Fiil CTO Wu Ning: What is it like to work on headphones with Wang Feng?

If we count the headphone brands, almost all of them are imported: Beats, Sennheiser, MONSTER, Audio-Technica, AKG. However, recognition does not represent the real market. Domestic headphones have won a certain share with low prices, but the profit is limited and the space is tight.

This is the background of Fiil’s birth. In a macro sense, consumption is upgrading.

Last August, Wang Feng brought Fiil headphones to the show. The official statement was: "Fiil's goal is to become a Chinese brand similar to Beats, learn from the Xiaomi model, position itself as light luxury, take a high-end route, and get involved in streaming and music social networking."

During this year's Chinese Valentine's Day, Fiil released its second flagship product, Diva, and simultaneously launched a 35-day JD crowdfunding campaign. After 41 hours, the crowdfunding amount exceeded 10 million, making it the leader in the headphone category.

Wang Feng revealed to the media that in the past nine months, Fiil's first-generation sales have reached 75,000 units, and the company will break even by the end of the year. If converted into monthly shipments, CTO Wu Ning told Leifeng.com: "It is about 10,000 units."

In late autumn of 2014, Wu Ning met Wang Feng for the first time, introduced by Wu Shichun of Meihua Venture Capital and Zhang Ye of Qingshan Capital, and had a meal together at Sanyuanqiao in Beijing. At the dinner table, Wu Ning took out a few headphones made by Plantronics for Wang Feng to listen to, and the latter's subjective feelings were recognized by Wu Ning.

At this point, Wu Ning began to seriously consider the issue of "partnership".

Previously, Wu Ning was in charge of R&D at Plantronics, and Wang Feng was just "a person who lives in TV" to him. When Leifeng.com asked why he decided to start a business, Wu Ning asked back: "I am 38 years old this year. Do you know what it means to be a man of this age?" After a pause, he continued, "Although I am not as rich as Peng Jinzhou (Fiil CEO), I have enough money to spend. At this stage in life, it would be a pity if I don't sprint once."

After joining Fiil, Wu Ning set about building a team. He hoped that new employees could get started right away without any training, but it was obviously more difficult to recruit people. “Equity options and equity may not satisfy a person who doesn’t want to ‘run around’.” During that period, several people rejected his invitation, while others agreed after just one meeting. In the end, several old colleagues from Plantronics decided to continue to serve as the main force under Wu Ning.

In Wu Ning's eyes, reliability is a more important quality than passion . Therefore, unlike many startups, the average age of the Fiil team is around 35 years old. However, this does not mean that the fast pace and overtime work that are standard for startups have no place here.

As for his boss, Wang Feng should be the one with the most busy schedule in Wu Ning's career. Therefore, his working mode at Fiil has become to write the plan and then fly to Wang Feng's location to discuss and make decisions, which happens about once a month.

When netizens first learned that Wang Feng was making headphones, they criticized Fiil very badly. The R&D team was very depressed during that time because the cheap attacks almost ignored their existence , and people thought that Wang Feng was the only one making headphones.

Wu Ning had never expected this. But looking at it from two perspectives, Wu Ning understood that if it weren't for Wang Feng's halo, no one would have known about Fiil until now. This is the price that must be paid for a staged victory.

Nowadays, "Wang Feng makes headphones" has become a normal thing, and people are no longer surprised by it. Therefore, for Wu Ning, how to remove the equal sign between Fiil and Wang Feng is his responsibility.

After the company was founded in March last year, Fiil took 5 months to release its first product in conjunction with the schedule of "The Voice of China". Wu Ning joked: "At that time, I really felt that my body was drained. It is difficult for you to understand how many sequelae a group of older people will have if they stay up late." Afterwards, Fiil held a blind listening session. Wu Ning was very pleased with the audiophiles who turned from haters to fans, as it at least proved that they did not trade quality for time.

They have been racing against time over the past year, and now the interim end point is vaguely visible: first set a small goal, such as selling 10,000 units in a single month.

| Postscript

Fiil's Suzhou laboratory is located in the Eastern Science and Technology Park, which is mainly responsible for Fiil's hardware research and development. This acoustic team, which has been established for more than a year, has placed "two sets of head-mounted equipment molds for human ear wearing comfort and headband pressure and height ratio", a professional anechoic room, an independent test room dedicated to communication module testing, a detailed indicator system for measuring static electricity, and a set of professional company product operation design and evaluation processes in the R&D room.

After the interview, CTO Wu Ning got lost in the parking lot while driving an old Sagitar 1.6 automatic. He was always humble and answered every question. He told Leifeng.com that Chinese brands are synonymous with "bad" in the headphone market, and we want to "educate" this market.