Review of an Internet car rental platform (2) - platform, ecology and architecture

Years ago, I wrote "Review of an Internet Car Rental Platform—How to Hold an Entire Industry" (the article is password-protected and cannot be seen by ordinary people).

This article is mainly a supplement to the previous article.

1. How to launch a multi-sided market platform product?

As mentioned in the previous article, growth is divided into three major stages. Among them, the first two major stages are:

1. The first big stage: survive and gain a foothold.

Based on the above growth model, we can quickly achieve order growth and build our own core competitiveness.

2. The second major stage: becoming one of the major players in the market

Explore and build user ecology to form the second growth pole. Expand the upstream and downstream ecosystem to include more car-related companies, including OEMs, vehicle sales terminals, etc., and explore and build a multi-interest ecosystem. Use ecological construction to expand yourself and defeat your opponents in order to gain the largest share of the market.

It was also mentioned why the first major stage should focus on the supply side.

However, at this stage of the plan, I did not include the user ecology. Because, for the initial stage of entrepreneurship, what is more needed is simple, rough and effective growth, so that the entrepreneurial project can survive in the safest way. However, the construction of user ecology requires continuous trial and error based on data analysis. This process will be relatively long and cannot be achieved overnight. Therefore, the first big stage is centered around this growth model. In the second major stage, we will consider building a user ecosystem and making it the second growth pole of the platform. See the "Evolution Route" below for details.

Here, I would like to talk about the methods and ideas for launching a platform product in a bilateral or multilateral market.

For launching a multi-sided market platform, increasing the number of users on one side will lead to a large increase in the number of users on the other side. Similarly, increasing the number of users on the other side will also lead to an increase in the number of users on this side. This is called the network effect.

This is the characteristic of a multi-sided market platform product.

The car rental platform is a typical two-sided market platform, and it can even develop into a multi-sided market platform. It is not simply a unilateral market product targeting a certain user group.

For this car rental platform, I chose to start from the supply side first.

In fact, this is also the successful strategy chosen by many trading platforms, content platforms, etc. For example, domestic Didi, Meituan, Kuaishou, etc., and foreign YouTube, Uber, etc.

Once a certain amount of supply is established, as long as some traffic entrances are opened, the growth of C users and order volume is a natural thing. The growth of C users, that is, the growth of demand, will lead to the growth of B users, that is, the growth of supply. In this way, the snowball effect will appear. This is the first growth pole.

The second growth pole is user ecology. Regarding the car rental platform, what I was thinking about was how to let users spread the word and how to let users produce content during their use. Because if these two things are done well, another snowball effect will be formed that is brought about by users and affects more users.

2. Regarding the separation of “selling” and “using”

One of the key points of the previous article is the separation of "selling" and "using".

In fact, the separation of "selling" and "using" has another benefit. That is to separate growth and user experience, so that growth and user experience have different focuses.

In this way, growth can get rid of many restrictions by focusing on the "selling" level, and user experience only needs to focus on the "using" level.

Improving user experience is very important for retaining users, repurchasing, and forming a user ecosystem. Doing it well will also increase growth to a great extent.

3. About the architecture of the inventory system

The purpose of architecture is to build and maintain a system with the least cost. It can also be said to make complex things simple, whether it is implementation, expansion, or maintenance.

This inventory system uses a hybrid architecture of microkernel architecture and event-driven architecture.

1. Overall, a microkernel architecture is adopted.

The key to the inventory system is the handling of inventory changes. Inventory changes can model multiple inventory changes. Each variation model independently has a plug-in "plugged into" the "kernel".

As new business types and inventory changes may appear in the car rental business in the future, corresponding plug-ins can be flexibly customized and "inserted" into the "kernel".

In this way, the entire inventory system has a high degree of availability and high scalability.

2. The kernel architecture adopts an event-driven architecture.

To put it simply, the core of the inventory system will monitor changes in order status and vehicle status, and then decide which inventory change "plug-in" to execute based on a series of strategies and rules and calculations. The changes in inventory are ultimately determined by this plug-in and some parameters entered into this plug-in.

In this way, the automation and unmanned operation of the inventory system are basically realized. The automation of the inventory system also laid the foundation for the subsequent automation of the entire car rental business.