I don’t know if Meituan got into a fight over its food delivery, and why did they start fighting each other and beating their own people... Two days ago, I suddenly got on an app called Yami.Note, we are not looking for ducks, we are looking for food.Its positioning can be summed up in one sentence: it only provides food reviews [niche reviews]. Doesn’t this mean he wants to compete with his own Dianping for business?
Interestingly, its head of operations said publicly on social platforms:No profit is considered, just word of mouth.
I don’t know what everyone thinks. I don’t believe a big manufacturer’s product is boasting like this. Out of curiosity, Shichao went to do some research.
First of all, let me say that I am not even optimistic about the future of this app.
Yami is currently still a prototype product, considered a start-up project within Meituan. Even now it’s only available for iOS. Moreover, the service scope is limited to Beijing area.
Shichao originally wanted to say, let’s see what kind of flowers it can find in Hangzhou, a food desert, but I’m not worthy anymore.
Fortunately, it can be used even if you switch the IP. Once you enter the homepage, the biggest feeling is that it is simple, even a little minimalist.
Different from Dianping, which is also a food ranking, a must-eat list, and a must-stay list.
Yami only has a few functions. The navigation bar at the bottom is divided into [Homepage], [Recommendation Officer], [News] and [My].
In addition to one album on the homepage, it is a restaurant ranking. The information flow is also displayed in a simple and clear single column.
Yami on the left, Dianping on the right
After shopping around, I found that many basic functions are highly similar to Dianping.
Here Shichao will briefly introduce some different small functions.
For example, the top of the homepage is an official collection of recommended restaurants, which is a bit like the playlist of NetEase Cloud Music, with one playlist per theme. For example, the eating variety show "One Rice to Become the God", recommendations from the owner of Beijing Authentic Bean Juice Shop, etc.
It's a pity that because it's too urgent to go online, there are only 5 albums available...
Another example is the [dynamic] function, which is similar to the food circle of friends.
Based on your geographical location, we will recommend food pictures and texts written by people nearby.
If you are interested in calling someone, follow them. Then the updates he posts will be displayed in the watch list.
This function is quite practical. I met a netizen from Yuhang District on Xiaohongshu. I recognized several of the foods he recommended, which shows that our tastes are very similar.
I just follow him, and I eat whatever he recommends, and the rate of cheating can be much lower.
However, the most special thing about Yami is the restaurant ranking on the home page.
If you look carefully, you will find that under each message, several spoons and a comment are displayed. These two are the core functions of Yami.
One is the rating system: Golden Spoon Restaurants.
Although diners also rate the restaurant, Yami uses a simpler three spoons to represent the degree of deliciousness, which are:
Worth a special trip, worth a detour, worth a drop-in.
The more spoons the better.
After reading this, Shichao had some visions of the Michelin restaurant next door. However, the difference between the two sides is still very big.
The four top restaurants that received Three Spoons are indeed well-known local restaurants.
We pay attention to both cooking and environment.The Beijing children of our company also gave a high evaluation:It’s really cool at this price..
But apart from these four restaurants, the other contestants who won two spoons are basically more civilian and down-to-earth restaurants.
They don't pay attention to the ultimate environment like Michelin, they only focus on taste and dishes. Even a liver-fried restaurant with a per capita price of RMB 17 is included in the list.
In addition to looking at the number of spoons, another is the restaurant review.
Dianping allows everyone to rate and write reviews for restaurants. This model is good, but it also leaves a backdoor for merchants to give good reviews, buy trolls, and delete bad reviews.
In order to ensure the purity of Wuguang, Yami introduced the recommendation officer model.
The officials themselves selected a group of diners who could eat and drink, or famous chefs, to serve as recommendation officers.
Although we can also comment, officials are greater than the people.The platform will give priority to displaying the reviews of recommending officers to prevent people from posting fake posts.
Most importantly, judging from the posts posted by the head of operations.
If the recommendation officer is suspected of advertising and taking money to get a meal, they will strike hard and clear them out.
To be honest, if it can really do this, I personally think this app is quite good.
The functions are simple and the interface is clean. Some small designs and a good experience.
For example, it will show how many times the review user visited the store.You can check its ingredients without clicking on the profile picture.
Click on the recommendation officer's homepage to sort and filter restaurant reviews based on distance.
After all, when it comes to eating, the cost of going to a restaurant is also a very important indicator.
Moreover, this idea is indeed a good one.
Nowadays, there are a lot of Tandian stickers that are hard to distinguish between genuine and fake. ShichaoI have long since lost trust in the entire Internet, but there is nothing I can do about it.
It’s hard to find some really delicious restaurants online.
Just having a good idea doesn't necessarily mean you can survive. The more he used it, the more curious Shichao became:How long can it last...
It feels like every once in a while, a major manufacturer will release a youth version of this app.
I still remember that at the beginning of 2022, all members of Alibaba, Byte, Tencent, Baidu, and Zhihu were crazy about launching new technologies. Byte has created the “Knowledge Area”, Alibaba has created the youth version of Taobao’s “Standard”, and Tencent has created the “Yintu”.
These applications also focus on simplicity, no ads, and good community ecology.
But they are like pebbles thrown into the pool by big manufacturers. If the water is shallow, you may be able to crawl to the shore and lie down for a while. If the water is deeper, you will never return.
"Youth version of Taobao" fashion community platform is great
Because this thing is destined to be contrary to the logic of major manufacturers.If you make it so simple and straightforward, how do you commercialize it and how do you achieve KPIs?
In order to ensure profits, everyone will gradually be forced to add a spoonful of it here and a piece of it here.
But once we start thinking about the money we have in our pockets, the community atmosphere can easily change.
After all, Dianping started as a niche review.
The most important thing is,If you rely on food recommendations to make money, it will be difficult to make good content; if you make good content, it will be difficult to make big money..
Shichao thought hard and couldn't think of a decent way to make money.
Out of curiosity, I contacted their developers, who revealed a little inside information to me.
First of all, it should be true that it is not profitable.
On the one hand, how to survive now is the most important thing. Yami’s DAU currently only has one or two thousand, so we don’t have time to think about tens of millions of daily active users.
In addition, Meituan has no profit indicators for them. It mainly wants to test whether this model can run smoothly.Their internal positioning is that they will not consider cashing out for at least the next two years..
But what Shichao said doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t matter if the platform doesn’t make money. Your Meituan family has a great business, and if you make a few dollars less, you will make less money.
I worked hard to visit stores and post content, why don’t you let me earn some money while I play house with Meituan?
If I can’t make money, why should I post here?
Although the platform will still give 50-1000 Meituan card incentives. But compared with the efforts of big Vs and Internet celebrities on other platforms, it is a bit inadequate.
Therefore, Yami avoided the MCN food bloggers who make money in this industry and found a group of special people to serve as recommendation officers.
In this era of content explosion, if you visit a store to become popular, it’s often not because you know how to eat. What matters is whether they can play with traffic and create content.
Some people who really know how to eat are slowly being marginalized because they cannot use the adjectives "Juejuezi" and cannot operate an account.
We want a clean Internet without trolls, and these experts also need a platform to share real food experiences.
Although there is no money to be made on Yami, their content will be exposed first, and the platform will not do anything to boost the rankings.
Many diners who are not short of money are still willing to try it.
After talking about this, Shichao can roughly understand what Meituan wants to do, but it is difficult to fully agree.
As far as Beijing is concerned, the platform can still slowly screen people. How can we manage the number of people in the future?
According to the other party, Yami plans to expand to 10 cities and hire 100 recommendation officers in each city. Assuming that a person sends 10 pieces of store-exploring content in a single month, the platform needs to review 10,000 tweets.
According to the current "movie king" level acting skills of the bloggers who visit the store, if the National Anti-Fraud Center comes, they will have to pay 200.
However, the above problems are actually about money in the final analysis.
If Meituan itself is willing to continue to spend money, this matter will be worth watching.For Meituan, the benefits of losing this little fortune far outweigh the disadvantages.
Spending some money to develop a product that regains its original intention can be regarded as a cost-effective image restoration.
In today's world of marketing and advertising, the emergence of such a "rebellious" application is also a good thing for those of us who eat.
I just don’t know how long this purity can last.