With the land secured, the foundation approved a special grant of one million yuan, and Jiang Xiaoman added some of her own money, planning to build a cold storage facility as well.
In this way, during the tea season, finished tea cakes and green tea can be stored, and during the wild vegetable season, if there are consecutive rainy days, some fresh wild vegetables can be temporarily stored, so that the wild vegetables that the people have worked hard to pick from the mountains will just rot away.
The last project, which no one expected, was actually spearheaded by Lang Ying!
Since the movie became a hit, Lang Ying, who played an important supporting role in one of the segments, has also gained some popularity.
However, she's not in the entertainment industry, so her "popularity" is more evident in her daily life.
What's most baffling is that many villagers from the surrounding area who watched the movie firmly believe that although Lang Ying is not wealthy now, she will eventually become a successful rural businesswoman like in the movie!
After being praised so mindlessly by her fellow villagers for a while, Lang Ying realized that she could no longer be as indifferent and laid-back as before.
If she didn't understand before why Director Liang and his team wanted to make these ordinary people's stories into a movie, the overwhelming calls for the protection of rural women's rights from official media and countless self-media after the movie's release gradually brought her to her senses.
Whether it's the media or the villagers, perhaps the person being praised and lauded is not Lang Ying, but the millions of rural women like her who dare to resist unhappy marriages and fight against fate.
She should have done better, so that more rural women like her could see hope for life!
Coincidentally, after she and Qingshan got married quietly, she went to Laoshan'aozi a few times and discovered that the wild mushroom resources there were particularly abundant.
Remembering how the crew often praised her mushroom sauce and even bought a lot from her, and seeing that Jiang Xiaoman and Shan Yan had both applied for entrepreneurship support funds from the foundation, Lang Ying decided to give it a try as well.
Perhaps it was the first time the foundation had received an application for entrepreneurship from a rural woman, or perhaps it was because the filter of Lang Ying's role in the movie was still there; in any case, her application for a 300,000 yuan entrepreneurship fund was actually approved!
Because making wild mushroom sauce requires a lot of water and space, the small factory eventually settled in Langshan Village. However, the couple had already discussed that when the wild mushrooms were ready, Qingshan would be responsible for going back to Laoshan Aozi every day to collect the mushrooms. The mushrooms brought back that day could be made into mushroom sauce the next day.
Well-sealed mushroom sauce can last up to two years, but it takes up a lot of space, so the warehouse needs to be large. If it's made entirely by hand, you'll need to hire more people when things get busy.
Lang Ying is not afraid of not being able to recruit people.
For over a year, she followed Jiang Xiaoman everywhere, becoming familiar with all the surrounding villages and towns. To put it bluntly, now there are plenty of people from nearby towns who want to use her connections to find work in Langshan Village. She can find anyone she wants, no matter how many people she doesn't have.
And she also has a cheat code—
Lang Ying's new mother-in-law is a hundred times better than her ex-mother-in-law! When she heard that her daughter-in-law was going to collect wild mushrooms for business, she went back to the village and called out, and immediately gathered all the women in the village to go up the mountain to dig bamboo shoots and pick mushrooms. The raw materials for making sauce were continuously transported out from the old mountain valley.
With her mother-in-law being so supportive, she didn't make things difficult for her, and the purchase price she offered made the aunties and sisters-in-law in the old mountain valley very happy.
Everyone complimented her mother-in-law, saying that she was incredibly wise to betroth Qingshan to Langying as a son-in-law!
Lang Ying was a gentle and filial woman by nature. Her mother-in-law treated her well, and she reciprocated by going back to the mountains with Qing Shan almost every week to bring some things to her mother-in-law and sister-in-law and have a meal together as a family.
To Jiang Xiaoman and the others' great surprise, Lang Ying and her sister-in-law, whom they had never met before their marriage, hit it off immediately!
The eldest sister-in-law, Qingmei, greatly admired Lang Ying's decisive action in divorcing her scumbag ex-husband and expressed particular regret that she hadn't met her sooner, otherwise she could have helped beat up Jiang Erming.
P.S.: My sister-in-law comes from a mountain village and is exceptionally brave. She used to go into the mountains with others to hunt wild boars when she was still at her parents' home!
However, what's baffling is that Qingmei really doesn't understand why Lang Ying wants to marry her brother!
In her sister-in-law's opinion, women only look for men to have children (something seems off here). Lang Ying already has two children, a successful career, and has even become a movie star. With all that, isn't being single comfortable? Why would she want to find a man to make things difficult for her? (Qingshan: Hey!!)
Although Qingshan is her own younger brother, Qingmei said that if she were Lang Ying, the other party would either be extremely wealthy or as handsome as the movie star Jiang Yuan, otherwise she wouldn't be able to give up her single status.
At first, Qingshan was quite happy, thinking that his wife and family got along well. But after he overheard his older sister and wife talking one day, he became less willing to take his wife and children back to the mountains.
Don't ask! The answer is: you absolutely cannot let your wife be friends with bad women outside!
In conclusion, thanks to the strong support of her new mother-in-law and sister-in-law, Lang Ying's wild mushroom sauce was actually among the first of the three projects in the village to start selling.
This was the first villager's entrepreneurial project "incubated" by Jiang Xiaoman. On the day Lang Ying did her live stream, Jiang Xiaoman once again used a "matryoshka doll-style live stream" approach.
He even moved his livestreaming studio to Lang Ying's factory, and the livestream content was to let fans watch Lang Ying's first livestream...
Fans: "..."
Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to give us such a perfunctory response.
Jiang Xiaoman wasn't just giving her fans the runaround.
He had long been envious of the short video matrix that Tang Xinlan and his team had built in Shuangwan Town. At that time, Jiang Xiaoman realized the potential problems of "one tree cannot make a forest".
Simply put, people in the internet age are more fickle; it's not uncommon for someone to be the darling of the internet today to fade into obscurity a month later.
Jiang Xiaoman doesn't know how long he can stay famous, nor how long he can help the villagers. Therefore, he has always wanted to replicate the short video matrix model of Shuangwan Town in Langshan Village.
If Jiang Xiaoman is the only internet celebrity in Langshan Town, the risk of pursuing rural e-commerce in the long term is very high.
However, if there are ten or a hundred e-commerce platforms with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers, it wouldn't be difficult to turn Langshan Town's local specialties into a popular online brand.
He had been waiting for such an opportunity to personally create a model for rural e-commerce. In this way, other young people in the town who wanted to do short videos and rural e-commerce would unconsciously imitate Lang Ying's model.
Therefore, this nested live stream was less for fans and more for the local young people of Langshan.
Lang Ying also has a short video account with over 200,000 followers. However, most of them only started following her after the movie was released because they liked the character she played.
At that time, some fans had already suggested in the comments that Lang Ying could sell products to supplement her family's income, but Jiang Xiaoman suggested that she wait.
Jiang Xiaoman's original intention was to protect the purity of Lang Ying's account. He had studied the online influencers who had previously failed, and many of them had failed because of their product selection. No matter how many followers they had, as long as one product failed, such as the sunscreen incident a few years ago, a group of big influencers could all fall from grace.
So Jiang Xiaoman's advice to Lang Ying was to wait until spring when he started selling small tea cakes and wild vegetables, and then sell their own products directly.
Jiang Xiaoman knew the quality of her products better than anyone, and the local specialties of Langshan were also very much in line with Lang Ying's account positioning, making it less likely to backfire.
Unexpectedly, things didn't go as planned. Before he even started harvesting this year's wild vegetables, Lang Ying had already made her wild mushroom sauce.
However, this inadvertently filled a gap in their local specialty products: before the large-scale availability of wild mountain vegetables in the spring, there were no local specialties to sell.
Lang Ying was very nervous about selling things via live streaming for the first time.
However, remembering what Jiang Xiaoman had told her before the broadcast, if she was nervous, she should imagine the live broadcast room as a market in town. Lang Ying used to often carry the vegetables she grew to the market to set up a stall. Imagining the live broadcast room as a market, she was able to relax immediately.
It must be said that Lang Ying made the right choice in selecting wild mushroom sauce as the factory's first product.
Because there are many varieties of wild mushrooms, after they are purchased, they do not need to be manually sorted like when selling fresh wild mushrooms. Instead, they are washed, crushed, and used to make sauce. There are only three flavors: original, mildly spicy, and extra spicy.
"The wild mushrooms here were all picked by the villagers in the mountains yesterday. The oil used to make the sauce is our local soybean oil, and the soybean paste comes from our factory. Don't worry, it's all the kind we eat ourselves, and we haven't added any random stuff."
"How to eat it? Oh, there are many ways to eat it. I mentioned it in a previous video. This wild mushroom sauce is cooked, so you can eat it directly after opening the lid. We usually use it to sandwich pancakes, as a dipping sauce when roasting potatoes, or to mix with corn rice. It's delicious all of these."
"You can also use it to mix with noodles when cooking. In the hot summer, we also make our own pea jelly. It's delicious to mix it with some wild mushroom sauce."
"Oh, right, there's another way to eat it. I tried it when I was on a diet. I really couldn't eat the vegetable salad that people talked about online, but it was quite delicious with this wild mushroom sauce. Sisters who are on a diet can give it a try. Don't be fooled by the layer of oil on top of our sauce. It's actually all mushroom oil that's been boiled down. It's very flavorful, with very little soybean oil."
...
Lang Ying seemed to have put herself in the shoes of a street vendor at a market, and her speech became increasingly fluent as she spoke to the camera. However, to Jiang Xiaoman's dismay, she seemed to have forgotten to remind her fans to place their orders...
This really worried Jiang Xiaoman's fans in her live stream.
At first, everyone just wanted to watch the excitement, but as they watched, they unexpectedly discovered a sense of responsibility.
Lang Ying's live-streaming sales are not working!
There were no sales pitches to encourage orders, no "rock-bottom price" promotions, and for the first time they went live, they didn't even give away any free gifts!
Through Jiang Xiaoman's live stream, fans saw Lang Ying talking incessantly about how she made the sauce and how to eat it...
Okay! It does sound pretty drool-worthy, but why don't you get the fans to buy it?
Jiang Xiaoman's fans became increasingly anxious as they watched, and some even switched to Lang Ying's live stream to teach her how to use the tricks of live-streaming e-commerce.
Seeing many people reminding her in the comments section, Lang Ying paused for a moment, then hurriedly flipped through the printed live stream script next to her.
Fans: "..."
What to do? This poor rural livestreamer, will she really only have fans left?
Jiang Xiaoman's fans were speechless. Why do the internet celebrities from Langshan Village always go off-topic when they go live? Please respect the existence of the script, okay?
While fans were frustrated and disappointed in Lang Ying, tagging her and showing her many popular live-streaming e-commerce accounts, they couldn't resist placing orders to support her.
Well, although Lang Ying didn't try to play the victim at all, her fans and netizens who happened to pass by all felt that this anchor was really pitiful!
Luckily, they were selling their own local specialties. If they were promoting a brand, and the brand didn't urge fans to place orders at all, they probably would have blocked the brand before the live stream even ended.
Chapter 209
Although the process was somewhat tortuous, fortunately, with the support of Jiang Xiaoman's fans, Lang Ying's wild mushroom sauce sold more than a thousand orders in the first live broadcast, which can be considered a small success.
"Fortunately, wild mushrooms haven't been widely available yet, so the factory doesn't have much stock." Lang Ying wiped the sweat from her forehead.
She seemed so relaxed when she watched Jiang Xiaoman's live stream before, so why was she so nervous when she went on stage herself?
"It's okay, I was even more nervous than you at first. You'll get used to it after a few more practice sessions," Jiang Xiaoman comforted her.
Lang Ying was filled with sorrow.
Although wild mushrooms are not yet widely available, the factory can produce at least 5,000 bottles of wild mushroom sauce every day. A single live stream only sold a little over 1,000 bottles, which barely covers the factory's expenses.
Adding in the costs of acquiring wild mushrooms, purchasing soybean oil and soybean paste, she's going to lose money...
"No, starting tomorrow, Xiaoyu and I will help you sell them! We don't have anything good to sell lately anyway."
When Jiang Xiaoman told Jiang Yu about it, he agreed without hesitation.
"I was worried that Yingzi wouldn't have enough to sell, how come they haven't sold out?"
"Then just give me the rest. Many of my fans are wilderness survival experts, and they always have Lao Gan Ma chili sauce and pickled vegetables in their trunks. Yingzi's wild mushroom sauce is much tastier than Lao Gan Ma," Jiang Yu couldn't help but complain.
Once upon a time, Lao Gan Ma was an irreplaceable goddess in the eyes of countless otaku!
It's a pity for this national brand; it squandered its potential!
If you're going to make chili sauce, just do it properly!
Fans love your original flavor!
Don't you know how you became famous?
Oh, now that they're famous, they've forgotten their roots and are going around collaborating with people and trying to be innovative. Pshaw!
If Lao Gan Ma (a popular chili sauce brand) were to wear a trendy brand, would it still be the Lao Gan Ma that fans know and love?
Ever since Lao Gan Ma lost favor with Jiang Yu, he has started eating locally produced chili sauce again. Now that he has Sister Yingzi's wild mushroom sauce, he has forgotten his old love with a new one. The former goddess has fallen from her pedestal and is no longer the white moonlight in the hearts of otaku.
Jiang Yu wanted to take all the remaining goods from Lang Ying's factory, but Jiang Xiaoman wouldn't allow it.
Everyone's selling products, so why should you be the only one to make money? Don't his fans deserve any perks?
The two of them went to find Lang Ying and each took 10,000 bottles of wild mushroom sauce from her factory, intending to go back and test the waters first.
Jiang Xiaoman was already prepared for the fact that new accounts wouldn't be developed quickly.