Chapter 43: Spreading the Legend

How could Gu Cheng not know who Ma Feng was? It was just that, in the future, he knew him as an elderly man with a head of white hair. Now, meeting Ma Feng, who was only forty, he naturally didn't recognize him.

“So it’s President Ma—my apologies for the oversight. My company has just started, so we haven’t printed business cards yet. Let me write down my contact information for you.”

Gu Cheng wiped his hands, took a notepad, and wrote his name and phone number, omitting any title.

Ma Feng glanced at it and immediately caught the key point. “So, Mr. Gu, you’re the person in charge of the company?”

“In name, it’s my sister, because I’m underage.”

“Underage?” Ma Feng seemed to have heard the most shocking news of the night. “How old are you, Mr. Gu?”

“In a few months, I’ll be seventeen.”

Ma Feng was speechless, his jaw nearly dropping to the table.

After a long pause, he finally sighed. “Your company, you started it after the bubble burst, right? I remember you moved in here less than twenty days ago.”

“That’s right, it’s been exactly twenty days since registration.” Gu Cheng answered every question, his attitude much warmer than at the start, clearly intending to win him over.

No matter how impressive Ma Feng was, right now he couldn’t compare to Gu Cheng.

The e-commerce boom hadn’t arrived yet; in the coming three-year winter, only the online gaming industry would stand out in the internet sector.

Ma Feng gave a slight, bitter smile. “To enter the industry at such a critical moment, your courage is undeniable. As for whether online gaming is the right entry point, I can’t say—I don’t know enough about it. Before, when my colleagues and I left work for barbecue, the whole building would already be dark. Since you moved in, I realized there are people working later than us.”

Gu Cheng laughed amiably. “It’s just a seasonal thing. We’re rushing the schedule. Once the game is in open beta, there won’t be so much overtime.”

Ma Feng was eager to learn; perhaps he hadn’t interacted with online gaming company owners before, so he took the opportunity to ask Gu Cheng quite a few questions. Gu Cheng shared whatever he could, and the two quickly became familiar.

From their conversation, Gu Cheng could see that Ma Feng had a wealth of practical experience and was not someone who succeeded by luck alone.

Especially regarding early-stage promotion strategies for the internet industry, Ma Feng’s thinking was highly pragmatic—he wasn’t dazzled by flashy concepts.

“Offline business can’t just sell a concept and expect it to migrate online by itself at the start. If the environment were truly that mature, why would the opportunity fall to you? Take e-commerce, for example—obviously, the conditions aren’t mature yet, but there’s hope they will be. So you go offline, knock on doors, adding businesses to your database, and start cooperating. In five or eight years, when the market is fully developed, that’s when you make your money.”

“What? You ask if I’m afraid of running e-commerce at a loss for a few years? Not at all. Last year, Old Sun gave me twenty million dollars. Someone else would have burned through it in two years; I might not even finish burning it in five. That’s why my business life is three times longer than my competitors’, and I have three times as many chances. I’m not worried at all right now, because the post-80s generation is still playing online games. In five or ten years, when they become the backbone of the business world, it’ll be time for people like me—who dug the pit five or ten years early—to shine.”

“There are too many people in China, and too many smart ones at that. Even if there really was a business that could make you rich overnight, you couldn’t possibly be smarter and harder-working than everyone else. Why would that opportunity fall to you? So people like me can only gamble on foresight. Others dig a pit, squat for two years without profit, and then give up and die. But if I’m sure of this spot, I’ll stick to it for life—succeed or perish. If I lose, I’ll jump off the Qiantang River Bridge rather than move on!”

In the midst of their casual conversation, Ma Feng inadvertently slipped into a motivational speech.

Gu Cheng mostly played the listener, gradually discerning Ma Feng’s qualities: vision, ambition, the ability to “dig the pit,” and the stamina to endure loneliness.

The key was that he managed the company’s burn rate well, could motivate his subordinates, and kept them hanging on with future goals that might only be realized five or ten years down the line.

Of course, Gu Cheng also knew there must be dozens more “Ma Fengs” out there, just as persistent and enduring, but perhaps with slightly less vision or a bit more bad luck. Those people really did jump off the Qiantang River Bridge, with no chance to leave their names in history.

Their late-night chat wasn’t just motivational talk. Gu Cheng found that he now had a better feel for the pulse of the internet in this era, and was somewhat inspired regarding future strategies for promoting “Legend.”

Before meeting Ma Feng, Gu Cheng had planned, given his limited advertising funds, to focus on running ads on the main single-player and online gaming websites, and to hire some internet “water army” to post on various strategy forums.

At most, he thought of pushing into print media, placing cover ads in computer magazines like Popular Software, and publishing more strategy features.

But after talking with Ma Feng, Gu Cheng realized that internet penetration in this world was still pitifully low. Ignoring offline promotional work would definitely backfire.

If even the e-commerce giants were still pounding the pavement offline, how could an online gaming company rely solely on “air force” tactics?

As for how exactly to solve this problem, Gu Cheng hadn’t figured it out yet.

After all, in this matter, none of his knowledge from the future was useful—by 2040, there were no offline salespeople on Earth. In his era, nobody understood any of this.

The two chatted away into the early morning. When Ma Feng finally succumbed to exhaustion, he didn’t bother going home; he simply left with a polite “Let’s work together if there’s a chance,” and went back upstairs to his office to rest.

Just as Ma Feng was about to step out, Gu Cheng hesitated and called after him.

Ma Feng, hand on the glass door, turned back with suspicion. “Anything else?”

Gu Cheng thought for a moment and said, “For the next few years, online gaming companies will have it a bit easier. If one day you run out of e-commerce funds and really want to jump off the Qiantang River Bridge, don’t forget there’s a ‘venture capitalist’ living downstairs.”

“Alright, I’ve given myself another escape route today,” Ma Feng replied, laughing heartily as he left. Gu Cheng could tell he hadn’t taken his words seriously at all.

Gu Cheng then pulled out a lounge chair and fell asleep on the spot.

…

Gu Cheng slept for over a dozen hours, not waking until his cousin called him in the afternoon.

The company was on holiday that day, having just completed a major project. Pan Jieying had made a pot of soup at home and brought it in a thermos.

After washing up, Gu Cheng sipped the soup, feeling guilty as he advised, “Sis, you really don’t need to keep doing this. You’re busy too, and school’s started already.”

Pan Jieying replied proudly, “Don’t worry, I’m not that free! I only made it because I saw you drinking last night. Don’t expect this all the time.”

It was already late September, and even though first-year graduate students started late, Pan Jieying still had to report for classes.

Having spent time hanging around with Gu Cheng, she realized there was much she still needed to learn, especially in basic business management, which required solid grounding back at school—not just passively absorbing whatever the professors taught, but selecting what was truly useful.

After finishing the soup, Gu Cheng recalled his late-night chat with Ma Feng and shared his new ideas about game promotion with his cousin.

Pan Jieying also agreed with his concerns and poured out her own accumulated thoughts and questions from the past few months:

“I’ve been meaning to tell you—since you said that to do well in online games you have to go experience internet cafes firsthand, I’ve visited almost a hundred around the city in the past few months, breathing in all that choking cigarette smoke. Even the black-market cafes that are impossible to find without a veteran’s guidance, I’ve tried them all.

After all this, I think the online gaming industry is still very gray and marginal. Some of your earlier promotional ideas were too optimistic. Right now, at least eighty percent of internet users are sneaking out to surf the web behind their parents’ backs. Even if they play games, they don’t dare share it with friends and family, or even classmates—at most, only with their closest buddies.

In that environment, TV ads, forum posts, even specialty website ads, don’t do much. Kids whose homes don’t have computers just dive straight into the game as soon as they’re in the internet cafe—who wants to waste precious internet fees browsing forums?”

Her words truly made Gu Cheng see her in a new light.

He hadn’t expected her to take his offhand suggestion so seriously, let alone carry it out with such dedication.

He pondered aloud, “That is a real problem. By your logic, for teenagers without home computers, their only source of game news is in the internet cafe. And as soon as the computer boots up, they launch the game directly, not even glancing at web pages…”

At this realization, cold sweat broke out on Gu Cheng’s forehead.

To neglect offline promotion would be asking for trouble.

“It looks like we need to adjust our advertising budget for the next phase. The amount set aside for ads on Yaoqi Mountain and Game Knight should be trimmed. But we still need to advertise heavily in Popular Software. Also, we need to print more attractive posters and send people to put them up in internet cafes around the city… But that means we’d need a huge offline sales and promotion team. For a company of just twenty people like ours, that’s going to be tough.”