How did Zhihu develop?

There are two reasons for the development of Zhihu:

1. Direct reason: the rise of Quora.

2. Indirect reason: co-founder Zhang Liang’s urging.

The founder of Zhihu described how Zhihu developed

1. Direct reason: the rise of Quora.

After my first entrepreneurial failure, I found a website that moved me very much, which was Quora. Because in addition to paying attention to people, this website can also pay attention to knowledge and thinking, and can produce and accumulate good content. But Quora does not support Chinese, and it cannot even input Chinese. This is the direct reason that drove me to do it.

2. Indirect reason: co-founder Zhang Liang’s urging.

Beginning in 2007, Zhang Liang launched an Internet geek group blog. This website is very interesting. First, it attracts people from the technology and media circles; secondly, it attracts many non-media people. They all pay attention to Apple's development and products, and this group of people creates a lot of chemical reactions. So we thought about what would happen if the crowd expanded 100 times or 1,000 times.

Later, when I was still working at "IT Manager World", I launched N3, a group blog within the magazine. Its traffic exceeded the traffic of the magazine's website in one month.

So on August 8, 2010, I came back from Tibet and talked to Zhang Liang. He asked me: If we could find some money, would you be willing to build the Zhihu product? I said no problem. The next day, Zhang Liang called me: Your mind has not changed, right? Zhang Liang found Huang Jixin and then found investors. We have prepared three things. The first piece of paper: the business plan compiled in one afternoon; the second piece of paper: the 8-month financial plan; the third piece of paper: how to implement our plan. The angel investor was not in the technology field, but because he had just become a heavy user of Sina Weibo and was very interested in technology and social networking, he invested 1.5 million yuan in angel capital.

When we were working on Zhihu, we saw companies that we could refer to. This was very different from my first startup. When I started my first business, I was building a product to help small and medium-sized e-commerce companies provide search results. At that time it was impossible to get money from the corporate side. I made a product to serve users, but I am not a user of the product myself, and I don’t have the pain that only users can feel. But when I do Zhihu, I am a user myself, and I can empathize with it from the user's perspective. Be able to start from the nature and perspective of the user.

Zhihu--How Zhihu developed