BSI Chapter 13 The Overlooked Blue Ocean
Chapter 13 The Overlooked Blue Ocean
At 11 p.m., Su Chen was the only one left in the office on the second floor of Hongyuan Intelligent.
There were three laptops on the table in front of him. One of them had the drone sales data pages on Taobao and JD.com open, another had the search trend chart of Baidu Index open, and the third was the analysis document he was writing.
Within two weeks of its launch, the Flyer F2 sold over 300 units through existing distribution channels.
This figure is considered a good result for a small, dying company, and its cash flow has begun to turn positive. However, Su Chen is well aware that monthly sales of one or two hundred units can only keep the company afloat; it can never support any meaningful development.
The ceiling for existing distribution channels is right here.
Hongyuan's distributors are mainly concentrated in South China, serving primarily model aircraft enthusiasts and small film studios—a market already saturated by DJI. In this market, you can only eat DJI's leftovers, never achieving significant growth.
Su Chen needs to find a new market.
A market that DJI doesn't want to enter, or hasn't had time to enter yet.
He had already compiled a week's worth of research data in his notebook on the table, and now he was going to do the final summary.
He opened the analysis document and typed a title at the top:
[Analysis of the Commercial Aerial Photography Market for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises]
Then he began to write down his findings from the week, one by one.
First, the wedding aerial photography market.
In 2016, the market size of China's wedding industry exceeded one trillion yuan. Aerial photography is becoming a standard feature of wedding videos—in first- and second-tier cities, almost every wedding company has begun to offer aerial photography services.
However, the situation is completely different in third- and fourth-tier cities and county towns.
Su Chen made over fifty phone calls this week, contacting small and medium-sized wedding planning companies in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hunan, Jiangxi, and other provinces. The result revealed a startling fact—
More than 70 percent of wedding companies in county towns do not use drones.
It's not that I don't want to buy it, it's that I can't afford it.
The DJI Phantom 4 sells for 9,000 yuan, while other brands' semi-professional drones cost 5,000 to 6,000 yuan. For a wedding planning studio in a county town, spending 6,000 to 9,000 yuan on a drone, if it crashes, breaks, or gets lost, means losing half a year's worth of profits.
Moreover, they are unfamiliar with drones and are worried that they won't be able to learn how to fly them or that they might crash them.
Therefore, most wedding planning companies in county towns either do not provide aerial photography or rent drones and operators temporarily, with a rental fee of three to five hundred yuan per trip.
But if they could spend two thousand yuan to buy their own drone, which is stable in flight, easy to operate, and produces clear images, they could earn an extra two or three hundred yuan for each wedding they film, and break even after filming ten weddings.
Second, the real estate aerial photography market.
In 2016, the national real estate industry was booming, with new housing projects launching daily in third- and fourth-tier cities. Real estate agencies needed DJI drones' aerial photos and videos for promotional purposes, but most small agencies couldn't afford them.
Third, inspect the market at construction sites.
Construction sites need to regularly take aerial photos of the construction progress for client reports, government reviews, safety monitoring, etc., but most construction companies' solution is to "exhaust manpower"—to have people climb to high places to take photos.
Fourth, the small media market.
County-level TV stations, local news media, and self-media entrepreneurs—these groups have an increasingly strong demand for aerial photography, but their budgets are limited.
After writing down these four market segments, Su Chen let out a long sigh of relief.
These four markets share a common characteristic—
They are all located in third- and fourth-tier cities and county towns.
Their buyers are not model airplane enthusiasts or professional photographers, but ordinary small business owners.
They don't need 4K resolution, visual obstacle avoidance, or a 5-kilometer transmission distance.
What they need is:
Cheap. Flies steadily. Clear picture. Easy to learn. Durable.
These five words were like a key, pressing the lock in Su Chen's mind that he was trying to unlock.
He suddenly realized that he had been making a mistake all along.
Since taking over Hongyuan Intelligent, his thinking has always been: how to make the product better and then compete with others in the existing market.
But the current market is DJI's home turf. No matter how good your product is, you'll only get leftovers in the face of DJI's absolute dominance.
The real breakthrough is not "doing it better", but "doing it differently".
Find markets that DJI doesn't value and serve customers that DJI can't serve.
"Just like Xiaomi back in the day," Su Chen blurted out.
In my past life, Xiaomi's rise to prominence wasn't because it outperformed Apple, but because it delivered "good enough quality" at "a price that made people scream."
The same logic applies to the drone industry—
If Su Chen could price a drone that is stable in flight, provides clear images, and is easy to use, under two thousand yuan—
That is to open up a completely new blue ocean in the "lower-tier market" that DJI and other brands have looked down upon.
Su Chen's eyes lit up.
He wrote down the concept of the new product in the document:
[Flyer F2 Working Version]
Positioning: An entry-level commercial aerial photography drone targeting small and medium-sized commercial customers in third- and fourth-tier cities and counties.
Key selling points: F2-level flight stability (the biggest competitive advantage), 1080P online high-definition aerial footage, and extremely simple controls that allow "zero-experience learners to fly in ten minutes".
Price: 1999 yuan.
When Su Chen finished writing the number, his heart raced.
1999 yuan.
What does this price mean? Currently, the cheapest drones on the market with flight quality close to the F2 cost over 3,500 yuan. The F2 working version, by removing some unnecessary functions—eliminating the spare battery interface, simplifying the remote controller design, and using a lower-cost plastic body instead of carbon fiber—can reduce the hardware cost to less than 900 yuan per unit.
Selling one unit yields a gross profit of at least one thousand yuan.
For wedding companies, real estate agencies, construction sites, and small media outlets in county towns, buying a usable drone for 1999 yuan and shooting seven or eight events will break even.
Anyone can figure this out.
Su Chen closed his laptop and glanced at the time—it was already past 1 a.m.
But he was not sleepy at all.
He had something even more important to figure out—how to sell it.
Traditional dealer channels are virtually nonexistent in county towns. No county town has a dedicated drone store, and local digital product stores won't sell drones to you.
Therefore, we cannot rely on traditional channels and must build our own sales network.
What method?
Su Chen thought of a ground promotion method that many drone companies used in their early days—mobile demonstration teams.
Send a small team with a prototype directly to the target customer's location, conduct a live flight demonstration, and close the deal on the spot.
Where are you going?
Wedding clients – go to wedding expos and wedding photography streets.
Real estate clients – going to the sales center of a new property development.
Construction site clients go to the building materials market.
Media clients – go to the photography equipment market.
All of these scenarios share a common hard requirement—
We must fly it to them on the spot to show them.
Drones are different from mobile phones. You can tell if a mobile phone is good or bad just by touching it, but a drone has to fly to prove itself.
Therefore, every ground-based promotion must be a flight demonstration.
This is precisely the biggest advantage of the Flyer F2 – its flight control stability is unmatched by competing products in the same price range.
Once it takes flight, no one will refuse it.
Su Chen opened his phone and sent a WeChat message to Meng Xiaoyi:
"We'll have a meeting tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM. Zhou Ming and Zhang Lei are both called in. There's a new plan."