When I met Zhu Jiang, he was still working as the CGO of a listed company, and we have been with him from thinking about the direction of starting a business to now having started a business for a year and a half. He compares dealing with uncertainty to riding a roller coaster. Through this dialogue, I hope to let everyone see the ups and downs of his and his team's entrepreneurial journey, as well as some thoughts on business and entrepreneurship.
——Investor of CreativeFitting
Yao Fangzhou, Investment Director of ZhenFund
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Yao Fangzhou: From the CGO of a listed company to the No. 1 position of a start-up company, what is the biggest challenge and change for you?
Zhu Jiang: Although I have participated in the entire process from starting a business to going public, and had many times of independent responsibility for the success or failure of the business, the intensity and frequency of uncertainty and my position as the number one position in the company are difficult. very different. As the No. 1 position of the company, the CEO has to deal with the most complicated and difficult problems of the company every day. It can be said that he faces the life and death of the company almost every day. Learning how to live with uncertainty is the most important compulsory course for CEOs, and it is also a very interesting thing in the entrepreneurial process. I liken dealing with uncertainty to riding a roller coaster. My guideline for riding is: keep your eyes open at all times, take the necessary protective measures, then try to relax your body as much as possible, and try to enjoy the whole process of change. This might be a good idea.
Yao Fangzhou :Among your two partners in this startup, Jim is the co-founder/CTO of the company you joined as an early member, and Gao Ming is a partner who has been in the team before you. What is your criteria for choosing a partner?
Zhu Jiang : My criteria for choosing a partner are the following three points:
First, I have an extreme desire to start a business. I have the determination and courage to create a great cause, and this determination and courage are not due to external conditions, but come from the depths of my heart. The three of us are all like this. Even without CreativeFitting (Welltop's one-stop production platform for "real person" short videos overseas), the three of us would choose to start a business respectively.
Second, believe in a common vision. CreativeFitting's vision is to become the world's largest human-machine collaborative production platform for commercial content, which is our common belief. We all firmly believe that the era of collaboration between human intelligence and machine intelligence is coming, and commercial content production is ushering in a huge change.
Third, lifelong learning and complementary abilities. Every partner must continue to learn and constantly update their own cognition, because the development and change of the entrepreneurial process is very fast, and every partner must be a lifelong learner. In addition, the capabilities should also be relatively complementary. Jim’s capabilities are biased towards machine intelligence. He has comprehensive technical capabilities. He was a CTO in his previous venture. Gao Ming's ability is biased toward human intelligence. He is an excellent full-stack product manager with comprehensive growth strategies, creative strategies, and user interaction experience. He has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on short video marketing and has incubated products with tens of millions of daily active users. I am relatively comprehensive. I understand both technology and business. During my studies at Shanghai Jiaotong University, I focused on computer graphics and images.
Yao Fangzhou :Can you give an example to specifically talk about the value brought to customers?
Zhu Jiang : At present, the production of short advertising videos for globalization has not yet formed a mature product solution. For example, when domestic advertisers are making live-action short advertising videos, they generally face insufficient script inspiration, difficulty in multilingual translation, and difficulty in finding localized actors. , expensive production, long production cycle and other pain points. The CreativeFitting "real person" we launched
CreativeFitting has two major features:
First, in the script link, an AI screenwriter assistant based on a large model of reinforcement learning is provided . Creators only need to input a few keywords such as product marketing selling points, etc., to generate rich creative scripts in seconds; at the same time, the platform brings together tens of thousands of industries. Popular scripts are analyzed and translated by AI to inspire creators. With these features, authoring time for high-quality scripts has been reduced by more than 80%.
Second, in the video production process, we provide AI director assistants and scene-based digital humans based on multi-modal deep learning models . We provide thousands of scene-based digital humans that support more than 50 languages. With the assistance of the director's assistant, different scenes and different characters can be selected, and the video can be automatically generated online. Since there is no need for offline real shooting, the overall video production efficiency has increased by more than 10 times compared with traditional methods, while the cost is only about 20%.
In terms of content quality, short video advertisements produced through CreativeFitting have been listed on TikTok’s global popular advertising creative list many times . For example, an overseas short video advertisement by a leading e-commerce customer has received more than 8,000 users’ likes, and the number of conversions is also the highest. Top 5% of the industry.
Yao Fangzhou :The company decided to transform overseas this year. What are the favorable/unfavorable changes in the external environment for CreativeFitting? How do you plan the pace and path of future overseas business expansion? What is the judgment behind the decision?
Zhu Jiang : Since we had complete globalization experience in domestic and overseas markets during our last entrepreneurial process, CreativeFitting has targeted the global market since its inception, and we have made good progress in both domestic and overseas markets. Since the beginning of this year, the overseas commercial short video market has developed rapidly, and the commercialization of short video media represented by TikTok has accelerated, and we have quickly seized this opportunity.
It can be said that 2022 is the first year when short advertising videos are blown overseas. Last year, TikTok's overseas revenue was less than US$4 billion, and it is expected to exceed US$12 billion this year, most of which is advertising revenue. With the rise of TikTok's commercialization, advertisers' demand for short advertising videos has also increased significantly. Since the effect of full-screen short video ads is much better than that of video ads in the form of pre-rolls and news feeds, giants such as Meta and Google have also begun to accelerate the follow-up of short video ads.
CreativeFitting mainly serves the top KA customers who do short video advertising marketing on TikTok and other platforms. Now it has covered dozens of top advertisers in e-commerce, finance, games, social networking and other industries, including overseas and overseas local customers. Next, we will accelerate the expansion of overseas markets and officially establish offices overseas, focusing on expanding the Southeast Asian market and radiating ASEAN and more countries and regions around the world.
Yao Fangzhou : What is the essential difference between CreativeFitting and other companies in the same industry? For customers, where does the core competitiveness and differentiation come from?
Zhu Jiang : The real-life short video production products in the market can be divided into three modes:
One is the purely artificial mode, where all the intelligence of creativity comes from humans. From script creativity to content production and production is done manually. The content created by this mode is of higher quality overall, but it is difficult to achieve scale. After reaching a certain scale, the marginal cost of content production will rise rapidly;
The second is the pure AI mode, where all the intelligence of creativity comes from AI. The content production and editing process is solved by AI. At present, this model is still difficult to achieve high content quality, and the degree of professionalism is also low, which cannot meet the industry needs of high-quality content;
The third is the AI+artificial collaboration model, where creative intelligence is provided by AI and human collaboration. The key here is to allow AI and humans to have the same content evaluation system and to cooperate in the division of labor in terms of creative intelligence. For example, the AI screenwriter assistant and AI director assistant we provide can help human screenwriters write the first draft of the script, select scenes and digital humans. This division of labor and cooperation can reduce workload and improve work efficiency, while also controlling the content well. quality. This AI+manual collaboration model has a scale effect and can continuously reduce the marginal cost of producing content.
Yao Fangzhou :Some people think that there have not been any big companies in your business field before. What do you think about this? What is your vision for the future of CreativeFitting?
Zhu Jiang : We believe that companies worth tens of billions of dollars will be born in the field of video production in the future. The main reason is that the rapid development of large-scale model technology around 2020 has made generative AI capabilities gradually reach the applicable stage, the efficiency of human content production will be greatly improved and the marginal cost will be reduced rapidly. Generative AI is different from the previous analytical AI. It mainly solves creative tasks, such as writing articles, writing codes, drawing, generating videos, and generating 3D. Relying on generative AI to solve creative work is gradually becoming a major trend. We believe that excellent creators and AI can collaborate to complete video production work, which will change and reshape the entire industry, and contains huge market opportunities. CreativeFitting's vision is to become the world's largest human-computer collaborative production platform for commercial content. Our goal is to become an outstanding company worth tens of billions of dollars.
Yao Fangzhou : What are the three necessary qualities of an entrepreneur?
Zhu Jiang : In addition to physical fitness, physical strength refers more to action power. Only continuous action can gradually approach the truth of things . In addition to intelligence, brain power refers more importantly to cognition. The deeper the cognition of a thing, the stronger the ability to solve problems. The combination of physical strength and mental strength constitutes the flywheel of knowledge and action from practice to cognition. In addition to mental toughness, mental strength refers more importantly to the ability to accept pain ,because the real world is full of contradictions, and the process of starting a business is also a process of constantly touching the essence of real things, which is bound to feel a lot of pain. The stronger the ability to accept pain, the faster the flywheel of unity of knowledge and action will turn. The practice of physical strength, mental strength, and mental strength is the continuous internal strength in the process of starting a business. Let's encourage each other together.