Chapter 53: Surpassing QQ in Three Months?

[PS: An extra chapter will be added tomorrow]

August 3rd, 2001, morning.

“Brother-in-law, up to now, the number of installations for our OO has already surpassed one million users!” Just a week after OO officially launched, Leng Zhimeng excitedly reported this astonishing figure to Huang He.

To be honest, if Tenda were to learn that OO had reached this number of installations, they would probably panic, staying up all night to brainstorm countermeasures. After all, it took Tenda a whole year to go from one installation to a million, but OO managed it in just a week—this speed of catching up is even more terrifying than a bullet train.

Of course, Tenda had no idea, their attention being entirely fixed on foreign instant messaging software, paying no mind to domestic competitors. This wasn’t arrogance but a conclusion proven by history: after 2000, there simply hadn’t been any domestic rivals capable of challenging QQ—unless a time traveler appeared.

“But this number is highly inflated!” Huang He shook his head. “These one million are just installation users. Of these, 95% registered accounts, and among them, 80% never launched the software after installing.”

“So nobody should be fooled by these numbers. Our real registered users are only 200,000… and among those, only 30,000 log in daily, with a peak concurrent online count of 4,800. That’s the true state of OO right now. There’s nothing for us to be proud of!” Huang He spoke seriously, maintaining a clear understanding of their current situation.

All things considered, OO’s growth rate was still impressive—reaching 30,000 daily logins in just a week. Even QQ took over three months to reach that milestone. Achieving this under QQ’s overwhelming dominance was already remarkable.

But with these numbers, not only was defeating QQ out of the question, it wasn’t even enough for QQ to take notice.

“But brother-in-law, I haven’t included the Coralworm OO’s data yet!” Leng Zhimeng said. “Among the more than one million active Coralworm QQ users, 300,000 have become joint users of OO and QQ—and these are all active, logging in every day!”

“But at heart, they’re still QQ’s users, not ours.” Huang He tapped Leng Zhimeng on the forehead. “What I care about most is the data on OO Farm. How is it doing?”

“It’s doing incredibly well!” Leng Zhimeng grinned. “Brother-in-law, did you farm before? Otherwise, how did you know our users would love farming this much? Nearly all OO users are on OO Farm, and on average, every OO user brings in 0.385 new users for me every day—just to get their friends to help them steal crops. And these are basically all active users. If we keep growing at this rate, in three months we’ll surpass Tenda in active users!”

Overtaking Tenda in three months sounded absurd but was actually a strict mathematical conclusion.

Currently, there are 30,000 active users. At a rate of each user bringing in 1.385 people per day, on day two it becomes 41,150, on day three 57,540, on day four 79,700, and by day twenty-two, 28 million. It wouldn’t even take three months—a single month would be enough to surpass Tenda.

Of course, this rate of viral growth would inevitably slow down later on; it couldn’t possibly be sustained. Surpassing Tenda in three months was pure fantasy. But gaining over a million active users in three months was very likely; at that point, OO could finally compete with Tenda head-on.

“And brother-in-law, do you know what other hidden advantage OO Farm has?” Leng Zhimeng asked, keeping a secret.

“I have no idea!” Huang He shook his head; he truly didn’t know.

“I’ll tell you. Among all OO Farm players, 58% are women—over half! And female players are far more active than male players. The men mostly choose crops that take six hours or even twenty-four hours to mature—plants that require little attention.”

“But women are different. Their calculations are meticulous. They’ve realized that planting short-maturing crops yields higher daily returns per plot!”

“So during the day, they pick crops that mature in one or two hours, and are able to log in on the dot to harvest them. When they’re about to go offline, they plant those that need a dozen hours or more. They calculate everything so carefully to maximize their own benefit—something most male users can’t match!”

“Is that so?” Huang He nodded. With Leng Zhimeng’s explanation, he recalled that back in school, it was indeed the girls who played Farm Frenzy most obsessively; men’s interest was much less. After all, a game that requires action every few hours isn’t likely to ignite much passion in men.

But women are different—they love this kind of setup… Of course, what they love most is stealing crops, especially from women they dislike. That brings them the greatest joy.

“Brother-in-law, this means OO has a huge advantage in its proportion of female players—far more than QQ. It’s a strength, but we don’t know how to leverage it. We can’t just go around saying OO has more female users!” Leng Zhimeng said, clearly troubled.

“You’ve made a very important point!” Huang He’s expression grew excited; he hadn’t noticed this at all, but Leng Zhimeng had thought of everything. It seemed she truly had the makings of a capable CEO.

At the same time, he himself needed to figure out how to use this so-called advantage—female users are the ultimate weapon for attracting male users!

“Oh, right—brother-in-law, Mom says you haven’t been home in a while. She went to the market this morning and bought three pairs of fresh pig kidneys. She insists you come home for dinner tonight!”

“Alright.” Huang He nodded. The factory was basically back to normal now, and even the lines that had previously shut down were running again.

With blind box orders pouring in from all over the country, their leather goods inventory was depleting rapidly, though it was still sufficient for now.

The problem was, there weren’t many creations left from the Italian masters. So Huang He started up two production lines to manufacture more items based on the masters’ designs.

Moreover, some people complained the blind box products were too monotonous, so Huang He decided to launch a handbag production line, focusing on women’s leather backpacks.

This was a production line he had already built before his time-travel—the whole thing had cost over 30 million yuan. At the time, Huang He was brimming with confidence, determined to break into the women’s handbag market.

According to what he had observed while studying abroad, once the people of Huaxia became wealthy, women’s handbags would become the largest segment of the leather goods market. Now was a perfect time to enter.

It had to be admitted, Huang He’s business vision was sharp; it was his actual management skills and risk control that had been lacking, and he’d moved too aggressively. As a result, the handbag line had barely launched before going bankrupt without producing a single bag.

But with the sales boom of the blind boxes, and a little breathing room financially, Huang He was ready to officially restart the handbag line, producing a small batch to include in the blind boxes—this way, the blind boxes could crack open the women’s market.

As fate would have it, both OO and the blind boxes had reached the point where leveraging the female market was essential.