Chapter 126 - 118: How Did You Get Into Xuyuan?
In April, Lashou Network held two special Group Buy sales events on FoxTao, achieving a cumulative sales volume of 57 million and acquiring 230,000 new customers.
Lashou Network paid 20 million in marketing fees and 9.2 million in new user acquisition bonuses for this. The return on investment barely reached 2, which didn’t seem worthwhile on the surface.
However, this 57 million in sales allowed Lashou to gain an additional 3.5% market share out of thin air in the April industry competition, firmly suppressing Meituan, WoWo Group, and Gaopeng Network.
Even Juhuasuan, with its tens of millions of daily active users, couldn’t surpass Lashou Network in its first month of entering the Group Buy race.
Initially, Chen Yansen was paying attention to the competition in the Group Buy industry, but he later became busy preparing for the Super Sale Day on April 22nd and stopped keeping track.
Thanks to the combined efforts of the advertising, events, and operations teams, FoxTao’s daily active users surpassed 3 million for the first time after the three-day event concluded.
But Chen Yansen knew that, based on the current weekly retention rate, it would be good if the daily active users could stabilize at 2.7 million by the end of the month.
When the event ended, the total sales volume was 93 million, though it was publicly announced as 100 million.
The gross margin dropped from 10% to 6.3%. After deducting the cost of user acquisition by the advertising team, the profit from this event was almost zero.
The good news was that they had made a name for themselves!
After more than half a year of market cultivation and user education, many potential customers, even if they had never used FoxTao, no longer considered shopping guide e-commerce sites to be scams.
Chen Yansen put down the copies of *Introduction to Algorithms* and *C Primer Plus* in his hands and stood up to head downstairs.
His mind was still preoccupied with how to solve the lagging issue in the Android system.
In truth, the lag in the Android system wasn’t entirely due to software; hardware issues also limited its smoothness.
In 2011, phone processors had low clock speeds and few cores, making it difficult to complete calculations quickly, which resulted in slow performance.
Furthermore, Android phones at the time generally had between 512MB and 1GB of RAM, and their internal storage was mostly 4GB or 8GB. With slow read/write speeds, lag was inevitable.
Chen Yansen couldn’t change the hardware, but on a system level, he wanted to develop a more efficient memory management algorithm to solve the problems of memory consumption and fragmentation.
He currently had two ideas for this problem. The first was to optimize the process scheduling algorithm to improve system responsiveness. The second was to adopt a generational garbage collection algorithm, adjusting its trigger conditions and strategies to increase collection efficiency.
Having organized his thoughts, Chen Yansen walked over to the Aurora Research and Development Team’s office area and called Wang Teng out.
"Brother Sen, the initial architecture for Aurora is designed. We have three versions of the interface prototype, and the system startup and file system modules just passed testing..."
Wang Teng, assuming Chen Yansen was there to ask about development progress, proactively reported.
"I didn’t come to hear about that. Do you have any good suggestions for the system lag and slow phone performance issues?"
Chen Yansen beckoned him over. They found a temporary meeting room and sat down to talk.
"The usual approach is to reduce animation effects and lower the screen resolution, sacrificing some of the user experience. Or, you could tackle it from the hardware side by increasing the RAM or using a more powerful multi-core processor."
Wang Teng replied earnestly, frowning as he drew on his experience at OPPO.
"Are there any better solutions on the system level?"
Chen Yansen shrugged. He had no intention of sacrificing the user experience, nor did he plan to shortchange users with a low-end processor.
"Improving the memory management mechanism or optimizing process scheduling... but OPPO and other domestic phone manufacturers have tried that, and the results weren’t great."
Wang Teng said, thinking aloud, while also pointing out the drawbacks of these two methods.
More than a decade later, Android phones could be used for three or four years without lagging. This was partly because Google continuously upgraded the operating system, fixing the flaws of the initial versions.
On the other hand, hardware development had advanced by leaps and bounds. Storage combinations of 16GB RAM and 1TB of storage became commonplace, naturally eliminating the trouble of lag.
"I have an idea. We could divide the data into a young generation, an old generation, and a metaspace, creating different memory regions. Based on information like the time, frequency, and memory usage of garbage collection, we can combine it with an intelligent algorithm to clean up junk data for the user in real-time, in the background..."
After hearing Wang Teng out, Chen Yansen knew that current phone manufacturers didn’t have any good solutions for the system lag problem.
He paused briefly, then began to speak slowly, explaining the concept while also dictating how the code would be implemented.
As Wang Teng listened, his pupils gradually dilated, his face a mask of shock.
He remembered that just over 20 days ago, Chen Yansen knew nothing about programming and algorithms and had even asked him to recommend some relevant books.
Now, less than a month later, the man had gone from zero knowledge to a professional level. His thinking was crystal clear, and he could even provide a viable technical solution.
A storm raged in Wang Teng’s heart. He desperately wanted to ask Chen Yansen, ’How did you even get into Xucheng Academy?’
’With this kind of learning ability, forget Qingbei—wouldn’t any of the country’s top-tier 985 universities be his for the picking?’
"Hmm? Did you get all that?"
Chen Yansen asked, raising his voice when he saw Wang Teng was distracted.
"I’m listening, Brother Sen. Please, continue," Wang Teng snapped back to attention and quickly replied.
"In short, I don’t want a copy of OPPO’s Unique UI. I want a brand-new, customized UI."
Chen Yansen patted Wang Teng’s shoulder and instructed him softly.
"Understood, Brother Sen. I’ll communicate the generational garbage collection algorithm you just described to the developers immediately, following your line of thought, and implement it as soon as possible."
Wang Teng mulled it over and, concluding that Chen Yansen’s plan was feasible, gave his earnest assurance.
"Alright, get back to work."
With that, Chen Yansen turned, went back to the second floor, picked up his books, and headed for the library.
Lately, Chen Yansen had been spending a lot of time in the library. Besides reading books on computer science and software engineering, he would occasionally flip through a French vocabulary book.
Building on his experience with learning English, he discovered he could master a new language in just seven days.
The first two days were for intensive study of vocabulary, grammar structures, parts of speech, and sentence patterns. The third and fourth days were for watching ten original-language films. On the fifth and sixth days, he would synthesize everything he’d learned, making adjustments to his pronunciation, intonation, and expression through deliberate practice. By the seventh day, he could basically speak fluent English or French.
Africa was the third-largest market for smartphones. Seventy percent of its adult population was under 30, and their demand for and curiosity about digital products were no less than that of Southeast Asia.
Chen Yansen certainly wouldn’t miss out on such a large market. Learning French in advance was also a preparation for market expansion.
After all, on that continent, nearly 200 million people used French as an official language.
Chen Yansen took the book he had just borrowed to the upstairs reading room and began to read with focus.
If Chen Guobin had seen this, his jaw would have probably dropped, because Chen Yansen had never put much effort into his studies growing up.
BZZZ BZZZ BZZZ— His phone vibrated.
Chen Yansen pulled out his phone and pressed the answer button. Before he could even speak, he heard Liao Wei on the other end: "President Chen, the warehouse in the Lighthouse Country is secured, and the staff are in place. When can the cross-border shopping assistance feature on FoxTao go live?"
"Anytime. Just don’t mess things up this time," Chen Yansen said with a smile, his tone light but carrying a warning.
"Don’t worry, I’ll oversee it personally." Liao Wei understood what Chen Yansen was worried about and quickly gave his assurance.
The last counterfeit wine incident had caused Cloud Speed Express’s business volume to plummet.
Even though Chen Yansen had intervened, Wine God Network still terminated its exclusive partnership with Cloud Speed and chose another delivery company instead.
Liao Wei knew clearly that if he failed to satisfy Chen Yansen again this time, he would most likely be left struggling to keep Cloud Speed afloat.
’When someone gives you a chance, you have to be able to seize it!’
"Alright. Add the person responsible for order integration to the project group. Let’s get it online as soon as possible."
Chen Yansen said readily.
It had been almost two months since he first proposed the idea of an overseas transit warehouse; it had indeed been delayed for a while.
However, he also knew that Liao Wei was already very capable to have successfully rented a large overseas warehouse and hired staff. Someone else might not have been able to handle it.
Still on the phone, Chen Yansen walked out to the hallway by the window and called Zhuang Rui, telling him to launch the pre-developed cross-border transit feature.
"Okay, Brother Sen." Upon receiving the instruction, Zhuang Rui immediately followed orders, first selecting 20% of the users for testing to observe the new feature’s conversion performance.
This would determine whether to proceed with a full rollout.
With FoxTao’s daily active users now approaching 3 million, launching a new feature directly was too risky. They typically used A/B testing or canary releases to mitigate losses from potential bugs.