Insight
Liu: A winning grocery delivery app cannot exceed brick-and-mortar prices
“We believe that to become the go-to grocery shopping app, we cannot be more expensive than brick-and-mortar stores.”
Insight
Liu: Hard work and talent are baseline; ultimate scale depends on luck
“Hard work and the talents are just necessary, but how high you can go, how far you can grow, really has a lot to do with the situations you are in, what happened to you, what people you met, and you can loosely say those are all luck, or fate, or destiny.”
Assertion Supported
Liu: Automated e-commerce price arbitrage remains viable across platforms today
“You can still do that today, and you can do, like, even more, right? So now there are, like, cross-border companies. You can actually scrape those companies and list down on eBay.”
Insight
Liu: E-commerce arbitrage makes money but creates minimal fundamental value
“It's a good vehicle to probably make some money, but we fundamentally did not solve any problems or create much value.”
Insight
Liu: US group-buying was a workaround for poor grocery access, not entertainment
“The fundamental reason people were doing this was because they couldn't have easy, affordable access to the food they love. I remember that's what I felt like the fundamental problem People were trying to solve using these group bias, but it was not the right …”
Insight
Liu: Founders should pivot execution on right goals, but quit fundamentally wrong ideas
“So if it's the right thing and you are just not doing it right, you should not give up. You should try to find a way to do it right. However, if it's not the right thing, You should not try to make it better, because it's not the right thing. You should stop r…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: Goodwater Capital owned over 50% of Weee! by late 2018
“So, so by the end of 2018, they ended up owning more than 50% of the business.”
Insight
Liu: Scheduled Batch Delivery Enables Viable Unit Economics Over Expensive On-Demand
“From day one, we knew that we couldn't do the on-demand delivery, because on-demand delivery is so expensive. So we did what we call scheduled delivery. That way we can aggregate a lot of orders, and we can do the route planning.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: Typical E-Commerce Companies Spend $50 to $100 Per Customer on Ads
“People, other e-commerce companies spend probably 50 to a hundred dollars to Google and Facebook to acquire a new user, right?”
Insight
Liu: Startup success only buys entry to harder competition against stronger players
“All the success we had basically only earned our ticket to play the next game, and the next game is going to be harder. That's how I felt. I felt it's definitely harder than the early days, simply because we have bigger vision, we have bigger dreams, and we ar…”
Assertion Contradicted
Liu: EachNet Was the Only E-Commerce Platform in Early 2000s China
“We have never seen this kind of thing before, and there was no e-commerce in China. Only each net.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: Automated arbitrage side venture reached $2M in sales with >10% profit
“So at its peak, we were doing about two million dollars in sales and a little more than 10% net profit.”
Insight
Liu: Career choices require passion, skill, and a multi-decade industry runway
“Like a business, you have to choose something you're passionate about and you're good at. So, so for me I think it applies to your personal career choice as well. I wanted to choose something that, I'm really passionate about. I also want to choose something I…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: A WeChat mom generated $10,000 overnight in seafood group orders
“I remember one night, a mom in the group posted some information. She said, oh, I went to this harbor called Half Moon Bay. There was a fisherman's market, right? She said, I talked to this fisherman because I really liked the fish, the Pacific black cod. And …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: US Chinese immigrants organically organized WeChat grocery group buys in 2014
“So, so first of all, I saw this happening in many different groups, right? Not just this one group. And also, I talked to my friends in other cities in the US. People were doing this in Boston. People were doing this in Seattle. So Chinese immigrants were doin…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: Weee! reached tens of thousands of users by mid-2015
“So we released the software. I remember it's January of 2015. By mid-two 1015, we had tens of thousands of users already using our software to organize group buys.”
Assertion Partly supported
Liu: Hotmail co-founder Jack Smith wrote Weee!'s first $250,000 check
“He committed to write the first check we ever received, a 250,000 dollars, because he really liked the scrappiness and the creative ways that we approach this.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: Over 99.5% of early Weee! users used Chinese language app
“More than like, 99.5% of the users actually use Chinese language on our application, so almost all Chinese immigrants.”
Insight
Liu: Expanding geographically when a model fails locally is a mistake
“Now looking back, we were doing the exactly wrong thing, which is when something is not quite working in a smaller geographic area, we try to make it work in more areas, right?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: Weee! had under $1 million left by mid-2017
“By mid of 2017, we were running out of money. We had less than one million dollars left.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: Personally Delivered Over 1,000 Orders to Build Weee!'s Logistics Software
“I delivered more than a thousand orders myself. Because I had to figure out how to do delivery, how to write the software that, how to design the driver experience, and how to figure out the delivery part.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: Weee! Reached $500,000 Per Week in Sales by Late 2018
“A year and a half later, we were doing half a million dollars a week in sales.”
Disclosure
Liu: Weee! relocated warehouses overnight without halting daily operations
“And by moving the warehouse, we actually did not shut shutting down the business, not even for a day. We ship today's order. Then we put away the inventory. We disassemble the shelves. Then overnight we move the shelves and inventory to the new warehouse. We r…”
Assertion Supported
Liu: The Three Early EachNet Sellers Became Weee!'s Co-Founders
“At the time, three of us, actually all, now they are all the co-founders of We. So that was like more than 20 years ago. Three of us, we were just having fun.”
