From opening a tavern to opening a hotel, the secret of Tiaohai is "Liberal Arts Students' Entrepreneurship" | Exclusive Interview

Interview | Yang Xuan

Arranged | Lan Jie

"Liking Diving into the Sea is like liking hope. This is the only story I've heard this year that is still growing," a friend in the venture capital circle said to Liang You (nicknamed "Liang Ergou"), the founder of Diving into the Sea Tavern this year.

This chain tavern not only survived the epidemic. In the Moments of Sui Yi, my former colleague and co-founder of Diving into the Sea, I can always see the news that a new Diving into the Sea Tavern has opened again and again. After it received financing from Challenger Capital in September this year - it is also a rare thing for consumer projects to get financing nowadays - there were about twenty Diving into the Sea Taverns at the beginning of this year, and now the number has doubled to 40.

Today, when there is insufficient demand, the new consumption is depressed, and the overall consumption is dominated by "low price", the story of Diving into the Sea is undoubtedly an exception.

What is the secret of Diving into the Sea's continuous growth?

From the appearance of the store, even though Liang You listed many elaborate designs of Diving into the Sea to me, I have to say that this tavern is unremarkable. Only when night falls and many young people are crowded at the entrance of Diving into the Sea, does this unusual liveliness show its specialty.

A particularly large number of customers, particularly good income and profits, and particularly high prices of alcohol that are complained about - when a general craft beer bar sells a glass of beer for 50 yuan, Diving into the Sea sells it for 70 yuan - together constitute a good business.

How good is the business? The gross profit is about 75%, the坪效 is close to 40,000 yuan/square meter, and all the stores are profitable.

In the previous discussions about the Diving into the Sea model, its business secret can be summarized as "drainage". Specifically, the first is "people first, then stores". Liang You first gathered a group of friends who could be invited to drink. After the number of people was so large that a WeChat group of 500 people could not hold them, he opened the first Diving into the Sea store; then it is the "bartender model", which allows the part-time bartender friends to bring their friends, bringing new customers beyond Liang You's personal circle of friends, so that new stores can also be opened.

In other words, this is an offline chain store supported by "private domain traffic". Behind this is Liang You's clear understanding after many entrepreneurial attempts: Online traffic is too expensive. Only when the traffic is in your own hands can you get rid of the fate of working for the platform.

But it is too shallow to understand Diving into the Sea only with "drainage".

In these years when the story of "private domain traffic" is prevalent, we have seen too many dead WeChat groups. The operational actions are like advertising machines without emotions, and the final effect is also difficult to evaluate.

The background color of the story of Diving into the Sea is not the cold "drainage", but the operation of the community. There are too many "liberal arts students" elements, which exceed the general business rationality and data analysis.

If the bartenders of Diving into the Sea are compared to the KOLs of the online community, what kind of temperament are these people? How to establish norms and conventions for the entire community? What is the underlying psychology of community members' "addiction" to Diving into the Sea?

So Liang You very much hopes that everyone can understand the "liberal arts students" story of Xiaohongshu, so that it will be much easier for him to explain Diving into the Sea to his partners.

Because of this, I caught Liang You and talked about many liberal arts topics beyond pure business rationality. In addition, I asked many times whether the gameplay of Diving into the Sea can work in other fields.

Liang You thinks it can. He himself plans to expand this gameplay of community operation to youth hostels and long-term rental apartments. At the beginning of this year, he wrote in his Jike as follows: There are many things that this set of Diving into the Sea can do, depending on how big our ideas are.

The following is a conversation between 36Kr and Liang You, with some editing and simplification.

1. Why is it Diving into the Sea?

Yang Xuan: You were a member of the entrepreneurial team of Someet, a social platform for young people. Some people say that "Diving into the Sea is actually the bar version of Someet". Many of my post-90s colleagues have used Someet, and I was once a young Beipiao who can understand that young people who come to big cities have a strong social need to fight against loneliness. But Someet was not commercially successful. In the end, has it been proved that a bar is a better way to solve the social needs of young people?

Liang You: There are many activities initiated by users on the Someet platform, and there are three to four hundred high-quality activities in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou every week. There is a concept in e-commerce called people, goods and places, while we have people, space and content, and we try to make matches and optimizations. Now that I'm doing Diving into the Sea, it becomes that the activities initiated by those users are held in different stores, and we use different activities to fill different spaces. This is also the optimization and matching of people, space and content.

Yang Xuan: But compared with coming to Diving into the Sea to drink, the activity planning of Someet mode is non-standard, which requires an event planner with strong planning and organizational skills, which is more difficult to do.

Liang You: The co-founder Sui Yi and the founder Xiaobai of Someet have particularly high requirements for the quality of activities, but the higher the activity quality, the higher the threshold, and the number of users cannot increase. In order to allow ordinary people to initiate activities on it, Someet even set up a department called product manager of activities (PMA). Each activity has a PMA to help the initiator do the activity well, and this role is part-time - this is actually the basic idea of the bartender of Diving into the Sea, letting users help complete the delivery of a certain product.

But the problem of Someet is the business model. In the end, we can only charge membership fees from members. After collecting it, the monthly active users dropped by half. This is the dilemma at that time.

Yang Xuan: speaking of our common friend Sui Yi, he also worked at Someet and ran a home bar. He is also a wine partner with a literary and artistic atmosphere. Why did his bar close, but the Diving into the Sea Tavern can continue to grow?

Liang You: His tavern at that time was said to close when it earned (income) three thousand yuan today. His demand for expression is far greater than the commercial demand.

He was the co-founder and actually my leader at that time. Now he is a partner of Diving into the Sea, and our roles have been reversed because I am more commercial.

Yang Xuan: So friends who don't want to make money are finally led by friends who want to make money? (Laughs) Let's talk about the expansion of Diving into the Sea. I once talked to Wu Jun, the founder of San Dun Ban. To some extent, his coffee shop in Changsha had a similar temperament - friends went because he was there - but it was impossible to open a branch because there was only one Wu Jun.

Liang You: The bottlenecks of both cafes and cocktail bars lie in how to establish their own "De Yun She". A barista/bartender needs both professional skills and the ability to communicate with people, and people who have both of these abilities have opened their own stores. But if everyone is in a short-term relationship, and the bartender of Diving into the Sea only comes to pour drinks once or twice a month, the economic leverage will be blurred.

But if everyone has a one-day trial work every night, the service standard will definitely be unstable. If this can be accepted by customers, this thing will be established. This is the thinking behind the bartender system of Diving into the Sea: I fully accept all the complaints related to the service. I have to choose one of these two poisons.

Yang Xuan: You said that the bartender system of Diving into the Sea was actually an unintentional move because you wanted to go out and play and find someone to take your shift?

Liang You: This is the story, but there is a very serious thinking behind it. I believe that every bar owner has asked friends to help watch the store, but no one has systematized it: You have to think about the problem on a scale of 100 times larger. When I only had one store, I was thinking, if there were 100 Diving into the Sea, what kind of mechanism would be needed.

Yang Xuan: These thoughts have a bit of the taste of the "Internet thinking" residue (Laughs).

Liang You: Haha. At that time, I was thinking about whether to take 5 - 10 years to do it as an entrepreneurship. So after the first store in Beijing opened, the second one was in Guangzhou, the third one was in Chongqing, and the fourth one was in Shenzhen - I need to transplant these methodologies that I have summarized to completely different markets for verification.

Yang Xuan: To cross the huge geographical differences of cities to verify the methods, or to make local adaptations.

Liang You: Localized fine-tuning is definitely needed, and this is also the most interesting part. We will try the effect of the same activity or methodology in different cities, and the person in charge of each city will give feedback to the headquarters. This process is continuous. We call this the "Octopus Theory".

For example, the very popular "Academic Bar" now, we actually did it a long time ago.

Yang Xuan: When we media people hear it, we know that the "Academic Bar" is unsustainable. We know too well how difficult it is to produce good content.

Liang You: Yes, we also found it difficult to continue in practice. So now we do the "Diving into the Sea Night School". Everyone plays land surfing, skateboarding, and African drums in the store. It is more relaxing and more experiential, and everyone can participate. Such activities have been retained.

2. Community Life

Yang Xuan: If you are essentially an offline community, what do you think of online communities? Recently, the report criticizing the entrepreneurship of liberal arts students on Xiaohongshu has been very popular. What do you think?

Liang You: I very much hope that Xiaohongshu can succeed, so that the explanation of Diving into the Sea will be less difficult. We are also liberal arts students' entrepreneurship, and many problems of Xiaohongshu are also the difficulties that Diving into the Sea is currently facing. You need to sacrifice some efficiency in exchange for a certain sense of community and fault tolerance.

Yang Xuan: I think the most powerful thing about Xiaohongshu is that it has a sense of neighborhood and altruism, and the process of sharing and interaction is very addictive.

Liang You: This is a very scarce thing nowadays. Xiaohongshu must have done something right, otherwise it would not have reached this scale.

Liberal arts students' entrepreneurship, represented by ByteDance, has been done to the extreme. But I believe that in addition to the A side of this world, there is also a B side. In addition to this method, there must be other methods.

Yang Xuan: Then what is the difference between Diving into the Sea and online communities?

Liang You: Communities based on online sharing have more power relations. One of the successful points of Xiaohongshu is that it gave up the concept of "big V", so its community atmosphere is very good now. But even so, you will still have fan anxiety and like anxiety. Likes are power.

I actually don't like ByteDance very much. I looked through Zhang Yiming's Douban. He gave "Chungking Express" two stars, "2046" one star, and "Apocalypse Now" one star, but gave "Kung Fu Panda" and "Detective Dee" four stars. So I'm not surprised that he can create such a company and products. I think the algorithm is enslaving some people.

I am a person who is very sensitive to power relations. But it is easier to break through this power relation offline. All the communities of Diving into the Sea are based on offline stores and geographical locations. And when you are drinking in a tavern, you will probably put down your phone and have a "look into each other's eyes" communication.

Yang Xuan: Life needs a more complete and three-dimensional experience.

Liang You: The value that Diving into the Sea provides, I call it community life.

Yang Xuan: The epidemic seems to have brought a change: Many young friends have realized that what I want is experience and life, rather than owning something. The so-called "I don't want to fall into the trap of consumerism anymore".

Liang You: Yes. Do people really come to Diving into the Sea for the alcohol itself? Drinking at home is the most efficient, comfortable and cheap, but why do you come out to drink? I think 80% has nothing to do with the alcohol itself.

Yang Xuan: Coming out to drink is still for socializing and relieving loneliness.

Liang You: Loneliness is the norm for modern people. Anyone living in a first-tier city will face this kind of loneliness.

But some users, after hearing our sharing in the media, will have overly high expectations of Diving into the Sea, thinking that as long as they come, they will definitely meet many people, etc. But in fact, it is not. We are more like borrowing a lighter or passing by for a light social interaction. We can only provide the first step, and the second to the tenth steps need you to come by yourself.

There should be some blank space between people, which extremely rational companies may not understand.

Yang Xuan: So the alcohol in Diving into the Sea is more expensive than other places. Can it be understood as the premium brought by solving social needs? When 36Kr last reported on the financing of Diving into the Sea, the comment area was still dissing that the alcohol in Diving into the Sea is too expensive.

Liang You: Offline consumption is different from buying things on online e-commerce. An e-commerce coupon will greatly affect your consumption behavior, but the decision-making threshold for offline consumption is very high: You dress up, go out and take a taxi, these are all costs. You will not go to the next bar just because the alcohol there is ten or twenty yuan cheaper. I have a better experience than the next door, and it's okay to sell it more expensive. Consumers are not stupid. And if you think it's expensive, you can come to Diving into the Sea to pour drinks. As long as you don't drink too much, you can drink for free.

A high price does not mean that the business is not established, nor does it mean that it has no social value.

Yang Xuan: The demands for becoming a three-dimensional person and anti-alienation are widespread, but neither Someet nor Douban groups have developed a particularly good business model until the emergence of Diving into the Sea.

Liang You: An organization needs an economic basis to operate, and we use the price of alcohol to solve this problem. So I can withstand all the remarks that criticize the expensive alcohol of Diving into the Sea. It is the economic basis.

I think more mature people should focus on how to make things continue and make everyone benefit.

3. The Method of Diving into the Sea Cannot Be Learned

Yang Xuan: I think one thing is worthy of the attention of today's bosses: Consumers are paying more attention to the emotional atmosphere rather than the specific products. For example, an important element of the popularity of rock climbing is that the atmosphere in the rock climbing gym is very friendly and encouraging, which can complete some light social interactions. Just like people come to Diving into the Sea not for the alcohol, do people really go to the rock climbing gym just for rock climbing? I don't think so.

Liang You: It's like going to Jolin Tsai's concert. It's not all about wanting to hear her sing, but wanting to sing along with her and with the whole audience.

The world is not what many people imagine.

Yang Xuan: Based on this cognition, if I am a yoga studio or a restaurant, can I learn this set of Diving into the Sea, including community operation, bartender system, etc.?

Liang You: It can be learned. With the progress of technology and AI, the product delivery cost or professionalism of many industries will drop to the difficulty level similar