Stronger by Paying Salaries and I Have 1 Billion Employees

The gray-market tycoons ran automated scripts, while the low-level wool-gatherers did it manually.

Soon after, tech-savvy college students with a knack for hands-on work also joined the wool-gathering craze.

It was slower to do it manually, but it was still no problem to earn two or three thousand yuan in a day.

Getting temporary numbers, using stolen info, and running location-spoofing and ride-simulation software—it was all against the terms of service and illegal, but no one seemed to care.

Chang Wei watched the number of new user registrations and orders skyrocket on his dashboard. He felt a surge of joy, but it vanished as soon as he glanced at the promotion’s subsidy costs. He fell silent.

’This subsidy war is a fucking money pit!’

But the arrow had already left the bow. All he could do was grit his teeth and push forward.

「Meanwhile.」

Chen Yansen posted a promotion for an app called Douyin on his Weibo and Toutiao accounts. The caption read: ”Let’s play a little game. The first 1,000 fans to follow me will each receive an 888-yuan red envelope.”

”Douyin? A short-video app?”

”There’s a super popular short-video app in North America called Mimo. I guess President Chen is getting into the localization game himself.”

”Forget that, the red envelope is what matters! Let’s go!”

While most users in the comments section were busy trying to be the first to post, their brains hadn’t even caught up. The smart ones had already opened their app stores and downloaded Douyin.

They registered, logged in, searched for ”Chen Yansen,” and hit the follow button immediately.

In less than ten minutes, Chen Yansen’s follower count on Douyin surpassed 170,000, bringing nearly 200,000 new users to the platform.

Liang Bo ran video ads on Penguin and Youku, and graphic ads on NetEase, Sina, and Sohu. Combined with exposure on Toutiao, Lingxi Browser, and Xiaohongshu, they easily pulled in over a million new users.

Having deep pockets and a powerful backing gave them a massive advantage when promoting new products. For example, to force the adoption of Penguin Weibo, Ma Wenteng directly funneled traffic from QQ, bringing in four hundred million users in a single year.

But whether a product was actually good or not would ultimately be decided by its user retention rate.