"D tone imitates Musical.ly from product to operational strategy."

Yang Luyu, the founder of Musical.ly in 2017, was facing a difficult bone, when the Musical.ly platform quickly opened the US market and gradually spread to the European market due to the 15-second lip-syncing short video gameplay. It became one of the most successful cases of domestic Internet entrepreneurship in those years, but Yang Luyu found a thorny problem.

At that time, Yangluyu, who wanted to return to China for development, found that the D sound in the domestic market was almost a pixel-level copy Musical.ly from multiple dimensions such as positioning, function, and opening interface. Moreover, D Yin has already made 18 million daily lives with the traffic support of today's headlines. Facing the competitor of D Yin, Yang Luyu felt that it was a troubled thing.

But Yang Luyu's troubles did not last long.

In November 2017, ByteDance acquired Musical.ly for a billion US dollars, and in August 2018, Musical.ly users in overseas markets were officially merged into the T-Tok platform, so from this point of view, Yangluyu is the founder of T-Tok's high market share overseas.

Yang Luyu was also integrated into the ByteDance team, when Zhang Yiming told him that he hoped that the company could go from soft to hard and from online to offline in the future. After Zhang Yiming revealed the development strategy of the hardware he wanted to focus on, Yang Luyu began to be in charge of ByteDance's education hardware business, completing the construction of the business from 0 to 1. The vigorous intelligent work lights led by Yang Luyu have also been favored by Zhang Yiming and Vice President Chen Lin, and have repeatedly evaluated internally as a bright breakthrough in the education business. Although not a member of the founding team, Yang Luyu is also one of the core figures of ByteDance.

Such a core figure has recently been revealed to have left ByteDance.

From founding Musical.ly being chased and acquired by Facebook and ByteDance, to holding hands with ByteDance to develop educational hardware, and now leaving Byte, Yangluyu is in the center of changes in the short video industry and Internet education.

Founded T-Tok's "past life" Musical.ly and sold his body bytes Now T-Tok

can sing all the way in overseas markets, which is inseparable from the Musical.ly founded by Yang Luyu and Zhu Jun.

Back in 2015, when Yang Luyu's startup website for college students and the clothing customization project both failed. After failing to start a business twice, Yang Luyu seemed a little discouraged and started a normal life. At that time, he joined EPRO Software, which was doing global business, and when he was on a business trip to the United States, he happened to meet his former friend Zhu Jun, who was doing research on future education at SAP in the United States.

After communicating with Zhu Jun, the two hit it off and decided to leave and start a business. In 2014, Yang Luyu and Zhu Jun spent six months in Shanghai with the raised $250,000 to polish an educational video app called "Cicada". This APP mainly imparts knowledge points through 3-5 minute short videos recorded by experts. However, the user interaction cost of this APP is high, and it is difficult to attract user participation, due to the lack of interactivity. After a few months, 8% of the $250,000 raised.

Zhu Jun once saw a group of children entertaining in two ways, listening to songs and adding music to videos. It occurred to him what would happen if these two methods were combined? After the idea was born, he returned to Shanghai and explained his imagination with Yang Luyu. Within a month, Yang Luyu browsed the global APP at that time, and after careful research, decided to make a short video APP. But at that time, the duo had little entrepreneurial capital left.

In 2015, the Musical.ly without publicity was quietly launched, and Yang Luyu and Zhu Jun did nothing, but simply put the APP on the shelves and waited for the judgment of fate.

A few months after its launch, a group of kids in Texas discovered the Musical.ly and began to spread it through friends, and the number of users Musical.ly skyrocketed. Four times as many user emails received in two months as Cicada's operating year in a year. Later, after being introduced at the party, Yang Luyu met the relevant personnel of Cheetah, and after several communications, Musical.ly finally ushered in life-saving money and got Cheetah A round of 5 million investment.

With the blessing of capital Musical.ly expanded rapidly, and won the first place in the Apple Store on Yangluyu's birthday. Musical.ly also became one of the favorite social apps of young Americans at that time. The Musical.ly of the big move has attracted the attention of the giants.

Under the recommendation of the B round investor SIG, Zhang Yiming and Yang Luyu met, at that time ByteDance began to lay out the development of globalization, and the domestic D tone was just starting for half a year, and the two sides discussed the development of the short video business, but the communication between the two sides was only business-level communication.

communication between the two penetrated into life, and Zhang Yiming knew that after Yang Luyu broke his hand playing with the balance bike, he often cared about greeting him. After a period of running-in, Zhang Yiming proposed to buy Musical.ly for $1 billion, nearly half the price than Facebook. But Yang Luyu accepted the acquisition agreement because Facebook gave all cash, and ByteDance gave cash and stock. Secondly, Yang Luyu himself is deeply fascinated by ByteDance's algorithm.

ByteDance brought Musical.ly under its umbrella and merged its users into T-Tok, and at the time of the merger Musical.ly the number of overseas users had reached 100 million, which undoubtedly provided a huge boost to T-Tok's overseas development. And this polytechnic man, who liked to look up at the stars during college, also chose "sixpence" to enter the big factory and started a new life.

Regaining his dream of education, after Byte encountered Waterloo

joined ByteDance, they took two paths, and Zhu Jun chose to continue to develop in the short video business. In 2019, Zhu Jun became the head of T-Tok, and later began to be responsible for D sound, reporting to Zhang Nan. In March 2020, Zhu Jun became the head of strategic investment of ByteDance, responsible for product strategy, corporate strategy and investment. At that time, Zhang Yiming specially emphasized that "this year, together with Zhu Jun, we will improve the global management team of ByteDance".

Compared with Zhu Jun, who chose to do the short video business that he is good at, Yang Luyu has found a new challenge for himself. Yang Luyu cut off Eason Chen's hairstyle and cut it into inches, less unruly taste back then. After changing his hairstyle, Yang Luyu "disappeared" in front of everyone, first working as an assistant next to Zhang Yiming for half a year. Until half a year later, Yang Luyu said in the circle of friends that "I have been in retreat for more than half a year, and I plan to make some hard goods for education."

At this time, ByteDance attached great importance to the development of the education industry, Zhang Yiming once said, "We will be patient with education for a long time." Chen Lin, the head of the education business, also directly stated that vigorous education can not be profitable for three years. It can be seen that at that time, for ByteDance, it was determined to redo education and fight a tough battle.

In ByteDance's education business, Yang Luyu is mainly responsible for the intelligent hardware product line. Based on intelligent hardware equipment and educational attributes, Yangluyu chose to take smart desk lamps as the entry point. In his opinion, desk lamps are a standing product on students' desks, so there is no user education cost, and the penetration rate is very high. It is said that within ByteDance, Yang Luyu proposed a vision: to use smart desk lamps to connect the desks of thousands of students, thus forming the largest classroom in human history.

In addition to desk lamps, Yang Luyu also develops software and educational services, which are collectively known as "triathlons". After two years of in-house polishing, the product was launched. In terms of products, Yang Luyu mainly highlights the word "autonomy", and he hopes that the powerful smart lamp can help students independently drive into learning, independently formulate learning plans, independently control the learning process, and independently evaluate learning effects. Through artificial intelligence to provide enough help and guidance, parents can rest assured of the learning effect of students, so as to stay away from students' learning space and let students be in an independent learning environment.

After the product positioning became clearer, it inherited ByteDance's consistent style - fast in terms of launching on the market.

In order to cultivate the user's mind in the shortest possible time, the team was determined to put a lot of ads on D tone without the volume of traffic. Yang Luyu once said, "We do this business ourselves, not a pure hardware business, so the hardware is not profitable is within our expectations, we are losing money and selling." Hardware is a service carrier. At this time, the team level also continued to expand, ByteDance merged the hammer hardware team into the smart lamp team, reporting to Yang Luyu and Chen Lin, so far the team led by Yang Luyu in ByteDance has reached the scale of 1,000 people.

However, after smashing the marketing expansion team, it did not get the desired sales, and the expected sales of Vigorous Smart Lights in 2021 were 2 million units, but only half of them were completed by the end of the year.

Before the powerful smart lamp began to make a profit and complete the vision of Yangluyu, the "double reduction" policy quietly came.

After the "double reduction" landed, the online education industry slumped, and the education hardware business was also affected. Layoffs became the key word in ByteDance's education business. YOU SHOOT ONE, GOGOKID STOPS OPERATING; removed about 50% of the experience class tutors of Guagulong; Qingbei Online School has launched all junior high school system courses.

Among them, the intelligent hardware team of Vigorous Education in charge of Yangluyu is one of the hardest hit areas of the entire education line layoffs, according to public information, the next Vigorous Intelligent Learning Light will not launch new products. There are no strong smart lights in the rivers and lakes, and Yangluyu's educational dream has once again been broken.

This wave of layoffs spread to the top.

According to the report, "On August 31, a small meeting was held within Vigorous Intelligence, Yangluyu was transferred to a post, no longer responsible for Vigorous Intelligent business, and the next step was Yangluyu more responsible for Vigorous Education product strategy, including the linkage of its products, innovative product exploration, and the strategic planning of the entire product." After Yang Luyu was no longer responsible for the vigorous intelligent business, the hardware business was handed over to Yang Kang, who was previously in charge of Qingbei Online School.

A year after switching to strategic planning, Yang Luyu chose to bid farewell to his former friend Zhu Jun who fought side by side, and ByteDance. This serial entrepreneur, who has repeatedly lost battles, may also be looking for the next battlefield.

According to the information of Tianyancha, Yang Luyu is currently a shareholder of many companies, including Zhejiang Super Brain Space-Time Technology Company. This is a representative of a third-generation blockchain public chain system, and the CEO is the former technical director of Alibaba's security business group. In addition, there are companies such as Shanghai Makuma Film Entertainment and Nanjing Mars Walk.

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