Chapter 120: How Did You Get Into Void Academy? (Begging for Monthly Tickets)

In April, Lashou ran two group-buy flash sales on Fox Treasure, with cumulative sales reaching 57 million yuan and 230,000 new customers added.

Lashou spent 20 million yuan on marketing and 9.2 million yuan on new-customer rewards for this, with a return on investment barely reaching 2 — seemingly not worth it.

But those 57 million yuan in sales gave Lashou an out-of-thin-air 3.5% market share increase in the April industry competition, firmly suppressing Meituan, Wowo Group, and Gao Peng.

Even Ju Hua Suan, with its tens of millions of daily active users, failed to surpass Lashou in its very first month entering the group-buy track.

At first, Chen Yansen still paid attention to the group-buy industry's competition, but later, busy preparing the Super Flash Sale Day on April 22, he paid it no more heed.

With the joint efforts of the Ad Placement Group, the Campaign Group, and the Operations Group, after the three-day event ended, Fox Treasure's daily active users broke through 3 million for the first time.

But Chen Yansen understood in his heart that, calculated by the current weekly retention rate, stabilizing at 2.7 million daily active users by month's end would already be good.

When the event ended, total sales were 93 million yuan, though publicly it was claimed to be 100 million.

Gross margin dropped from 10% to 6.3%; subtracting the Ad Placement Group's traffic-purchase costs, the event's profit was almost zero.

Fortunately, the reputation got out there!

After more than half a year of market cultivation and user education, many potential users, even if they had never used Fox Treasure, no longer regarded shopping-guide e-commerce sites as scams.

Chen Yansen set down the "Introduction to Algorithms" and "C Primer Plus" in his hands, stood up, and headed downstairs.

His mind was still mulling over how to solve the Android system lag problem.

In fact, Android system lag isn't entirely due to software reasons — hardware issues also limit smoothness.

In 2011, phone processors had low clock speeds and few cores, making it hard to complete computations quickly, resulting in slow operation.

Moreover, Android phones at this time typically had RAM between 512MB and 1GB, with internal storage mostly at 4GB or 8GB; slow read/write speeds made lag inevitable.

On the hardware side, Chen Yansen was powerless to change things, but at the system level, he wanted to develop a more efficient memory management algorithm, thereby solving the shortcomings of memory occupation and fragmentation.

Currently, for this problem, he had two trains of thought: one was to optimize the process scheduling algorithm to improve system response speed; the other was to adopt a generational garbage collection algorithm, adjusting the trigger conditions and strategies of garbage collection to improve recovery efficiency.

Chen Yansen sorted out his thoughts, walked to the Aurora R&D team's work area, and called Wang Teng out.

"Sen-ge, Aurora's preliminary architecture design is done, there are 3 versions of the interface prototype, the system boot and file system modules just passed testing…"

Wang Teng, thinking Chen Yansen had come to ask about development progress, reported proactively.

"I'm not here for that. Regarding system lag and slow phone operation, do you have any good suggestions?"

Chen Yansen beckoned, found a temporary meeting room, and the two sat down to talk.

"The usual approach is to reduce animation effects, lower screen resolution, sacrificing part of the user experience, or to start from hardware — increase memory, or use stronger multi-core processors."

Wang Teng frowned and replied earnestly, drawing on his experience at OPPO.

"Is there a better way at the system level?"

Chen Yansen shrugged; he had no intention of sacrificing user experience, nor did he plan to fob users off with low-end processors.

"Improve the memory management mechanism, or optimize process scheduling — but OPPO and other domestic phone manufacturers have all tried it, and the results weren't great."

Wang Teng spoke while thinking, simultaneously pointing out the drawbacks of these two methods.

More than a dozen years later, Android phones wouldn't lag even after three or four years of use — on one hand, Google continuously upgraded the operating system, fixing the flaws of the initial version.

On the other hand, hardware development advanced by leaps and bounds; 16GB+1TB storage combinations became commonplace, naturally eliminating the annoyance of lag.

"I have an idea: divide data into Young Generation, Old Generation, and Metaspace, create different memory regions, and based on information like garbage collection time, frequency, and memory usage, combined with intelligent algorithms, clean up junk data for users in real time in the background…"

Chen Yansen, hearing Wang Teng finish, knew that current phone manufacturers had no good solutions to the system lag problem.

He paused briefly, then slowly began to speak, outlining his thinking while dictating the code implementation.

Wang Teng listened, his pupils gradually widening, his face full of shock.

He remembered that just over 20 days ago, Chen Yansen had no understanding of programming or algorithms, and had once asked him to recommend relevant books.

In less than a month, the other had gone from zero foundation to professional level, with clear thinking, and was even able to provide a reliable solution from a technical standpoint.

Wang Teng's heart was in turmoil; he really wanted to ask Chen Yansen — how did he get into Void City Academy?

With this kind of learning ability, not to mention Tsinghua or Peking, any top-tier domestic 985 university — wouldn't they be there for Chen Yansen to pick from?

"Hmm? Got it all down?"

Chen Yansen, seeing Wang Teng's mind wandering, raised his voice and asked.

"I'm listening, Sen-ge, please go on." Wang Teng came back to himself and hurriedly replied.

"In short, what I want isn't an OPPO ColorOS knockoff, but an entirely new customized UI."

Chen Yansen patted Wang Teng's shoulder and reminded him gently.

"Got it, Sen-ge. I'll take the generational garbage collection algorithm you just described, immediately communicate with the developers according to your thinking, and implement it as soon as possible."

Wang Teng mulled it over, felt Chen Yansen's plan could work, and earnestly assured him.

"Alright, get back to work."

Chen Yansen finished speaking, turned and went back to the second floor, picked up his books, and headed toward the library.

Recently, Chen Yansen often hung out in the library; besides reading books on computer science and software engineering, he occasionally flipped through a French vocabulary book.

With the experience of learning English, he discovered he could master a new language in 7 days.

The first two days, focus on learning vocabulary, grammar structures, parts of speech, and sentence patterns; the third and fourth days, watch ten original-language films; the fifth and sixth days, integrate what was learned, through deliberate practice adjust pronunciation, intonation, and expression; by the seventh day, he could basically speak fluent English or French.

Africa is the third-largest market for smartphones; 70% of adults are under 30, and their demand for and curiosity about digital products is no less than Southeast Asia's.

Such a large market—of course Chen Yansen wouldn't miss it; learning French in advance was also preparation for expanding the market.

After all, on this land, nearly 200 million people use French as their official language.

Chen Yansen took the books he had just borrowed, went to the upstairs reading room, and focused on reading.

If Chen Guobin were to see this scene, he'd probably have his jaw drop, because Chen Yansen, from childhood to adulthood, had never really put much effort into studying.

"Buzz buzz buzz—" the phone vibrated.

Chen Yansen pulled out his phone and pressed answer; before he could speak, he heard Liao Wei on the other end say: "President Chen, the Lighthouse Country warehouse is set up, and the staff are in place — when can the overseas-shopping auxiliary function on Fox Treasure go live?"

"Anytime, but don't mess this up." Chen Yansen said with a smile, his tone relaxed yet carrying a warning.

"Don't worry, I'll personally keep an eye on it." Liao Wei understood what Chen Yansen was worried about and quickly assured him.

The last fake-alcohol incident caused Yun Su Express's order volume to plummet.

Even though Chen Yansen stepped in, Wine God Net still terminated its exclusive partnership with Yun Su and switched to a different courier company.

Liao Wei knew perfectly well: if he failed to satisfy Chen Yansen this time, he would most likely end up struggling to keep Yun Su afloat.

When others give you a chance, you have to be able to seize it!

"Fine, pull the person handling order coordination into the project group and get it online as soon as possible."

Chen Yansen said readily.

The idea of an overseas transit warehouse had been almost two months from when he first proposed it to now — it really had been dragged out a bit too long.

Still, he also knew that Liao Wei had already done very well to smoothly lease the overseas warehouse and recruit staff; another person might not have been able to pull it off.

Chen Yansen took his phone, walked out to the corridor by the window, and called Zhuang Rui, telling him to launch the pre-developed overseas-shopping transit feature.

"Got it, Brother Sen." After receiving the instruction, Zhuang Rui immediately followed orders and first ring-fenced 20% of users for testing, to observe the conversion performance of the new feature.

Based on that, he would decide whether to continue rolling it out to everyone.

Fox Treasure's current daily active users were approaching three million, so launching a new feature directly carried too much risk — generally they used A/B testing or unit testing to reduce the losses from potential bugs.

(End of chapter)