「Under the same starry sky. The Night Guard. The Demon Hunting Bureau.」
Ye Han stood alone in the small courtyard. He glanced at the Guard at the entrance, suppressing the fury in his eyes.
He began to walk, pondering to himself.
「Zhao Mansion.」
"My lord, Tang Enxuan intends to harm Li Qingxian again."
"Mm."
「Street Patrol Room, Room A9.」
The morning sun was rising. After a good night’s sleep, Li Qingxian had planned to head straight home. To his surprise, Liu Muwa from the Ministry of Works showed up in person and dragged him off to the Imperial Prison Department’s distillery.
In the distillery’s temporary meeting hall, personnel from the Night Guard, the Ministry of Revenue, the Ministry of Works, and the Inner Treasury Bureau were all gathered.
More than fifty officials were present. Over ten were Red Middle Grade, and the rest were Green Lower Grade.
The distillery’s design was mostly finalized. Since the distillation tanks had been replaced with refined steel, there had been no more major accidents.
From this point on, the distillery’s focus would shift from production to operations and expansion.
Liu Muwa, Luo Jing, Jingg Guan, and others were discussing methods for expansion and operation.
At first, Li Qingxian listened humbly to the crowd’s discussion on operations. But the more he listened, the more speechless he became. ’These bureaucrats are worse than common merchants, to say nothing of a new media professional like me, who’s been baptized by the torrent of the information age.’
Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. Li Qingxian stood up and said, "Do you people know what the ’chasm of death’ is? Do you know what the ’new product adoption lifecycle’ is? Do you know the difference between innovators, early adopters, and the mass market? You’re just spouting nonsense without any regard for the actual situation, blindly confident in your own ideas. How do you ever expect to make this distillery bigger and stronger!"
Li Qingxian’s barrage of new terminology stunned the entire room.
Li Qingxian continued, "Disciplinary Officer Liu, if you please, bring out your Magic Fog Board. I’m going to demonstrate the new product adoption lifecycle for everyone. It’s something my Fate Master maternal grandfather and my father mentioned in a casual chat."
Disciplinary Officer Liu waved his right hand. A white shell with yellow stripes flew out from his Qi Fortune Silver Fish Pouch. The shell opened, and the black pearl at its center spat out a plume of white mist, which coalesced behind Li Qingxian into a white Fog Board.
Disciplinary Officer Liu took out a pointed conch shell used to store Magic Ink and handed it to Li Qingxian.
"The adoption of a new product is basically divided into five stages: the innovator stage, the early adopter stage, the early majority stage, the late majority stage, and the laggard stage."
Holding the conch, Li Qingxian drew a horizontal and a vertical line on the board. "The horizontal axis is time, and the vertical axis is product sales volume."
Then, starting from the intersection of the axes, Li Qingxian drew a line that sloped gently upward from left to right. After reaching a peak, it began to slope downward, resembling a rugged mountain. He then drew vertical lines to divide the mountain-shaped graph into five sections.
"This first stage on the far left is very small. It’s called the innovator stage. It refers to the point when a new product appears and only a very small number of innovators use it. Out of a hundred people, that’s only one or two."
"The second stage to the right is the early adopter stage. These are people who like to try new things. Out of a hundred people, they make up about ten."
"As time goes on, influenced by the innovators and early adopters, we enter the third stage. The masses will gradually accept the new product, leading to the early majority stage. These people are the main purchasing force for a new product, accounting for more than thirty out of every hundred people. Our liquor will only be considered stable once it survives to reach the early majority stage! Because..."
Li Qingxian drew a heavy, dark shadow between the second and third stages, separating them.
"Between the early adopter stage and the early majority stage, there exists an invisible chasm of death! We can never be certain that a new product will be accepted by the masses. In fact, 99% of all new products, for one reason or another, plunge headfirst into this chasm of death and never climb out. The products that actually become well-known to the public make up less than 1% of the total."
At this point, Li Qingxian swept his gaze over the crowd with a serious expression.
"We’ve just entered the first stage, not even the second, yet some people are already talking about a massive expansion, opening a hundred distilleries at once. That is a straight dive into the chasm of death! I ask you, is the distilling process fully mature? No! Have the master distillers and their apprentices been trained? No! Have you started cultivating innovators and early adopters? No! Do you have a contingency plan in case the liquor doesn’t sell? No! What if it sells too well and you run out of stock, how will you handle that? No! How will you guarantee consistent product quality? No! I won’t even mention the rest. You have nothing, yet you boast to high heaven. You didn’t even have basic safety procedures in place at the start! How many times has this distillery blown up? Who gave you the courage to believe that the moment you open for business, you’ll have a massive, sustained bestseller?"
The meeting hall fell silent. The faces of the officials were flushed red with embarrassment.
After a long moment, Luo Jing said cautiously, "Weren’t you the one who was hyping it up the most at the beginning?"
The others nodded lightly.
"I assumed you all knew these basic things!" Li Qingxian said without a shred of mercy.
Looks of shame appeared on their faces.
"Such profound family learning," Liu Muwa sighed.
"Then what should we do?" Luo Jing asked.
"Our strategy for the liquor must be niche before mass; special demographics before the general population; scarcity marketing before mass production; small iterations before a wide rollout. We must embrace uncertainty, identify the pain points, choose the optimal approach, and create a flywheel effect..." Li Qingxian waved his arms, projecting the air of an internet tycoon spouting incomprehensible jargon.
These officials had never experienced such a high-level intellectual beatdown. They nodded their heads like chickens pecking at grain.
"But... what do we do specifically?" Liu Muwa asked.
Li Qingxian said, "It’s simple."
"The principle of ’niche before mass’ means we take the aristocratic route. First, we promote it among officials, wealthy merchants, great clans, and Cultivators to build a high-end liquor brand. I ask you, do you dare to do something big?"
"How big?" Liu Muwa asked.
"Create an imperial liquor. If that’s not possible, we can just change the character for ’imperial’ to the one for ’jade.’"
The officials all looked terrified.
The Eunuch, Jingg Guan, quickly said, "You really are willing to risk your life for money. But... the ’jade’ character might actually work."
Li Qingxian thought for a moment and said, "Lord Jingg, this is where we’ll have to trouble your Inner Treasury Bureau. Present this liquor to the Emperor. Then, when we sell it, we can mysteriously tell our customers that it’s a liquor the Emperor has tried. We’d be telling the truth. That should be fine, right?"
Jingg Guan said helplessly, "It’s possible, yes, but don’t say it out loud in public!"
’Cowards,’ Li Qingxian cursed inwardly. He then said aloud, "You all figure it out. As for ’special demographics before the general population,’ that means promoting it first among soldiers and scholars. We can spend a good sum of money to find a few famous, literary scholars who enjoy drinking and have them write a few poems about our liquor. In short, we build hype..."
Li Qingxian talked on and on, leaving everyone in the room in a daze.
With Li Qingxian steering the overall direction and clarifying the path forward, the group pooled their wisdom and slowly formulated various plans.
Tightly controlling production, building up cellar reserves, gradual expansion, bottle packaging, the aristocratic route, marketing gimmicks, poetry for promotion... A whole series of plans were laid out.
Li Qingxian knew he wouldn’t have time to go home again, so he had no choice but to stay and oversee the process.
For the next few days, Li Qingxian remained at the Imperial Prison Department’s distillery, sleeping less than two hours a day on average.
What Li Qingxian hadn’t expected was that after his ideas were relayed to the Ministry of Works, the Vice Minister of the Ministry of Works, Xiao Yuan, actually came to the distillery in person.
He was the second-in-command under the Minister of the Ministry of Works and Liu Muwa’s direct superior.
After listening to Li Qingxian’s detailed explanation, Xiao Yuan was delighted and decided to personally go to Lüliang City in a few days to build a new distillery.