Kr-Asia is all about actionable insights for entrepreneurs. And through this post, you’re about to find out:
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What are the challenges that product managers meet during work?
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How to successfully duplicate one business/product model to another product, thus serving different users?
PMDaniu.com (产品大牛) has raised millions of yuan in financing from Ruzhe Chuangtou, an angel investor. The money will be used for R&D, operation and marketing. Previously, the comapny has won seed funding from Demo++.
GitHub provides a web-based hosting service for open source and private projects. It is mostly used for computer code. Besides source code management (SCM) system, it is also featured with code editing, group discussing and source code sharing, making it a large host of source codes for software engineers. Cheng Xi, the founder of PMDaniu.com, said that PMDaniu.com is attempting to build a community to facilitate product managers’ work, just as what GitHub has done for programmers.
Baidu Index shows that “product manager” has enjoyed an increasing popularity in recent years with a sharp rise of 65% in search frequency from 1005 in October 2011 to 1540 in October 2014. According to Cheng, more than 200,000 people jump to the role of project manager each year. This is a very similar growth trend to that of programmers during 2006 to 2007. Besides, there are more and more sectors in the demand of project management.
Cheng used to work as a product manager at Yin Yue Tai (音悦台), one of the major music and video sharing websites in China. He points out that, the biggest challenges that product managers meet during work are the management and classification of files and product prototypes, as well as low-efficient email communication and storage means.
Read more: Facebook PM: You Need to Think Like A PM to Work in a Facebook R&D Team (Part 1)
A product manager needs to communicate with various parties during the workflow, including product designers, UI, UX, backstage crew, sales, engineers, executive leadership, clients and users. However, the most commonly used project management software, such as Axure and Sketch, are all developed by foreign companies. They work well on PCs instead of on webs or mobiles.
Therefore, the first issue PMDaniu.com decided to address was prototype hosting. Learning from GitHub, the company divided its business into public/open source projects as well as private repositories. The former is free for users to get references in the database of different sectors, while the latter has a paid plan, which is more convenient to meet the needs of companies or individuals. In this way, it can gradually create costumers’ loyalty.
Apart from that, PMDaniu.com also supports online PRD, request pool, team management, etc. Documents can be hosted online and assigned with one click; all projects can be tracked and followed.
The business model of PMDaniu.com is composed of two parts, assisting product managers for a better efficiency and contributing communities with products and resources. Similar to the success of GitHub, once those superior products and resources go into the market, it will cover up to 100 million people and make a sizable profit.
PMDaniu.com has a user pool of over 23,000 product managers and more than 700 enterprises that are willing to pay, including Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Alibaba and MOMO. The number of daily active users is about 3,000, and the proportion of monthly active users is 70%. The number of projects in private repositories has reached over 15,000, while the projects of public/open source have totaled over 5,500. Profits of PMDaniu.com are mainly from three parts: private repositories charge, advertising revenue and outsourcing and matchmaking service fees.