How powerful is a drop of water? The answer given by shuidichou.com sounds very emotional: the strength of a drop of water may be insignificant, but tens of thousands of water drops can amass into a sea at shuidichou.com. We use love to deliver the hope of life.

Here are the rational data: since May 2016 when it was founded, shuidichou.com has accumulated as many as 400 million registered users and more than 100 million independent paying users within just two years.

In May 2016, Shen Peng, the No.10 employee of meituan.com and co-founder of waimai.meituan.com, resigned and created shuidichou.com himself, in the hope of building a platform for the general public to raise healthcare funds efficiently under the mutual aid online community model. Taking advantage of the wide coverage of mobile internet and WeChat, the mutual aid model championed by shuidichou.com becomes a hit on the Moments platform of WeChat.

At the China Social Enterprise and Investment Forum 2018 Conference, shuidichou.com’s parent company Beijing Zongqing Xiangqian Sci-tech Co., Ltd (hereinafter referred to as Shuidi Company) seized the Medical and Big Health Award and the 2018 Social Enterprise Award, an annual Oscar-like award for the social enterprise community.

Jet Li, founder of One Foundation and world-renowned Kungfu star, once commented about shuidichou.com, “This is exactly what I want to see, that is, allowing the whole society to help others in this simple way. This is indeed my dream back then.”

An Internet Startup Engaged in Critical Illness Charity

“They were once the commoners around you, but diseases have made them uncommon.” This is an opening statement of a publicity video endorsed by Shuidi Public Welfare and also a real perception of its founder Shen Peng on the outset of his entrepreneurship.

In early 2016, Shen Peng was in charge of the takeaway food operations at meituan.com. He came across two deeply emotionally charged events: the father of an employee from Xi’an died from cancer and his mother got a brain disease, too; another senior employee was diagnosed with liver cancer, but the liver transplant operation was to incur more than 400,000 yuan in medical expenses. So both the two employees were confronted with a huge gap in funding.

Then, Shen Peng helped them raise funds through the Moments platform of WeChat, disclosing the ins and outs of the two events. In the end, he called on all his colleagues at meituan.com to donate money for them and filled their funding gap in a short period.

It dawned on him that under the current medical insurance system in China, when a member of a family gets a dread disease, both the social security and health insurance schemes are unable to fund the actual financial needs resulting therefrom; to make matters worse, the process of raising money is highly likely to have the best time for treatment missed out.

After a comprehensive study of the range of medical insurance schemes at home and abroad, Shen Peng came to the conclusion that “under the mutual aid community model, the mutual aid money can be a good supplement to the medical funds in addition to the social security funds and commercial insurances”. So he resigned, founded shuidichou.com and obtained 50 million yuan in angel investment within a mere week, with the investors including Tencent, IDG Capital, meituan.com, ZhenFund and GaoRong Capital, etc.

On May 9, 2016, Shuidi Mutual Aid was officially put online. At the very first, it aimed at the mutual aid in the case of cancer and other critical illnesses and launched the middle-aged and youth anti-cancer plan, the middle-aged and elderly anti-cancer plan and the young children’s health mutual aid plan, with a view to providing low-threshold yet cost-effective health protection service for every single person with health insurance needs under a “one for all and all for one” mutual aid model.

On the platform, contribute 9 yuan and you become a member of the mutual aid community. After a 180-day observation period, if you are diagnosed with cancer or other dread diseases agreed in the terms and conditions of membership, you can therefore apply for the release of mutual aid funds, and the maximum of health mutual aid funds is 1.5 million yuan.

The model of Shuidi Mutual Aid features low threshold, convenience and inclusiveness. It is in a perfect position to serve the middle- and low-income earners and to resolve realistic problems and penetrate into the lower social classes. 100 days after the platform was put into operation, it has amassed one million users already.

Shuidichou.com at Moments

“If the love of every person is seen as a little drop of water, then the seemingly insignificant water drops may turn out to be a Pacific Ocean for others in need or a sweet spring in a desert,” Shen Peng explained on his original purpose to start up the platform.

In this spirit, the startup team quickly developed a new business line, i.e. shuidichou, on the basis of the Shuidi Mutual Aid, to provide a free-of-charge fundraising tool for people who suffer from dread diseases but are short of urgently needed money.

In June 2016, Shuidi Mutual Aid answered a call for help from a new member. The member was diagnosed with a major disease, but was still in the 180-day observation period. Within a week, Shen Peng received yet another request for fundraising from a former colleague, who was not a member of the mutual aid community, though.

These two events directly contributed to the birth of shuidichou.com. In practice, shuidichou.com makes the release and operation of personal assistance seeking information completely mobile and therefore greatly lowers the cost of seeking help from the society, so much so that people from the tier 3 or 4 cities/towns and even from remote mountainous regions can seek assistance for themselves via the platform.

As a pioneer for zero handling fees in the area of fundraising for critical illnesses, shuidichou.com shatters the tacit industry rule of charging fundraisers handling fees, thus serving the users without the burden of self-interest. This practice not only wins the praise from and reputation among users, but also helps promote changes in the industry concerned, spurring many platforms to charge no handling fees likewise.

More importantly, shuidichou.com makes charity all the simpler and all the more efficient in the era of mobile internet.

For donators under shuidichou.com’s model, the help-seeking information from the social network consisting of acquaintances is far more touching than far-flung charity projects. Moreover, as such information comes from acquainted social networks, the trueness of the help seeking events and the verifiability of charity behaviors make feedback more effective and therefore greatly enhance the sense of achievement on the part of charity doers.

Meanwhile, the mode of payment through Wechat lowers the threshold and breaks out of the constraint of time and space for money to be donated. As a result, charity doing at the fingertips becomes a possibility. In this process, external resources, including public welfare foundations and philanthropic enterprises, have also been deeply impressed by and appreciative of shuidichou.com, offering great potential for subsequent cooperation with and further development of the fundraising platform.

A Model of Balance with Charity on One Side and Business on the Other

Mr. Xu Yongguang, founder of the Hope Project, Chair of Narada Foundation, Fellow Researcher of Counselors Office of the State Council, set forth a Target Theory for social enterprises. That theory is one of the theoretical cornerstones identifying social enterprises that excel.

Under the halo of the 2018 Social Enterprises Award, Shuidi Company has an internal theory that holds the same as the Target Theory. As the founder of Shuidi Public Welfare Shen Peng places emphasis on a model of balance, which has public welfare on one side and commercial operations on the other. If public welfare is to be achieved in a sustainable manner, then equal importance must be attached to both charity and business.

Currently, Shuidi Company has four tranches of business, namely, Shuidi Huzhu (Shuidi Mutual Aid), Shuidichou (Shuidi Fundraising), Shuidibao (Shuidi Insurance) and Shuidi Gongyi (Shuidi Public Welfare), which cover a variety of areas including zero-handling-fee crowdfunding for critical illnesses (for personal help-seeking), online mutual aid, internet insurance and public donation solicitation information platforms, etc.

Under the balance model of Shuidi Company, on one side are Shuidi Mutual Aid and Shuidi Fundraising, two public welfare product lines; and on the other side are Shuidi Insurance and Shuidi Health, two commercial product lines. The products on either side operate independently from each other, but an effective business model has derived from the practice of promoting the sales of commercial insurances and health services through the communication channels and scenes of Shuidi Mutual Aid and Shuidi Fundraising.

Specifically, the online health mutual aid and internet insurance products provide prior, cost-effective health protection services for people with varying levels of consuming powers, while the fundraising services for critical illnesses provide a free fundraising tool in the form of posterior assistance for people in dire need of healthcare funding, enabling ordinary people to obtain help by mobilizing their own social connections.

Meanwhile, as an internet company characterized by the pattern of fast growth and rapid iteration, Shuidi Company boasts a natural advantage in breaking away from traditions. Furthermore, as every instance of innovation can be rapidly reflected by market data, it is able to adjust or alter its direction of development in a timely manner.

Nowadays, Shuidi Company has had more than 100 million independent paying users and more than 400 million registered users. On the public welfare side of its balance, Shuidi Fundraising and Shuidi Mutual Aid safely claim the NO.1 performer in the industry of their kind at present; while on the commercial side of the balance, the company is planning to extend from medical payment to medical services, which will emerge as a one-trillion-yuan-worth market in the future.

“If there is only public welfare, business will not be sustainable; likewise, if there is only business, then the company will deviate from its original mission and be unsustainable in the same way.” According to Shen Peng’s planning, Shuidi Company will first build up a customer base for business through public welfare and then feed public welfare back with commercial profit. In the future, it will make several breakthroughs in commercial operations and therefore provide sustainable impetus for its original purpose of promoting public welfare, thereby making public welfare really sustainable.