Turning social apps into business schools
Veteran mushroom farmer Zhang Xuewei can definitely show you the ropes when it comes to running a business by cashing in on the growing popularity of social messaging apps on the Chinese mainland.
He has been growing mushrooms for a decade, and is determined not to forsake his vast pool of knowledge of the trade by giving lessons to mushroom keepers on the ubiquitous WeChat platform.
Since May last year, more than 2,000 farmers across the country have benefited from Zhang’s expertise that has helped him rake in 26,000 yuan ($4,112.9). More significantly, based on the feedback from his students, he also runs a shop selling modified tools, earning him a further 280,000 yuan.
The process is so simple that students need not attend a forum and teachers do not need to set up websites. All he needs to do is spending an hour preparing a lesson lasting some 45 minutes and creating a WeChat group of up to 500 user accounts, with almost zero capital investment.
Once the lesson starts, Zhang sends out audio messages and photos to the group and his students can ask questions directly and they would be given appropriate answers.
Making use of small-time slots to study online is becoming all the rage in China, and people are willing to pay for these lessons to help enrich their knowledge in various aspects.
WeChat and Weibo have naturally become ideal platforms because of the low threshold to start for everyone
— there’s no need to develop an application.
Training lessons using social networks also has the advantage of attracting users at low cost, says Li Songlin, an analyst at iiMedia Research.
Besides, audio content is the choice of the majority of netizens — 41.6 percent — when surfing for online lessons, according to a survey conducted by the consultancy last year.
Although there is only a handful of social networkbased online learning platforms in China so far, they have attracted investments from industry giants like Tencent Holdings, which runs WeChat.
However, Li is concerned about controlling content quality, unsatisfactory user experience, and burgeoning video content as web communication is speeding up to the 5G era.
Huang Guan, founder and chief executive officer of Shenzhen-based micro-lesson platform Lizhi, is determined to upgrade the micro-learning tool.
The 28-year-old entrepreneur established the startup in 2016, covering training sessions from all walks of life — from parenting to wealth management, technology to psychology, and farming to fashion — at prices ranging from zero to hundreds of yuan.
He found WeChat group lessons do have limitations, such as poor audio quality, difficulty in managing several groups at the same time, and interruption in between the teacher’s messages.
To cope with such difficulties, he converted group chatting into a H5 page. It still looks and feels like a chatting room which users have accustomed themselves to, but it does not have limitations on the number of participants, and trainers’ messages can’t be interrupted by those of users, while training content can be reviewed.
The privacy of participants is also protected as they can’t send messages to others privately or add other learners as WeChat friends.
“The challenge is to guarantee its stability even when the interactive volume is huge,” Huang points out. At peak time, Lizhi has dealt with twoway live-streaming lessons with 100,000 users online simultaneously, enabled by their own algorithm.
In addition, he led the team to develop technology to improve the audio quality and insert video in its H5 classes.
WeChat only allows audio messaging for as long as 60 seconds, but Lizhi technology could automatically cut audio documents so that teachers don’t need to stop constantly during a lesson.
As for improving content quality, Lizhi last July initiated a plan to invest 20 million yuan in cultivating 1,000 trainers to produce systematic lessons, and they would be able to make a monthly income of 100,000 yuan in future.
These features have helped Lizhi much favored by more than 820,000 online trainers and over 150 million users, aged from 6 to 80 years. More than 1.2 million lessons are created and its investors have poured in more than $10 million.
As an avid fan of computer technology since childhood, Huang is very glad to “increase the efficiency of information spreading”.
Hailing from a village in a mountainous area in Guangdong province, he has learned coding by himself on the internet. “It has changed my life,” he says, noting he is being able to pay for his siblings’ tuition with money he has made from coding.
“People usually can’t get sufficient and up-to-date knowledge in small towns, so I hope the technology could really improve their lives, like people learning how to raise pigs and fish on Lizhi.”
Huang Guan,