Entrepreneurs join Taobao Live, can the “True Return” story be replicated?

Why do many bankrupt entrepreneurs choose to join Taobao Live? This article helps you explore the reasons and also provides some suggestions for those who want to engage in e-commerce live streaming.

Please imagine this scenario.

If you were a successful entrepreneur with a unicorn company valued at billions, no matter how small your action was, it would be infinitely magnified by the outside world and interpreted in various ways and from various angles.

After a few years, you went bankrupt, but you were not completely "broken" - there were several paths before you: the first was to become a deadbeat and disappear from the public eye with the debts owed to suppliers and endless negative reports; the second was to start a new business with the remaining trust of investors and to embark on the road of entrepreneurship again, which might result in failure or success; the third was to enter Taobao Live with your own entrepreneurial story, become a live-streaming anchor and make a lot of money from the audience.

In terms of the speed of recovery, the first two have a relatively long period of recovery. For example, it took Shi Yuzhu, who calls himself "China's most famous loser", nearly ten years to recover from the huge debt of Giant Group to the explosion of the game ZT Online.

It is different when you are a live streamer. Under the premise of good product selection and perfect live streaming infrastructure, as long as the entrepreneur's story is sexy enough to resonate with the audience in the live streaming room, it probably won't be too difficult to spend a year or two to repeat Luo Yonghao's "True Return Story".

Even if the "brave CEOs" become Taobao anchors, they will still face the same problems as other anchors, big and small, in live streaming. These problems are difficult to solve "one-stop" if they are not professional live streaming organizations. Taobao Live, which has been launched in a fully managed model for more than half a year, has largely solved this problem. Taobao, an e-commerce company, never needs to worry about "traffic".
But whether the CEOs’ “stories” are sexy enough is another question.

1. Bankrupt entrepreneurs flock to the live broadcast room

It seems that everyone is imitating Luo Yonghao's story of successfully paying off his debts by selling goods through live streaming.

In fact, since at least four years ago, it is no longer news that CEOs who failed in business sell goods to pay off their debts.

More recently, for example, Lin Sheng, the CEO of Zhong Xuegao, the former "Ice Cream Assassin", started selling sweet potatoes in his Taobao live broadcast room. However, it is not surprising that netizens dubbed him the "Sweet Potato Assassin" for the sweet potatoes that cost 42.9 yuan per 5 catties.

Going back in time, Li Houlin, CEO of diamond ring brand I Do, started live streaming on Douyin at the end of 2023. The first live broadcast on November 5th generated sales of over 10 million.

Going back further, Song Zheng (Xiaohei), the former executive editor-in-chief of Tianya Community, also launched a live charity sale called "Restart Tianya" on May 28 last year, but after a week, the sales performance was not ideal. According to the data released by the live broadcast room, as of 18:00 on June 3, a total of 149,900 yuan in sales were completed through the Douyin platform, plus nearly 55,000 donations from other platforms, the total income was only 200,000 yuan.

When it comes to the originator of the live broadcast debt repayment industry, Luo Yonghao is obviously unavoidable. The "Make Friends" live broadcast room he opened on Douyin caught up with the node of Douyin's efforts in live broadcast e-commerce, and thus became the benchmark of Douyin e-commerce, and his sales performance is obvious to all. As a result, in the three years of selling goods, he basically achieved the purpose of "live broadcast debt repayment", and took advantage of it to start a new business and embark on the road of entrepreneurship again.

Although the above-mentioned CEOs all carry the common label of "paying off debts through live streaming", their "live streaming talents" are vastly different.

For example, when Lin Sheng, the head of Zhong Xue Gao, first broadcasted on Taobao, he opened a live broadcast room with a huge number printed on the background board: 729. This is the number of employees owed wages by Zhong Xue Gao. Above that, there are two lines of words: Zhong Xue Gao Lao Lin, live broadcast selling sweet potatoes. This is the basic hardware configuration of the live broadcast room.

According to official news from Taobao Live, nearly 20 products were launched in the live broadcast room that night, including Zhong Xue Gao’s own ice cream, cheese from Zhong Xue Gao’s suppliers, and the most popular sweet potatoes.

Obviously, when it comes to the "hard power" links such as pallet supply chain, Lin Sheng's advantages as a CEO of the fast-moving consumer goods industry are highlighted. Even if he does not use the supply chain capabilities provided by Taobao, he can use the company's own supply chain as a product supply channel, without having to build his own supply chain or access a third-party supply chain like other celebrity anchors or CEOs of non-physical industries.
Helping these complete novices in the live streaming e-commerce industry to "get started" smoothly is exactly the problem that Taobao's fully hosted model aims to solve.

2. Is it possible to start broadcasting right away?

As early as February this year, Taobao established a live streaming e-commerce company to provide "nanny-style" fully managed operation services to celebrities, KOLs, and MCN agencies who are interested in broadcasting on Taobao.

The operational services here cover all aspects required for an e-commerce live broadcast, including but not limited to account cold start, full-cycle planning, business docking, official inventory, marketing planning, etc. If you go deeper, there are also deeper full-service services such as financial management and venue support.

From the CEO case in the previous article, we can also find that for some corporate CEOs and celebrities, it is difficult for these professional aspects of the live broadcast industry to build a complete live broadcast system from 0 to 1 if they are new to the industry. Sometimes, even as a partner, they need to intervene in some aspects of the live broadcast.

A PM (product manager) in the fast-moving consumer goods industry told Lujiu Business Review that when connecting with some powerful top anchors, they are often responsible for a series of links such as the live broadcast scripts and live broadcast room construction of their products. If one person completes these preliminary preparations alone, it often takes a long time. During the busiest times, 996 and 007 become the norm.

And these are just a few parts of a live broadcast. For celebrities who are left alone or bankrupt CEOs, their budgets do not support spending such huge costs in the early stages.

But for Taobao, which was the first to start live streaming to sell goods, this problem does not exist.

From the current pattern of the live broadcast e-commerce industry, we can also find clues. So far, the first echelon of live broadcast sales has basically taken shape. Head live broadcast rooms such as Dongfang Zhenxuan, Yaowang Technology, and Jiaoge Pengyou are no longer limited to broadcasting on a single platform. In 2023, seven of the top ten live broadcast rooms in the live broadcast industry have entered Taobao.

The same is true for MCN companies. The anchors they have in their hands, and the ones that need the most support are often not the top anchors who can "start their own business", but the middle and lower anchors with a larger base, and stars who want to transform, etc.

Of course, the full hosting plan here is not for everyone. Currently, it prefers to choose celebrities who have accumulated a certain personality or KOLs who have a certain degree of popularity on other platforms. And the service period is only 6 months. A person close to Taotian told Lujiu Business Review that for these live broadcast novices, if they really want to enter the live broadcast industry, a half-year learning period is enough for them to "debut".

If you want to continue live streaming in the future, you can choose a professional live streaming organization for support. Taobao full hosting is only responsible for "leading you in", and how high you can fly in the end depends on "the individual".

So far, Taobao Live has added hundreds of celebrities to its live broadcasts, including veteran Hong Kong stars such as Christy Chung, Rosamund Kwan, Natalie Tong, and Monica Chan. Prior to this, Auntie Xue and Wang Lin also completed their first live broadcasts on Taobao. In terms of results, Auntie Xue and Wang Lin's live broadcast room exceeded nearly 20 million GMV on the night of the first broadcast, and the live broadcast rooms of several other celebrity anchors also achieved a GMV of more than 15 million in their first show.

3. How long can the business of teaching people to live broadcast last?

From this perspective, Taobao's full hosting is more like a "trainee service" prepared for live streaming newbies such as celebrities and bankrupt entrepreneurs. After a six-month training period, they will "debut" independently, which is in line with the slogan of its promotional poster: "The courageous CEO."

However, as mentioned above, the reason why these entrepreneurs were able to start live streaming was, firstly, "live streaming to pay off debts", which was the gimmick they relied on to start live streaming, and secondly, they relied on the operational capabilities provided by Taobao's full hosting. But in order to finally achieve a deal and continue live streaming, other factors are still needed.

A senior Internet practitioner told Lujiu Business Review that these entrepreneurs who live-stream to pay off debts are not essentially merchants who bring goods, but rather "personal IPs with the attribute of bringing goods", that is, self-media. Therefore, the key to the continuous broadcast of these live-streaming rooms lies in the live-streaming content. The matching of the supply chain and the opening of the live-streaming link can only be regarded as a "threshold".

Whether the live broadcast content is interesting and can continue to create gimmicks depends on the CEO's own "online sense" and whether he can stand on the side of more target audiences and attract more traffic to the live broadcast room. Otherwise, after a single hot event, the traffic will return to where it came from.

There is also a case to follow here. Previously, Zhang Lan's live broadcast room became popular because of the incident related to Wang Xiaofei and Big S, and the sales of goods increased 10 times, with sales of 100 million in a week.

But after becoming a hot topic, sales in Zhang Lan's live broadcast room began to decline, with weekly sales of around 10 to 25 million yuan.

This is true for celebrity gossip, and it is also true for entrepreneurs who want to continue writing the "True Repayment Story". The same "never give up, never give up, insist on live broadcast to repay debts" can be paid once or twice by users, but when this track starts to get crowded, users are not enough. It may be questionable whether Taobao's fully managed 6-month service period can be completed.

After all, not everyone can become Luo Yonghao.

Taobao's invitation to entrepreneurs to join is more like a traffic monetization in the name of sentiment. After all, if these frustrated entrepreneurs don't go to Taobao, they will go to other platforms. And since Taobao's full hosting model, the curse of "the most profitable thing is not XX, but teaching people XX" has officially appeared in the live streaming sales track.

In summary, whether it is the bankrupt CEO or Taobao Live, it will take time to prove that entrepreneurs continuing to write the "True Return Story" can be more than just a gimmick.

Author: Hu Jiaming

Source: Lujiu Finance (ID: liujiucaijing69)