Huang Yimeng’s entrepreneurial journey

In addition to being the founder of VeryCD, Huang Yimeng is also the founder of Xindong Games. In 2012, the revenue of Xindong Games reached 1 billion yuan, from VeryCD, which could not make ends meet, to a web game company with annual revenue of 1 billion yuan. Huang Yimeng relied on his own feeling and exploration to start a business.

When Huang Yimeng made up his mind to make web games in 2009, he sold the website, which was one of the company's largest sources of income. Because at this time, in his words, "there is a bigger thing to do."

When I started making web games in 2010, the servers belonging to VeryCD that were about to be idle were put to use again. Before the new company's game products took shape, they carried out an architectural redesign on the original server.

The web game industry is dominated by intermodal transportation. The intermodal transportation party is equivalent to the distributor of the product. Xindong Games has determined the strategy of using a higher revenue sharing ratio to increase the promotion enthusiasm of the intermodal transportation party from the earliest days. Seven of them Chenggui United Transport’s share of the revenue is generally evaluated as “very generous”. Behind this decision is Huang Yimeng’s determination that his team should focus on the products and technologies they are best at, rather than operating and promoting them. In addition, the initial server architecture brings reduced operation and maintenance costs, allowing Xindong to realize this competitive channel model. On the other hand, they treat games as "experience products" and treat the research and development period as a small part of the product cycle, but they attach great importance to adjustments and improvements after the product is launched. Starting in the second half of 2011, Xindong Games reached its highest single-month revenue of 150 million yuan, which gave Huang Yimeng the capital to persuade others when recruiting new members for the company. Since the beginning of this year, Xindong Games has invested in three small teams in the form of equity investments. One of the teams was persuaded by Huang Yimeng to specialize in the development of the mobile version of "Shenxian Dao" - the project that this team was working on at the time was a video player. Earlier, At that time, he was working on a subtitle network and had no experience in mobile game development - and Huang Yimeng made the investment decision because he was "very optimistic about this team." This way of making judgments is also due to Huang Yimeng's past experience. At that time, one of the early team members of VeryCD—who was still a graduate student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University at the time—had returned to AMD after studying abroad for several years. After Huang Yimeng learned about it, he told the other party that he was willing to pay the same salary as AMD to invite him back. "His specialty is C++, and after he rejoined the company, we gave him a Flash module that he had never touched before and asked him to take the lead." Huang Yimeng said, "I didn't think too much at the time. I just felt that there would be new opportunities in the company's future. When it comes to direction, you definitely need someone to delve into it. "Finding trustworthy people from the people you know and "training them from scratch" gave Huang Yimeng experience in how to build a management team. However, the behavior at that time seemed more like loyalty between friends. When VeryCD was in a period of confusion about "must find a model", a group of old team members left one after another, which made Huang Yimeng very sad, "because my company really couldn't let them perform." When the new company Xindong Games was founded At that time, Huang Yimeng brought some of them back to play core roles in the new project. Huang Yimeng, who left college midway to start a business, interviewed and recruited his first employee on QQ. In order to make himself appear credible, he spent what was considered at the time "a considerable amount of money" to send the employee a letter from QQ. One-way ticket from Sichuan to Shanghai, and all of this is based on "having seen each other's works on the forum and admiring each other's programming skills." After operating Xindong Games for nearly three years, Dai Yunjie, who also went directly from a college student to a CTO, also gained new insights into managing a company. When asked this question, he casually said: "Managing a company is like designing a game. It is about letting people stay in the company (game) as long as possible, have fun, and at the same time be willing to work hard to upgrade." Huang Yimeng He and Dai Yunjie are not the kind of people who are hesitant, and it is not difficult for them to come to conclusions about things that interest them. The thinking of science students also allows Dai Yunjie and Huang Yimeng to "always use logical deduction to convince each other and themselves" when encountering uncertain problems - this has allowed them to have no problem in the nearly 10 years since they started their business together from VeryCD to Xindong Games. There have been irresolvable differences of opinion. In early 2013, the two newly developed web games developed by Xindong Games did not meet Huang Yimeng’s expectations after they were launched online. They could make money, but the response was only mediocre. They did not reach the level of being one of the best in the industry soon after their launch like the previous games.

He attributed the reason to "suddenly being too experienced in web games and completely following the model of previous successful products, which resulted in the current new products not being distinctive enough."

Previously successful products only represented “the industry level a year and a half ago.” Compared with then, Huang Yimeng no longer just hopes that the company can "make money quickly."

“After I no longer worry about money, I want more and pursue more.” Huang Yimeng said. The gaming industry used to be an industry that he felt was far away. When he was a kid, after completing all the single-player games, Huang Yimeng would stay in front of the screen and watch the ending song. The long list of production team names made him feel that good games are not products that can be made by one person. In 2012, when Blizzard announced that it would release "Diablo 3", the atmosphere where everyone around him was talking about and looking forward to it made him feel the vitality of a good game. Right now, the heart-beating game that is growing from small to large still has more things for Huang Yimeng to worry about. In order to allow experienced game developers to stay in the company with peace of mind, instead of taking projects out to work alone in small groups as is most common in the industry, Huang Yimeng is considering adopting a reward mechanism with a higher proportion of sharing, " We also need to make them aware of the importance of a company providing support in all aspects behind the success of a game product.” In order to prevent those teams whose "projects at hand are not the best" - such as the VeryCD team that is not as profitable as games - from losing motivation and leaving, Huang Yimeng is also the one who must be responsible for finding a direction for them.

At the end of 2012, Huang Yimeng spent a lot of energy on campus recruitment, personally promoting the various development opportunities provided by the company to those young faces.