Post-95 female entrepreneur chases her rural WeChat business dream
“I'll go pick the duck eggs tomorrow. Friends who want them, place your orders now, the quantity is limited!” Promoting her hometown's local specialties on WeChat Moments every day has become a part of Li Yao's life. And usually, within just a few minutes, her goods are all reserved.
In Kukeng Village, Fengyuan Township, Liandu District, Lishui City, Zhejiang Province, a place where mostly middle-aged and elderly people live, this beautiful young post-95 girl stands out especially. The “Yaoyao High-Mountain Agricultural Products” WeChat business platform she built sells local villagers' agricultural products and has achieved quite impressive results. “On average, daily turnover is five to six hundred yuan; when business is good, it's over one thousand yuan!” Speaking of her WeChat business dream, Li Yao looked especially confident on her still youthful face.
“At first I was just selling agricultural products I produced myself, and I never expected they would be so popular.” Speaking of her entrepreneurial experience, Li Yao had a lot of feelings. In 2014, Li Yao returned home from Tianjin to work, just as the village was hit by a typhoon, the family's high-mountain water bamboo field was damaged, and much of the water bamboo could not be sold. She and her family pickled the water bamboo, put it into small bottles, and promoted it to friends through WeChat, and unexpectedly it was an instant success. This made her think: could she build a WeChat business platform to connect the township's specialty agricultural products with market demand in the city?
To sell agricultural products well, opening up the market is very important. Li Yao was very confident in the quality of the village's local goods such as local pigs, chickens and ducks, and shiitake mushrooms, but she lacked an accumulated customer base, which was also the foundation of her small startup plan, so she decided to start by building connections. So Li Yao took the initiative to apply to work as the “female shopkeeper” at the village reception center, and learned skills one by one such as brewing tea, making small snacks, and brewing coffee. While chatting with tourists, Li Yao confidently promoted the village's local goods: free-range chickens and ducks, free-range local pigs, fresh vegetables, delicious shiitake mushrooms, and all kinds of dried goods. The tourists were quite interested in this articulate post-95 girl. Some added her as a WeChat friend, and some helped her promote together. 300 people, 500 people, 800 people…… Before long, a small circle of customers had formed.
In September 2015, Li Yao founded “Yaoyao High-Mountain Agricultural Products” and officially began working as a “WeChat business” operator. She went door to door to “package” all kinds of local goods from the villagers: taking photos, retouching images, adding captions, and then pushing them out in a unified way. Selling through an online platform was undoubtedly a novelty for villagers in the mountainous area. The prices were good, and they did not have to run around themselves, so why not? Now when villagers have agricultural products they need to sell, they all go to find her. From as much as several hundred jin of shiitake mushrooms to as little as a few eggs, she could find buyers at prices several tenths higher than the market price. “Now many elderly people treat me like family and come to me to discuss things when they have something going on!”
Kukeng Village is more than 60 kilometers of mountain road away from Lishui's urban area. Li Yao insists on taking the bus to the urban area 2-3 times a week to deliver goods and record customers' feedback so she can make improvements. “Once I forgot to ship an order to a customer, and only discovered it a few days later. I hurried to deliver it to them and also refunded the money. In the WeChat business, product quality must be excellent, and a good reputation is very important. Everyone is an acquaintance!” Speaking of her secret to doing business, Li Yao believes it is integrity and dedication.
Recently, Li Yao became a mother, but she has always been thinking about her “business” in the countryside. “In a couple of days I'm going to the village to take a look. The elderly people there all miss me!” Still in postpartum confinement, Li Yao has already begun planning her next step. She plans to make good use of her snack-making skills and purchase all the needed raw materials from the village, so that while developing her own career she can also make a contribution within her ability to other farming households in the village. She also wants to use her small startup plan to inspire more young people, letting them know that the seeds of dreams sown deep in the mountains can also sprout.