When Lang Qixu was at UIC, he was full of strong curiosity about the birth process of a good product; three years after graduation, he began to create his product called Tide. This app creatively combines natural sound, meditation and other audio content with daily life scenes and helps bring users physical and mental experiences such as sleep aid, concentration, relaxation and meditation. In 2019, his company received an investment of nearly 10 million yuan from Panda Capital.
Lang Qixu
From an idea to a product
After graduating from Culture, Creativity and Management Programme at UIC in 2012, Lang Qixu successively worked at Kingsoft and UCWeb as a Product Manager and gradually formed a product design concept of his own with his keen awareness of the market.
Talking about the idea of creating the Tide App, Lang Qixu explained that the fast-paced urban life gives anxiety to many people, and they urgently need solutions to problems such as stress, insomnia and distraction. He hoped to make a product to help users calm the body and mind as well as improve efficiency.
Tide App
It was during 2016 when Lang Qixu registered Guangzhou Moreless Network Technology Co Ltd, and the first version of Tide was launched that year. The app has accumulated more than one million users in a year after going online, won awards from various application platforms and got recommended globally. At present, the App has more than 15 million downloads worldwide, and 40% of its users come from more than 120 countries and regions outside China including North America, Japan and Europe.
Discovering business inspiration
The concern for people's psychological needs stems from an important experience of Lang Qixu at UIC. In the emotional intelligence course of UIC’s Whole Person Education, Lang Qixu was exposed to mindfulness meditation for the first time. Through mindfulness meditation, he can perceive negative emotions and adjust his body and mind well. This experience has inspired his entrepreneurship and also allowed him to see the popular value of this effective way of mental adjustment.
During the time at UIC, Lang Qixu got to know his entrepreneurial partner, Lyu Yaojia, who is a UIC 2013 Alumnus of the Computer Science and Technology Programme. They became acquainted during a volunteering teaching activity organised by UIC. As the co-founder and technical leader of Tide, Lyu Yaojia is proficient in programming and he used to be the head of Knownsec’s data team, and a senior R & D engineer at Douban. The two of them were fascinated by technology and shared similar interests and have since collaborated on many projects, including the creation of UIC's first student online communication platform.
From product manager to startup CEO
After graduation, Lang Qixu chose to become a product manager. He mentioned: "This profession has trained me to translate user ideas and needs into what product creators should do, and act as a bridge between products and users."
Lang Qixu believes that the thinking of a product manager is indispensable in entrepreneurship. As CEO, Lang Qixu also faces more challenges such as financing and management.
“Currently there are too many application products on the market aiming at killing users' time and immerse users in them, but what Tide has to do is to let people expand their psychological needs,” said Lang Qixu.
When it comes to advising other students, he believes that the most important thing is to find one’s interests and find what one is good at. Lang Qixu explained: “We should expand the concept of entrepreneurship, in our spare time we should work on something that makes us proud, improve a hobby to a professional level. The process of continuous learning, continuous problem solving, and overcoming our limitations can also be called entrepreneurship.”
Reporter: Lauren Richardson
Editors: Samuel Burgess, Deen He, Covee Wang
(from MPRO)
