A Story behind GZ4U.net

Liang Yuanaan is the master of GZ4U.net which has about 500 thousand registered members. GZ4U.net is a website for Cantonese students to have fun.

Staying with students every day, Liang keeps a young heart. At first, he only wanted to do interact with juniors with similar interests. But once the website started, things got out of control.

Liang likes to stay with students. After he graduated, the company he worked for was located in Zhi Xin Middle School. He made friends with a crowd of senior high school students. When he got the idea for setting up a website for them to have fun, the students were excited.

As a consequence, a white collar worker and 6 students spent 1000 Yuan on a server space, and GZ4U opened in October 2003.

Liang Yuanaan controlled the website, and put up the money to run GZ4U. The students played a supporting role for the website, and came up with the idea of setting up the site. They worked together to have a place for themselves. However, their site became popular, and by the end of 2004, they had 20 thousand registered members.

Liang never thinks about making money from the website. But running the site needs money. Liang spent all his salary on the website, and made money from advertising on the site. But still, he did not have enough money to support the site. Having more members needs a larger server space. After he managed to collect 30 thousand Yuan to afford a bigger space, more trouble came.

In 2006, China enacted a law that only companies could run websites, and that websites without supporting companies should be closed down.

Liang went home to ask his dad for money. He wanted to continue his site, but his father did not agree to give him money to register a company for a website. Instead, his father wanted to introduce some investors to help him.

However, it is not easy to find real investors. Only one company accepted Liang’s request that, he must be the controlling shareholder, manage the website; and that the investor only provide running capital.

Things didn’t get any better and by 2007, the site was still under the condition of having more members and fewer benefits. Money was going out every month but not coming back. One day, the only investor had some trouble. So over the following months, Liang’s site did not receive any money. His colleagues worked for him without salary during these hard times.

Liang planned to cancel his website after their annual get-together. As a result, the GZ4U get-together in 2007 became the largest ever. He thought it would be the end of his site. Luckily however, an invited client wanted to invest in the website at the party and GZ4U continued.

(By Luna Yang and Alan Devey)

Source: www.lifeofguangzhou.com

Editor: Carrot Chan