In December 2020, the "Flying Meow for Electricity" project won the national Silver Award in the 12th "Challenge Cup" National College Student Entrepreneurship Plan Competition.

He is a graduate student and an entrepreneur. After more than three years of exploration and practice, his team solved the charging pain points of electric bicycles by replacing the "8-hour direct charging system" with the "30-second site power change" idea, and redefined electric bicycle travel with the "flying meow for electricity" project.

He is Lou Zhangang, winner of the "Top 100 National College Student Entrepreneurial Heroes in 2019-2020" and a 2018 graduate student of the School of Art Design and Media of East China University of Science and Technology.

Target pain points, in-depth insight into user needs

Lou Zhengang is an entrepreneur and an experience designer. "Design comes from observation and demand comes from perception," he said. His entrepreneurial project was born out of careful observation of life.

In China, the social ownership of electric bicycles is close to 300 million, which can be called "national travel tools", but it is also facing a huge problem - charging. "There was a lot of anxiety when the power went out halfway."

"Charging stations are really hard to find!" "It's too dangerous to charge in the hallway!" According to the statistics of the Fire and Rescue Bureau of the Ministry of Emergency Management, there are an average of about 2,000 electric bicycle fires in the country every year.

In this regard, Lou Zhengang believes that safety can not always rely on fire and tragedy to wake up, innovation is the most effective "fire extinguisher". Therefore, since 2018, Lou Zhengang and his team members have visited more than 20 universities in Shanghai and Zhejiang in their spare time,

conducted field visits and case interviews in 18 cities across the country, filmed and collected a large number of real scenes, and started to classify the needs of electric bicycle users in first-tier, second-tier and third-tier cities.

After nearly a year of in-depth research, they found that the charging problems of electric bicycles are mainly manifested as long charging time, crowded charging space, and safety hazards of "pull fly line", which are ultimately the problems of insufficient charging piles and low charging efficiency.

After identifying the crux of the problem, team members used service design tools to draw a detailed user journey map, breaking down user touch points and emotional changes at each stage.

After brainstorming, they had a preliminary idea: charging is not a necessary link, can it be like a gas station, set up a station to provide seconds to change the battery service, improve travel efficiency?

Explore for 3 years, in exchange for 30 seconds "flying meow to change electricity"

A thousand times of fantasy is not as good as a single action! In September 2018, inspired by the entrepreneurial training activities organized by the school, the team planned the landing time rhythm from the small-scale pilot of manual power replacement, the research and development of automatic power replacement system, and then the expansion of the market path.

In the first step, Lou Zhangang and his team adopted the lean entrepreneurial method, used the minimum feasibility prototype and cooperated with manufacturers to conduct a low-cost manual power replacement test to quickly grasp the user acceptance:

set up a physical store to sell electric bicycles with power replacement function, and manually change the power. The pilot was a success, with 300 replacement cars sold in 14 days, both validating user demand and identifying the need to reduce labor operating costs.

Lou Zhengang rate team began the second step of exploration. This time, they are going to do the self-changing cabinets. The team has structured the business model, completed the product framework and product design,

and is ready to start technology research and development. But a question arises: Where will the money come from? Considering the large risk in the early stage of entrepreneurship, the team members unanimously discussed and decided to invest nearly 200,000 yuan to achieve product research and development.

In order to find the most suitable supplier and producer, in the first month, their "small team" in the eyes of industrialists ran more than 20 manufacturers, but they did not reach a cooperation intention.

The money for the accommodation was running out, and they almost gave up halfway. Fortunately, in the end, a partner saw their power prospects and signed a cooperation agreement with them.

Three months later, the results of hot-swappable universal interface, power change cabinet, tram change, XPower battery cell and station finding mini program were released. As the core technology, the hot-swap universal interface opens up the interface of lead acid and lithium batteries

, and it takes only 2 minutes to change the traditional electric bicycle into a "flying cat for a tram". With this technology, 80% of the lead-acid battery electric bicycles on the market can be modified, and it is a major contributor to the promotion of the stock market.