Article reprint source: AI DreamWorks
Original: Xie Meng
Source: Jianshi
It is really not feasible to raise funds by hyping concepts in the AI industry nowadays. More investors are beginning to require entrepreneurs to make money first.
This is the deepest feeling after in-depth discussions with investors and many AI entrepreneurs. But at the same time, we also found that entrepreneurs in the strong application layer of AI are still full of vitality in this "investment winter".
Some time before Jianshi organized the AIGC conference, we noticed that Tuzhan, a company with AIGC as its core, had completed its D and D+ rounds of financing, with a total amount of over 100 million yuan.
"We have been accumulating experience in the field of AI for a long time, which is why we have achieved our current results," said Dong Shaoling, the founder of Tuzhan, who was very calm about this round of financing. The long-term accumulation is the basis for them to obtain financing.
As early as after making several popular tools, Tuzhan began to consider whether the template generation process could be "AI-ized". This is something that the company began to think about and plan shortly after its establishment in 2014. The company has also carried out in-depth production and research cooperation with Peking University for many years, thus laying a solid foundation in the field of AI.
Over the past nine years, the Tuzhan team has independently developed a number of products including communication big data tools, marketing cloud platforms, digital human tools, etc. These innovative achievements have been widely used by corporate users, covering multiple industries such as finance, medicine, and real estate.
To quote Dong Shaoling, "Those who want to enter this niche market this year will not be able to compete with those who have already made plans and accumulated experience." Only with great accumulation can there be great success. For Tuzhan, taking one step at a time is their deepest feeling in the field of AI entrepreneurship.
Next, let’s go back to the conversation with Dong Shaoling and see what the Rabbit Exhibition has accumulated over the years. As follows, enjoy:
Without a good product, investors will ignore you.
Jianshi: How do you feel about our entire financing process?
Dong Shaoling: The overall economy now is different from the past when everyone was particularly optimistic and excited. Now it is even more about selecting the best from the best, and it is a matter of mutual consent.
So from a strategic perspective, I think the whole process was smooth. From a tactical perspective, of course, there were some setbacks. For example, even though this investment was belated, there was actually a lot of capital interested in us last year. The epidemic did have a certain impact last year, and some cooperation and investment were forced to extend the battle line.
Jianshi: What do you think is the most impressive factor for investors?
Dong Shaoling: Actually, I think there are three points.
The first point is the feasibility of the product.
From our observations of financing, there is no prior trust or default trust in communication with investors, only earned trust. It doesn't mean that I will get financing if I have a product that looks very cool. It is more likely that I will get financing only after I run this thing through, and it is feasible and predictable in the future, and then investors will think that this is a company worth investing in.
The second point is the long-term product polishing in the vertical field, that is, the uniqueness of the product.
In a vertical field, our products can be regarded as unique. We truly use standardized products to serve leading companies in the digital content market, and have achieved a user renewal rate of nearly 130%.
The third point is that our growth is stable.
Last year we had a growth of nearly 60 percentage points. At a time when the overall situation was pessimistic, our data gave everyone some support for optimism.
My inner feeling is that I have to prepare a step at each stage. We don’t have an elevator. At each stage, I have to climb up a floor, then gain the trust that I deserve at that floor, and then climb to the next floor.
Jianshi: Where will the raised funds be invested in the future?
Dong Shaoling: Our products have always revolved around the three aspects of human narrative: interactive experience, senses, and knowledge understanding.
This may be a little difficult to understand for people who don’t know much about the AI industry. Take the senses for example. Human senses involve vision, hearing, taste, and smell. Some AI systems are already able to classify and predict tastes and aromas based on input sample data.
These samples include ingredients, recipes and preparation methods of food and beverages. Through training, these systems have been able to recognize the characteristics of different tastes and aromas and predict the taste and smell of new samples.
It is not difficult to imagine that in the future everyone will use all kinds of methods to convert information that humans can perceive, or even cannot perceive, into digital signals for AI to learn.
This is also one of our visions, so we will continue to invest in this core mission and make understanding more universal. Another thing is to better solve the problem of human sensory understanding, especially the understanding of knowledge fields with barriers.
From H5 to AIGC content engine, we are more pragmatic
Jianshi: In fact, from what I heard, you have been planning in the field of AI for a long time. How did you think of the transition from H5 tools to the core content of AIGC?
Dong Shaoling: We started with H5 and launched four popular tools in the content production field, processing pictures, videos, games and interactions. The users of these tools cover more than 15 million governments and enterprises. However, how to achieve efficient monetization was a problem we had not yet solved.
So, we began to explore the back-end marketing cloud. In the marketing cloud link, the main problem we faced was how to upgrade the marketing methods for small and micro enterprises through a large number of user surveys. In order to achieve SaaS in a standardized and privatized environment, we focused on leading enterprises and found opportunities to achieve this goal in the financial industry.
The financial industry has extremely high requirements for software, and the budget is relatively sufficient. In this field, we found that many contents need to be intelligent, such as showing different rights, materials and products to Group A and Group B.
In order to meet this demand, financial institutions spend a lot of money or adopt outsourcing methods to dig out the jobs required in more than a dozen links such as front-end engineers, design planners and technical developers from traditional financial listed companies or modern digital marketing companies.
Since 2018, we have been committed to solving the problem of improving the efficiency of all types of digital content that requires heavy front-end development. Therefore, we defined the world's fourth-generation front-end three musketeers, including zero-code tools, low-code tools, and full-code/automatic code tools. In the second half of last year, we upgraded to the four musketeers with AI code capabilities.
At present, in the field of high-end digital content production, our productized competitors cannot automatically generate code directly through the UI design process, but our products can achieve this goal, which is a unique advantage of ours.
Jianshi: Your field sounds very vertically segmented, and it seems like a field that many people don’t take seriously.
Dong Shaoling: Of course, these are exactly where our opportunities lie, such as the questions often asked in the SaaS industry, such as how to renew and how to standardize large customers.
We think these questions raise some good points, and we solve challenges that people would immediately dismiss. Because of this, we see opportunities and scarcity.
Some investors believe that the cost of acquiring small and micro customers has exceeded their profits, so the entire track has no future. However, they may not have considered that a data search business like Chanmama can achieve a profit of nearly 100 million yuan with a revenue of 200 million yuan.
When a profitable product appears, that is exactly where the opportunity lies. Others only consider one step, but we need to consider three steps, or even more, to seize the opportunity.
If we had gathered AI resources and started working on AI this year, we would have no chance. Our idea came earlier. Although it seems a bit unrealistic to dream about this type of thing now, our success today is precisely because we have this awareness from the beginning.
Although customers may have 100 options, the trust, cooperation and reliable cooperation between us that we have been doing this for eight years give us a competitive advantage. I believe that with this advantage, everyone will choose to work with us without hesitation to move forward together.
Everything will be fine, just keep going
Jianshi: What do you think of this wave this year?
Dong Shaoling: In fact, the real turning point was in November last year. We had been working on automatic content production, automatic typesetting, and automatic Chinese art font generation for many years but had not done a good job. After the AI became popular, we found that there were actually no obstacles to these points from a scientific research perspective.
In the past, AI could only do a certain job and was not very smart. It was like training a child to screw nails from birth. When he grows up to 18 years old, he can already screw nails very well, but he only knows how to screw nails.
It is different now. Now it is moving towards a universal path. As long as the model is well made, it can be used for writing, drawing, video editing, and interaction using natural language. Humans do not need to have a high cost to get started. Therefore, the main reason for the AIGC wave this year is that its commercial value is explosive.
Jianshi: Everyone is catching up with the AI wave this year. Are you doing any upgrades or applications?
Dong Shaoling: We have been doing some research in this field, but the breakthroughs are not big. We also have some cooperation and research with teachers from Peking University. In November last year, it was the teachers who got excited first and asked us to do a lot of in-depth discussions.
During the Spring Festival this year, we first tried out AIGC's digital human. This digital human is not a traditional photographic digital human, but a digital human that is directly produced through a photo and a voice. We produced 1 million in two days, and we were completely excited at the time. If we used photographic digital humans, we might not be able to produce so many in our lifetime.
Now we have produced so much in just two days, and all of them are made using AIGC's technical route, which means that we will have a qualitative leap in future product research and development.
Jianshi: I remember that at the beginning of this year, some people said that the market was still very active, and then by the end of the year or until now, many people are saying that the entire market is in a cold state. So what do you think of the current market?
Dong Shaoling: Now we are indeed missing an important buyer who is willing to give high valuations and place large orders for dreams. We do need to re-establish a new valuation system, which may cause some pain. So I think the current market is asking us to continue to do valuable things. Hot and cold economies are bound to exist, and fluctuations in everyone’s confidence are inevitable, but things will eventually get better.
As a technology company, Huawei is a good example to learn from. Take Huawei's experience as an example. If you want to do big things, you can't go through some twists and turns. So every time we encounter some difficulties, we will think of Huawei first, and think of their experience, and then we feel that the problems we are facing now are not a big deal.