of Zaihang," Wu Yunfei said. Right — Fenda is cheap enough that anyone can buy a one-minute voice clip from an industry insider.

Fenda is plainly a hit, Ji Shisan's most successful run at monetizing knowledge. The Science Squirrels Club and Guokr's popular-science community were no help in getting there. What he needs are people from a different community.

After the Pivot, Zaihang and Fenda's Target Became Zhihu

Back in 2012, Ji Shisan gave his view of Zhihu in an interview: if Guokr had borrowed from Quora earlier, it might have launched "Guokr Q&A" before Zhihu launched.

After Zaihang went live in 2015, the experts it recruited included not only celebrities in the ordinary sense but many people who had made their names on Zhihu.

Fenda, this year's hit, is even more direct about it: it opened a section called "The Big Vs You've Followed Over the Years," listing more than 60 answerers who came from Zhihu.

Comparing their own products with Zhihu in interviews happened even more often.

Zhihu had never responded to Zaihang. Then, this past Monday, it launched Zhihu Value 3.0, a product almost identical to Fenda. Fenda hit back fast and hard: that same day, a Baidu search for "Zhihu Value" returned a top ad reading "Fenda Was Plagiarized by Zhihu Value," linked to Fenda.

Besides accusing Zhihu of copying, Ji Shisan said on Fenda that Zhihu was applying the model "mechanically" and that "this model doesn't actually suit Zhihu."

He may be right. Like Fenda, Zhihu Value still depends on WeChat, and it is not deeply built into the Zhihu community.

But Zhihu Value is not the product Zhihu has spent the most time on in monetizing knowledge. Since last summer Zhihu has been preparing a set of products it groups under a "knowledge marketplace" — products meant to help the people who supply information on Zhihu earn money in several ways — and Zhou Yuan, Zhihu's CEO and main founder, runs it himself.

The most important one visible so far is Zhihu Live.

From May 16 on, Zhihu pushed out its voice feature Live at nearly one session a day. For an hour, the host answers the audience's questions by voice online; listeners buy a ticket in advance, priced from 9.9 to 499.9 yuan.

Live is still being polished, and Zhihu, in its usual way, watches the operating details of every single session and adjusts the product and its direction accordingly.

Tipping, launched last week, is built around Zhihu Columns: readers can pay the columns they like. At least three more related products are in development, all of them plugged straight into the Zhihu community.

And Zhihu's community is the challenge Zaihang and Fenda have to face.

Asked about the competition, Zhou Yuan said his team had spent more of its effort on building a platform where knowledge can move: "Take someone like Wang Sicong — you can always find a way to reach him; people like that are just there. But someone with knowledge who is more ordinary, how does he get known on a platform through his own effort, how does he make a name — that is something you have to decide to go and build. We spent a lot of time on it."

Zhihu has now passed Douban, Baidu Zhidao, and Baidu Tieba to become the most active community on the Chinese internet outside Weibo. It is a place where people can make a name, and it also hands Zhihu's products a large supply of users — users interested in acquiring knowledge.

Fenda and Zaihang are still building a community, digging up Big Vs and users at the same time — work Zhihu no longer has to do.

Zaihang's 8,000 experts are the foundation for Fenda, but because they meet people in person, they are not gathered in one online community, in close contact with users. That is why the hottest people on Fenda are internet celebrities and public figures pulled together from everywhere.

And whether it is Papi Jiang, Luo Zhenyu, or Wang Sicong, the hottest internet celebrities do not depend on Fenda the way "Zhihu Big Vs" depend on Zhihu. In principle their existing fame lets them work on any platform: WeChat, livestreaming, Fenda, or whatever attractive platform comes next.

Zhihu's engineering is also clearly more mature. You can feel it using Fenda and Zhihu Value 3.0: both were built in a short time, but Fenda still makes you wait for payments to clear, or cuts the audio out 10 seconds into a listen.

What is visible now is that Ji Shisan and Zaihang will keep launching products to win over Big Vs and their followers. One is Zhi, a phone-call version of Zaihang: the asker puts a question to all the experts and names a price, experts grab the order, the asker picks one of those who grabbed it, the two get on a call, and the deal is done.

Taking on Zhihu's community will probably come down to whether Zaihang can raise money, keep turning out one hit after another, and make good use of platforms like WeChat.

All of that tests what the team can already do. As Ji Shisan said on Fenda in response to Zhihu Value 3.0: "Fast product iteration, product innovation, marketing, and operations are one whole."

But Either Way, Knowledge on the Chinese Internet No Longer Means Free

Whatever the outcome, the past few months are already a big step for the "knowledge economy." It has been a large-scale experiment in paying for information, and so far it shows the idea can catch on.

More companies are getting into the same business. Search "one-on-one consulting services" on IT Juzi, the directory site for internet companies, and 13 comparable companies come up; app stores hold even more "time and skill trading services."

Consumers may increasingly want information services with a person attached to them. Next to reading a celebrity's Weibo posts, which may well have been written by an assistant, today's popular voice services feel real and within reach.

The spread of mobile payment has also made paying simple — simple enough that people may accept it.

Portals got started by "aggregating" information from traditional media. Toutiao used new technology to "aggregate" media information that had already been aggregated once.

Plagiarism, piracy, and the argument that everything on the internet should be free have run in China for more than 20 years, alongside the internet's spread.

Now paying for information has finally become a business model that several companies here are willing to compete over.

Cover image from Visual China Group.