@seclink: Qi Junyuan's Early Stage (Full Path of Teambition's Launch)

Qi Junyuan Early Stage (Complete Path of Teambition’s Start)

Qi Junyuan’s entrepreneurial journey can be divided into five stages: early groundwork, first failed startup, building internal tools in-house, cold start with organic growth, and capital & product breakout. It is a classic example of a college grassroots founder building a B2B SaaS in the early days:

I. University Pre-laying: Early Start on the Entrepreneurial Path, Building Resources

• Admitted to Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) without taking the exam; gave up biological research and chose the Antai School of Economics & Management, aiming to start a business building enterprise tools.
• Spent freshman and sophomore years intensely participating in entrepreneurship competitions, debates, and speeches, accumulating business plans, investor contacts, and university network.
• Teamed up with tech students from the School of Information, using competition prize money to build the initial team and manpower foundation.

II. 2011 Junior Year: First Startup (Health Records) – Raised 2.5M RMB Angel but Failed

• Project: online electronic medical records / health archives, aiming to connect hospitals and personal medical record cloud management.
• Started smoothly: secured 2.5M RMB angel investment, built a team of 30, even hired a retired chief physician to help with database.
• Fatal issue: In 2011, the online healthcare infrastructure, regulations, and user habits were completely immature, making monetization and deployment extremely difficult.
• Team collapsed: classmates graduated and found jobs; eventually the company was left with only Qi Junyuan + the backend CTO, and only a small amount of money left in the account, on the verge of bankruptcy.

III. Unintended Discovery: Self-built Teambition v1 (Product Origin) to Save Themselves

1. Pain Point Origin

Qi Junyuan’s judgment: tools must serve ordinary employees, not just provide reports for managers – this was the biggest difference from similar products at the time. The 30-person team had chaotic management; they tried over 30 project/collaboration tools, domestic and international, all of which were either designed only for bosses (employees unwilling to use) or had fragmented features (files and tasks not integrated).

2. Extremely Grassroots Self-development Process (Second Half of 2011)

• Only two people left, lacking front-end and design skills; Qi Junyuan taught himself programming, Photoshop, AI image editing, and video editing from scratch.
• Daily routine: took the 5am shuttle from Xuhui dorm to Minhang Zizhu office, coded all day, returned late at night; didn’t dare tell family the project had failed, lived at school for a long time to save costs.
• Spent six months polishing the first web version; wrote 220,000 lines of code and deleted 300,000 redundant lines through constant refactoring.
• Initially positioned as an internal tool: used to manage the remaining two-person company – syncing tasks, files, schedules, and progress boards – with no intention of commercializing it.

IV. Cold Start: Zero Paid Marketing, Organic Growth Through Word of Mouth (Early Core Growth Strategy)

• Nearby startup teams visited and saw the internal collaboration tool on his computer; they proactively asked for access to try it. Pain points were highly overlapping among similar small startups. The first batch of users came completely organically.
• First seed users: startups in Zizhu Park; labs and student startup teams at SJTU used it in bulk, spreading at low cost within campus circles, forming a stable free user pool.
• Tech media journalists and editors (e.g., 36Kr, Iyiou) were themselves entrepreneurs; they tried it and wrote about it proactively, generating massive exposure with zero ad spend. At that time, there were few lightweight, free collaboration tools available to all employees in China, creating a strong differentiation.
• Growth logic: completely free basic version; relied on real collaboration experience for word-of-mouth, not sales or field promotion; users shared it spontaneously.

V. Capital + Product Dividends – Officially Established Position

• 2013: Series A of several million from Gobi Partners; Teambition officially became the main business, abandoning the health records track.
• 2014: IDG Capital and Pangu Venture Capital joined Series A+; capital helped expand the product and build mobile apps.
• Product milestone: 2015 iOS version was named Best App of the Year by Apple, gaining national recognition.
• 2016: Tencent strategic investment; became a leading lightweight collaboration SaaS in China, user base exceeded one million.

Core Differentiation (Key to Early Success):

• Designed products from the employee’s perspective, not just for management.
• Lightweight, low entry barrier with free plans – small teams could try it at zero cost.
• Integrated files, tasks, schedules, and comments – no need to switch between multiple tools.
• The founding team used it heavily themselves; collected user feedback every two weeks for rapid iteration.