Crowdfunding coffee is toxic: is it crowdfunding or cafes that are at fault after another?

How deep is the poison in crowdfunding cafes?

3W Cafe, which was served as CEO by Internet analyst Xu, was officially established on Aug. 6, 2011. unlike tens of thousands of cafes in China at that time, 3W Cafe was called "the first crowdfunding model in China".

According to data, 3W Coffee shareholders include a number of domestic successful entrepreneurs, investors, entrepreneurs, media opinion leaders and so on, forming a circle of Internet, coffee, red wine and salon. Shareholders include Qianya CEO Zhuang Chenchao, Tencent co-founder Zeng Liqing, New Oriental co-founder Xu Xiaoping, Sequoia Capital founder Shen Nanpeng.

On May 7, 2015, Premier Li Keqiang made a special trip to 3W Coffee headquarters to drink coffee while listening to the entrepreneurial model of 3W Coffee, which made 3W Coffee famous. Later, Xu only said in a speech that the coffee that the prime minister drank is now called "Prime Minister Coffee", and almost everyone must order when they go to 3W Cafe.

On a par with 3W Coffee, there is a start-up-themed garage cafe co-founded by 11 angel investors, but unlike crowdfunding coffee, garage coffee is more like an incubator.

After the emergence of 3W Cafe, there has been a start-up wave of "crowdfunding + coffee" all over the country, and many ordinary people who are not even entrepreneurs have issued prospectuses in the form of crowdfunding to raise money to open a cafe, especially in the first-tier cities in China.

Also in Beijing, in August 2013, 66 returnee "Red Beauty shareholders" from various industries raised a total of 1.32 million yuan (20, 000 yuan per person) to open a crowdfunding cafe focused on women in Beijing Jianwai SOHO.

According to reports at the time, almost all of these shareholders had a well-known foreign school background, and most of them worked in investment banks, fund institutions and the Internet industry. But only a year later, the crowdfunding cafe closed.

If you have heard of 3W Cafe, you must also know that "many people Cafe", a crowdfunding cafe in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, is not much worse than 3W Coffee and Garage Coffee, which has been widely publicized by the media. But after the initial uproar, he quickly fell into an irreversible dilemma, losing money for several months, and finally unable to pay his salary.

Taking advantage of the "crowdfunding + coffee" heat wave, 50 shareholders in Wuhan, Hubei Province also raised 1 million yuan to set up a crowdfunding cafe called CC Cafe, which aims to provide members with a venue for activities. Less than a year later, however, the cafe closed down quietly.

However, the worst should be a 500-person crowdfunding cafe in Taizhou, Shandong Province. Half a year after its opening, the partners quickly entered a long tearing period from the honeymoon period.

As a matter of fact, crowdfunding cafes have appeared not only in the above cities, but also in Zhengzhou, Changsha, Hangzhou, Dongguan and other places, but the results are too far from beforehand, either hurriedly closing doors to stop losses, or barely survive. To this end, many media have also predicted that 90% of crowdfunding cafes will close down in the second half of this year.

In fact, compared with 3W Coffee, the shareholder background of Shenzhen Kela Cafe is also famous, including Zhou Shiping, chairman of Hongling Venture Capital, Sun Mingda, chairman of Finance Institute, Tang Jun, chairman of Tuandaiwang, Jian Huixing, chairman of E Express loan, Ying Shuguang, chairman of Guangdong Commercial loan, Luo Mingxiong, president of Jingbei crowdfunding, and so on.

But perhaps the "poison" of crowdfunding coffee is so deep that even the famous Internet financial mogul in recent years can't change the status quo. Crowdfunding House tried to interview Jingbei crowdfunding platform about the matter last week, but the person in charge just frowned and didn't want to talk about it.

Try to detoxify.

After the collapse of crowdfunding cafes, many media people and financial experts have tried to explain this kind of thing. At present, there are three main theories:

People can't. Just because everyone is a shareholder doesn't mean everyone is in charge. In the current case of the closure of crowdfunding cafes in the market, there are mainly two kinds of shareholders, one is the type of 3W coffee, carat coffee and other models, and the shareholders are composed of celebrities from the Internet and investment circles; the other is a cafe set up by crowdfunding by the general public.

But either way, there is a problem: either the shareholders are too busy to manage, or the shareholders do not know how to take care of it, resulting in no one to take care of it.

Some media pointed out that although "people gather firewood", "firewood collection" is limited to fund-raising. After the cafe really opened, it was actually faced with a management problem, which is far from being solved by a large number of people.

On the contrary, due to the excessive number of shareholders and the early use of joint investment, it is difficult to clearly distinguish the rights and responsibilities of shareholders. It seems that everyone is the boss and everyone can participate in the actual management.

However, this model just violates the modern enterprise management system. For example, the sponsor has the ability to raise funds, but management is not necessarily his specialty.

The head of the crowdfunding platform once said that due to the lack of third-party supervision, such crowdfunding cafes are easy to form small groups, resulting in damage to the rights and interests of other shareholders.

According to this view, in fact, many crowdfunding cafes have such a problem, the most direct manifestation is that the cafe has closed down, whether it is necessary to obtain the consent of all shareholders, how to allocate the funds after liquidation, who will be responsible, and so on.

However, the crowdfunding cafe model is not static, and its management model has been changing since 2011. Now the mainstream model should be to hire a professional operation team to take care of it, and shareholders are not directly involved in management, which is expected to solve the contradiction between the excessive number of shareholders and enterprise management.

Crowdfunding Cafe is actually just a cafe under the cloak of "crowdfunding". In essence, it is a cafe with a fixed business model. Judging from past cases, the rise of crowdfunding cafes actually took off through the "crowdfunding" model, but the crowdfunding model is only suitable for solving financial problems, not operational problems. Because the essence is still a cafe. Then, its operation model is naturally to follow the inherent business model.

However, judging from the original intention of most crowdfunding cafes, profit is not their first choice, and its original intention is to provide a place for leisure activities for people in the circle. For celebrities, cafes with the goal of not making a profit may be able to afford the expenses behind them, such as rent, procurement, staff salaries, and so on, but for "civilian" crowdfunding cafes, they obviously cannot withstand this ordeal.

This is also one of the important reasons why many media predict that 90% of the crowdfunding cafes will close down in the second half of this year. The last remaining crowdfunding cafes are either "aristocratic" cafes that do not hesitate to lose money, or cafes that really know how to operate, but this is relatively rare.

Some experts believe that, in essence, the closure of a large number of crowdfunding cafes is still based on the market law of survival of the fittest, the good will stay, the bad will close down.

In fact, this view is mainly based on the competition in the coffee industry. In the face of Starbucks, Aix and other coffee chains, how can crowdfunding cafes find a way out? How valuable is the brand premium with crowdfunding as a gimmick? How to resist the joint killing of crowdfunded cafes by chain stores?

Internet finance is beginning to fail, and it is difficult to protect itself, so there is no energy to open a coffee shop. In a report on the collapse of Coffee Coffee in the Securities Times, it was mentioned that:

"perhaps the closure of carat coffee also reflects the changes of the entire online loan industry. From last year to this year, the growth rate of the platform slowed down, the number of listed companies merging P2P companies decreased significantly compared with the previous two years, and well-known venture capital investment cases basically no longer appeared. Instead, the financing cases of the industry are all large platforms, and the signs of de-P2P are very obvious. The mutual fund industry has changed from a loser to a strong Hengqiang centralized trend. Any attempt to deceive by telling stories has been receded by the tide of capital and exposed to the public naked. "

In the background of Kela Cafe shareholders, it is not difficult to find that most of the shareholders are chairmen of Internet financial platforms in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Affected by the decline in overall industry data, it is impossible to remove unprofitable cafes.

It is worth mentioning that one of the shareholders is Li Rui, chairman of HI Investment Bar, who was wanted by Shenzhen Public Security Bureau in April this year on suspicion of illegal fund-raising for issuing fake marks on the platform.

Of course, from the perspective of capital winter, it basically negates the crowdfunding cafe model and suppresses the enthusiasm of Internet financial insiders for this model.

The logic behind crowdfunding cafes

At present, the reason for the collapse of crowdfunding cafes is that the main shareholders are unprofessional, the competition in the coffee industry is fierce, and the capital winter affects these factors.

In the final analysis, both crowdfunding cafes and other brick-and-mortar stores should follow business rules, rather than subverting its inherent business model under the banner of "Internet finance" and "crowdfunding".

However, in fact, the crowdfunding cafes that appeared at the beginning did not want to make a profit, such as 3W coffee, garage coffee, etc., not only can not make a large-scale profit, but also the success is conditional. First, it is necessary to have a circle culture; second, it is difficult to rely on selling individual coffee to survive; third, there must be "financiers."

It's like why they run a coffee shop, why not a pancake shop, a milk tea shop, a barbecue kebab, or stinky tofu? Because. Can you imagine Internet finance bosses chewing stinky tofu while discussing the direction of the industry? In other words, the "coffee shop" embodies the cultural concepts of these circles, such as the Internet and the investment community.

Similar to the ancient books and theatres, they survived because they gathered people with the same social values. It's impossible for a few boxing fighters to open a teahouse, and there are a lot of people who talk about tea to patronize it. Of course, there is an example that cannot be ruled out.

However, the later derived crowdfunding cafes deviate from this logic and are more likely to raise funds through crowdfunding to make cafes profitable. So, this road obviously runs counter to the design of the original crowdfunding cafe.

Therefore, there is no need to criticize crowdfunding cafes indefinitely, because it is no different from the daily closure of shops on the market. If crowdfunding cafes want to jump out of this strange circle, they must focus on the management mode of cafes.

So what is the future fate of crowdfunding cafes? so far, we can only say that it is up to the later generations to solve the loopholes in this model.