(From TMTpost Entrepreneur Talk, the most titanium-edged entrepreneur stories.)

TMTpost Note: Let us temporarily set aside the debate on whether the "O2O bubble" exists, and instead look at the stories behind the O2O industry. Doorstep massages, home美容, on-demand manicures... it seems that overnight, they've taken over advertising screens across the city. Services that once required a trip to the neighborhood beauty salon, the SPA lounge in the mall basement, or the nail salon can now be enjoyed at home with just a few taps on an app. These beauticians, masseurs, and physiotherapists suddenly have what looks like an independent service license, carrying their toolkits and crisscrossing the city.

Wei Wuhui, a well-known TMTpost author, summarizes the essence of this development as "mass-scale amateurization." The internet is changing the lives of a group of practitioners via doorstep services, and also transforming the consumption habits of hundreds of millions. The TMTpost editorial team selected three different life stories to tell this sweeping "independent movement":

At 8:30 PM in Beijing, three people are living completely different lives.

Li Mei, a 19-year-old girl from Sichuan, is chatting with her younger brother on QQ using a second-hand iPhone 5s she bought from Taobao in June. Her brother's high school still holds summer tutoring sessions, and she tells him not to worry about money.

Master Wang, 34, leafs through a tattered copy of "Essential Acupuncture Techniques and Ten Massage Methods." Beside it is a 16-page notebook filled with densely packed red and blue annotations, as well as hand-drawn meridian diagrams of the human body. In addition to this book, he has recently revisited the GRE red book to further his study of American chiropractic techniques.

Li Wen, a 29-year-old consultant, is staring at a proposal she just received. Normally at this hour, she would be doing yoga with friends. From 3 p.m. until now, she's had five meetings and met six entrepreneurs. A vinyl record player spins Gregorio Allegri's "Miserere," but she feels restless. She wishes she could order an on-demand SPA service to relieve her physical fatigue.

In the past, the lives of these three people would never have intersected.

But now, a slowly emerging health O2O trend is gradually connecting them. Through the internet, people from different social strata and life circumstances have, for the first time, the opportunity to look at each other as equals. This wave brings not only business model and conceptual innovation, but also new changes in how those involved perceive the world and their own lives.

Start a Business? Go Back to China!

Two co-founders of Li Master share the same surname: Xue.

Xue Xipeng comes from a lineage of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners. His great-great-grandfather was an imperial physician who served Empress Dowager Cixi and Emperor Guangxu. He began studying medicine at age six, and in 2004 went to France to study Western medicine. Xue Di had moved to the US long ago, later working at Microsoft in marketing and becoming a naturalized US citizen. Over the next 12 years, he spent merely a few weeks in China in total.

Xue Di is an avid sportsman. Seattle, where Microsoft is headquartered, happens to be one of the few US cities where badminton thrives. After years of playing, he injured his arm. Through a Chinese doctor in the US, he was introduced to Xue Xipeng, who treated him with massage rehabilitation, and the two became friends.

Six years after leaving for France, Xue Xipeng returned to China. After working at several private hospitals, he decided to start his own business in 2014, founding Li Master to create an O2O platform for massage services. Xue Di also returned to China and became a co-founder of Li Master.

Xue Xipeng's grandfather retired as the chief physician of a railway hospital at 63 and later opened his own clinic. His uncle, Xue Yongge, runs the Kyoto Tai Chi Massage School in Beijing.

In Xue Xipeng's view, compared with traditional TCM clinics, Li Master's internet-based approach saves a great deal of time for users who are pressed for time or unwilling to leave home. It also allows users to choose their own masseurs on the platform and rate service quality, thereby increasing price and choice transparency — advantages that traditional offline methods cannot or are unwilling to achieve.

"The essence of our service is still technique, solving users' problems. I don't think entrepreneurship changes anything fundamentally; it's just using an internet-based approach to do it," Xue Xipeng believes. Li Master is using a method that addresses user pain points to promote traditional massage therapy.

As early as his student days in France, Xue Xipeng supported himself by posting offers on the "Fighting in France" forum, but he never had much close involvement with the internet before starting his business. This ambiguous relationship gives him a relatively calm and detached perspective on O2O.

He still vividly remembers the chaotic group-buying wars after 2010 and the taxi-app subsidy battles not long ago. Xue Xipeng wasn't just a passive observer; over the five years of O2O battles, he observed a crucial shift: internet trends and user preferences were gradually moving from the PC-centric group-buying era to mobile terminals.

The transition from websites to apps isn't just about changing user habits; it also signals the evolution of mobile internet technology — mobile terminals are no longer just traffic acquisition tools, but increasingly information interaction hubs that can facilitate the entire process of product display, booking, ordering, and payment.

After launching in January, Li Master began offline promotion. In the beginning, they could only visit one or two companies per day. With team expansion, they improved, reaching seven or eight companies daily. In the first 20 days after launch, they visited over 100 companies for promotion, and their first 1,000+ users were all acquired through offline efforts. To date, Li Master has completed promotions at more than 500 enterprises.

"What's fun about the O2O industry is that there's no fixed answer — everyone tries to cross the river by feeling the stones," says Xue Di.

Even as CEO, Xue Xipeng still personally massages some VIP users. He isn't worried about the fierce competition from other O2O massage services, believing he holds a real trump card.

Teachers, Teachers

Once you strip away the flashy internet veneer of O2O services, the final competition between Li Master and its rivals ultimately hinges on the skill and quality of the masseurs themselves.

Xue Xipeng is quite confident. According to him, Beijing currently has over 80,000 licensed physiotherapists, but fewer than 1,000 have gathered on various O2O platforms, and their skill levels vary greatly. Li Master's massage therapists all come from his uncle's Kyoto Tai Chi Massage School and undergo additional training. The school, founded in 1999, has trained over half of Beijing's masseurs.

Xue Xipeng aims to build Li Master into a platform that gathers the top 1% of masseurs. To achieve this, they need to work on multiple fronts.

First, the qualifications and skill level of the therapists must earn user recognition and trust.

Li Master currently has about 100 physiotherapists on its platform, most of whom were born in the 1970s, with very few born after 1985. These therapists, averaging around 30 years old, possess solid practical experience and don't find it difficult to learn new techniques like American chiropractic.

"Masseurs have qualifications from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, rehabilitation physiotherapists have credentials from the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and licensed physician qualifications have been implemented since 1999," Xue Xipeng told us. All therapists on Li Master have these credentials, and they are now planning to take the lead in standardizing the O2O massage industry. "Our school is a director of the Health Culture Association under the State Administration of TCM, and we're currently in discussions to create a new industry standard."

But that's just the beginning.

Problems like professional mismatches and low income have not only reduced enrollment in TCM colleges but are also the root cause of the mixed quality of masseurs in the current O2O massage industry. Thus, increasing the income of massage therapists is key to attracting them to the Li Master platform and continuously improving their quality.

Li Master currently has 70-80 full-time therapists who have signed labor contracts. The platform also has stock option pools and other incentives for core employees. More importantly, they've changed what Xue Xipeng calls the "unfair" profit-sharing model. In hospitals or massage parlors, therapists might have over 50% of their income deducted. On Li Master, depending on individual or corporate client services, they can receive 100% or at least over 80% of the service fee.

Master Wang is booked over ten times a week on average. Services ranging from 36 RMB shoulder-neck massages to 288 RMB American chiropractic and rehabilitation therapies account for 50-60% of his work, with the most popular services costing around 158 RMB. Compared to his previous work in a massage parlor, Master Wang's income has increased by up to 100%.

"Only Two Months Away from Bankruptcy"

"Hiring a bunch of people to do door-to-door service, that's only two months away from bankruptcy. It's a matter of philosophy — there's no necessary connection between hiring and quality," says Yang Li, founder of Rong Me Me, an O2O platform offering on-demand beauty services for women.

There are significant differences in the composition of practitioners between the two O2O startups.

Yang Li came from a rich background in commercial real estate operations at SOHO China. She and her Rong Me Me team were complete newcomers to the beauty industry. Given the furious pace of development in the beauty O2O sector, they simply couldn't afford the time and effort to train novice beauticians from scratch.

Therefore, beauticians on the Rong Me Me platform are generally poached from traditional salons. After joining Rong Me Me, they undergo a two-week intensive pre-job training focused on familiarizing them with service procedures, etiquette, and adapting to the change in service environment — aspects that many internet-inexperienced beauticians hadn't encountered before. After training, they must pass assessments before officially starting work.

Yang Li requires that beauticians on the Rong Me Me platform have at least five years of experience. Nevertheless, most are post-90s, generally in their twenties. Many dropped out of middle school to support their families or help younger siblings with tuition. For most, choosing to become a beautician was primarily because the profession has no high entry barriers.

In traditional beauty salons, a beautician's income primarily comes not from service fees but from commissions on products successfully sold to customers. This inevitably diverts their energy away from the quality of service.

Li Wen's ideal beauty service would help her relax. She strongly resents high-pressure sales tactics but finds it hard to refuse the young beauticians, so she simply stops going to salons.

These are exactly the customers Yang Li is trying to win over.

In Yang Li's mind, Rong Me Me's core user profile is this: Born between 1975 and 1985, living in first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai, stable in work and life, with a monthly income of around 10,000 RMB, open to new consumption concepts, internet-savvy, sensitive to physical changes, and having strong needs and awareness regarding beauty.

She positions Rong Me Me as an affordable luxury, using lower prices compared to traditional salons to increase usage frequency, and high-quality service to cultivate user habits. The former helps beauticians gain repeat customers, while the latter expands the user base.

O2O-based beauty services are not just a novel experience for consumers; they are equally novel for the beauticians. The vast majority of them are using mobile internet for the first time, and everything feels both strange and exciting.

"They really love the internet. We design their backend to be fun — when they complete a booking, 'pop!' another sum of money appears. It feels like a game to them," Yang Li says with a laugh. "Practical issues like how to turn on a faucet, how to use Amap for navigation, how to read house numbers — many young rural kids have really never seen these things before."

Li Mei has recently become hooked on WeChat. Every night after work, she opens WeChat to chat with regular customers she met through Rong Me Me, seeing it as a way to increase "user stickiness" — a new term she just learned. She hopes to serve these customers more often next month, or if lucky, attract a few new ones.

Another Possibility of the World

"The internet is just a tool, it's not something that erases everything," says Li Ting, CEO of StrongBrand Consulting Group, speaking rapidly while perched on a desk with her arms wrapped around her knees. "The internet doesn't solve your eating or drinking problems; it only addresses the information needs for eating and drinking."

She believes that O2O service companies are unlikely to turn a profit before Series B or even Series C rounds. In the initial stages, the most important thing for them is to open up the market and cultivate user habits.

Clearly, these two startups are currently in that stage.

Li Master bears the costs of therapist training, salaries, and insurance. According to their plan, the number of therapists will continue to expand for quite some time. Achieving a balance between the top 1% quality requirement and cost is an unavoidable challenge for Li Master. For Rong Me Me, although it doesn't bear salary and insurance burdens and has a one-month lag between user payment and beautician payout, the labor cost to acquire more beauticians is still substantial and cannot be ignored.

For both companies, the key to future development lies in finding richer, more diverse revenue models to avoid the potential profit squeeze from rising therapist costs.

In fact, both Rong Me Me and Li Master have clear and well-defined business models, and Li Ting's point about cultivating the market is precisely the first step in their overall plans.

Rong Me Me has already started piloting high-end customized services for price-insensitive customers seeking premium experiences. Moreover, Yang Li has an even more ambitious long-term vision: when Rong Me Me reaches sufficient scale, it will develop a transparent access and review mechanism, transforming into a platform open to third parties, directing O2O services it cannot cover to offline salons.

Yang Li sees next year's Spring Festival as a critical juncture. If Rong Me Me succeeds by then, the trend will likely spread nationwide through the return migration during the holiday, extending its influence from first-tier to lower-tier cities.

Yang Li confidently states that Rong Me Me will reach its profit point next year.

A similar optimism is shared by the Li Master team.

In 2013, the State Council issued the "Several Opinions on Promoting the Development of the Health Services Industry," estimating a health service market worth up to 8 trillion RMB by 2020. In Xue Xipeng's view, the significance of this document lies more in raising public awareness of personal health. As this trend intensifies, Li Master and the traditional Chinese medicine healthcare services it represents have broader growth potential — not only from an increasing user base but also from heightened investment interest in the sector from capital markets.

Xue Xipeng doesn't see Li Master merely as a simple door-to-door massage O2O service. In his eyes, Li Master has the potential to become a major health service platform. In the future, they will engage in cross-selling and upselling, thereby further enriching their business model.

Through therapists' home visits, they can not only facilitate the sale of mobile medical products. Starting from door-to-door massage, the derived services of rehabilitation, healthcare, and treatment can form a comprehensive set of user health data, which likely holds immense potential and commercial prospects in the future.

For service providers like Li Master and Rong Me Me, their corporate partners, and customers, O2O offers a novel and convenient opportunity that allows them to obtain what they need and create new possibilities by connecting online and offline.

For the ordinary massage therapists and beauticians, however, their lives have been changed more profoundly and deeply.

After overcoming her privacy concerns, Li Wen tried Rong Me Me's service, choosing Li Mei. She likes this quiet girl who doesn't push sales. Li Mei enjoys serving Li Wen, who books her at least three times a week. She feels she can not only easily afford her brother's tuition but might even buy him a new iPhone with a little more effort.

With his increased income, Master Wang and his girlfriend of five years have finally started planning their wedding. He's already a third of the way through the GRE red book; his latest recorded word is "propitious."

He feels it's an apt description of his current life. (This article will be published in the August issue of BT Media · Business Value magazine, exclusively debuted online by TMTpost. By Hu Yong.)