Losing Money to Be a Tycoon

February 15th, Wednesday…

Chang You, Guo Licheng, Wang Xiaobin, and Little Jiang formed a "fitness equipment development team" in the conference room of Otto Technologies.

The meeting today was partly to hand over to the next person-in-charge of Otto Technologies and also to further determine the product and game design form.

Chang You had won the best employee award, so he had to leave Otto Technologies.

Chang You might have taken advantage of the loophole and could continue to influence the development of Otto Technologies, but rules were the rules. He had to give up his position as the person-in-charge.

Chang You looked at Guo Licheng and Wang Xiaobin. "As everyone knows, the person-in-charge of Otto Technologies from now on will be Jiang Yuan. Everyone has met him before, so I won't introduce him."

"Of course, you can call me if you need me at any time."

Jiang Yuan nodded and said cautiously, "Everyone, just call me Little Jiang. I don't have much experience, so I'll have to trouble everyone to take care of me in the future."

Chang You: "Little Jiang is a little nervous. He even declined a few times. Obviously, he's not very confident. Please help him out in the future."

Wang Xiaobin smiled at Jiang Yuan. "It's alright. I was just as nervous as you when I was the person-in-charge. I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to do well."

"However, there is a magical thing in Tengda. Everyone would be encouraged by the Tengda spirit no matter who was chosen to be the person-in-charge and would definitely be able to do a good job. I was afraid that I would not be able to do it well at first. However, Boss Pei kept giving me projects and trained me. Thus, I slowly got better."

"What's more, since Boss Chang chose you, it must mean that you have the potential. You will be able to perform as long as you get the stage to. What's more, we can back you up even if something happens."

Jiang Yuan was very touched. "Thank you, Brother Wang."

In fact, he had just received this news two days ago. He felt… quite sudden and lost.

The next person-in-charge of Otto Technologies had to be decided by Chang You even though he had to give up the position.

Jiang Yuan was filled with fear and trepidation when he found out that Chang You had chosen him in the end. However, Chang You was only changing departments. He could still consult Chang You if he had any questions. Secondly, the change of person-in-charge of Tengda's department had always been so casual. It seemed like nothing had gone wrong until now. On the contrary, it had been very successful. Thus, Jiang Yuan did not feel conflicted anymore. He calmly accepted the fact that it fell into his lap.

He felt much more at ease with everyone so supportive of him.

Chang You looked at Jiang Yuan. "You're the person-in-charge now. You'll be the host of this meeting."

Jiang Yuan nodded. "Alright, I'll briefly explain the design plan for the smart fitness drying rack. Then, our focus today is to discuss the game plan with the equipment."

Wang Xiaobin nodded. He had already written his game design draft.

Jiang Yuan distributed the first design draft of the Intelligent Fitness drying rack to everyone before introducing it.

"We made slight adjustments to the previous design plan mainly in terms of safety and some details after we discussed it repeatedly with the factory. However, the changes were not huge."

"There was also some controversy during our internal discussions. I think we need to clarify the market positioning of this machine."

"Domestic fitness equipment itself is a niche market. The Chinese don't have fitness habits to begin with. This equipment is expensive and takes up a lot of space. This is a natural disadvantage. It's difficult to turn the situation around with just the products."

"It is unrealistic to expect to sell this equipment to millions of people."

"We actually only have two choices: either make a small, unproductive, light, and cheap equipment, or make an expensive, bulky, but professional equipment."

"The former might be easy to make and sell, but it would definitely not have a good fitness effect. It would also be difficult to distinguish it from the existing equipment in the market."

"That's why we chose the latter. Even though it will be expensive and takes up space, we have to ensure its fitness effect as much as possible.Our reputation and fame can be built up as long as the fitness effect is good. Then, our products can be sold from the gym to ordinary households. There's still room for profit."

"Our product is not competing with cheap equipment such as yoga mats or abdominal wheels. Instead, we are targeting to compete with large-scale fitness equipment.

"Those who did not intend to buy would not have bought it in the first place. We don't have to bother about people other than our target users. We just have to satisfy the customers who have urgent fitness needs and are more likely to persevere."

"Therefore, there are two key points to our product:

"First, how can we compete for market share from other large-scale fitness equipment?"

"Our equipment would definitely have a premium on price compared to these fitness equipment, because we added smart modules, have the game's development costs, and carried out unique designs. The first problem we need to solve is how to make professional users accept this premium."

"Second, after professional users accept us, how should we 'breakthrough' and get ordinary users without fitness habits to buy our products?"

Everyone nodded as they listened.

Intelligent fitness drying rack was actually a professional composite fitness equipment. It would be interesting to match it with games.

Its target customers could be divided into two types: the first type was professional users with strong fitness requirements. They might have already considered buying large-scale fitness equipment, so how should they persuade them to pay more to buy the smart fitness drying rack?

The second type would be ordinary users with certain fitness requirements, but they found it difficult to make up their minds to buy this large equipment. How to dispel their worries and make them buy this large equipment was also a very important question.

Jiang Yuan continued, "I think the key to breaking out of this situation lies in fun."

"People are lazy when it comes to learning and fitness. The biggest problem is not skills or physical conditions, but willpower and perseverance."

"We want to guide customers to focus more on fitness through fun to achieve a better fitness effect. Our product's reputation would explode as long as most of the first batch of users persevere and achieve fitness effect. Then, we can continue to spread to the masses through publicity."

"Just like how Deposit Fitness began."

Guo Licheng nodded.

The key to the success of Deposit Fitness was that it was indeed more effective than other gyms.

Of course, there were prerequisites for this effect: screening most customers who could not persevere, forcing users to stick to training time, and tying up with healthy meals.

After solving the problem of 'perseverance', people who did not know how to exercise would be able to achieve results.

Jiang Yuan looked at Wang Xiaobin. "Brother Wang, it would depend mainly on whether the game is fun or not. Whether this product succeeds or not depends on you."

Wang Xiaobin nodded and distributed the game design plan to everyone.

"This is the design concept manuscript that I wrote for the game. It is only a framework and many details have not been perfected, but the direction is very clear."

"I'll talk while you guys read. You can ask any questions you want."

Wang Xiaobin paused for a moment and continued, "The game's name this time is' Fitness Battle'. There's nothing much to say about the name. It's easy to understand, easy to remember, and easy to spread."

"The important thing is the specific design inside."

"First, it is a mobile game from its genre. At the same time, it supports cell phone screen projection."

"This game is meant to be used with a set of equipment. We can't possibly put a display screen on the equipment to sell it. That would make it difficult to sell."

"If you make it into a mobile game, you can choose the equipment that you want to display based on your actual situation. If you feel that there's no need to spend more money, you can use a cell phone or a tablet computer. If you want to have a better experience, you can specially buy a monitor that costs a few hundred yuan or a one or two thousand yuan television."

"This mobile game can be directly tied to Tengda Life App, and can be linked to the data of Deposit Fitness. It can also recommend players to purchase Fish-Catching Take-Out's fitness meals to achieve better training effects."

"The focus is on the specific design of the game."