The Business Code Behind Zocdoc's IPO: Building China's Costco of Healthcare Services

"Finding the 'Care' in Healthcare." By Zhiyan Chen

While most investors fixate on the explosive potential of AI, embodied intelligence, or innovative drugs, Zhiyuan Wang has led Distinct Healthcare right up to the threshold of the public markets.

In mid-December 2025, Distinct passed its listing hearing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange's main board. Today, this healthcare company founded in 2012 officially debuts on the HKEX.

Over the past decade, China's venture capital landscape has undergone a roller-coaster transformation. From the frenzy of O2O, the shared-economy and new consumption bubbles, to the silence of the capital winter, then the surge of AI and embodied intelligence — countless self-styled "disruptors" have emerged, peaked, and sunk.

Yet in the offline medical services sector — seen by outsiders as "heavy and slow" — Distinct has carved out a remarkably resilient growth curve: from 2022 to 2024, its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) exceeded 30%.

Meanwhile, among the many commercially driven companies propped up by capital, Distinct has maintained a rare kind of "purity": no participation in public health insurance, no reliance on marketing-driven growth, commercial interests subordinate to patient interests, no pursuit of veteran experts in favor of empowering mid-career physicians, and an unwavering commitment to "trust + word-of-mouth" growth. This purity is, on one hand, respect for the professional bottom line of healthcare; on the other, an equally pure reverence for commercial fundamentals.

This gives the company a unique value as a business specimen: both the industry moats and positioning scarcity of offline healthcare, and the sustainability of mid-to-high-speed growth. More importantly, at its foundation lies a user logic of high-frequency repeat purchases and long-term stickiness that has proven difficult to replicate.

The story begins in 2012. At the time, Wang was still in investment banking. A cramped consultation at a top-tier hospital — lasting less than three minutes — sparked his entrepreneurial idea that "people need better healthcare." The extreme absence of "Care" in Healthcare made him acutely aware of a massive gap in the system: people didn't just need to "get cured"; they needed to be treated as independent individuals, with respect and listening.

In Wang's conceptual framework, medicine is a rational exchange of value based on trust. He likens Distinct to "the Costco of health services" — its core is neither low prices nor the "service arms race" of premium healthcare, but rather "curation" and "filtering": just as Costco filters out mediocre products for its members, Distinct filters out unnecessary tests, unnecessary medications, and unnecessary medical anxiety for its patients.

Initially, the Distinct team harbored a dream with strong romantic overtones: to replicate the "Mayo model" in China.

As the "Mecca" of global healthcare, the Mayo Clinic — founded in 1864 — has perennially ranked first in authoritative rankings worldwide. Its greatness lies not in scale, but in having built a trust system so robust it has endured for over a century. The core of this model is "patient needs first": physicians provide precise diagnosis and treatment through multidisciplinary collaboration, rather than pursuing commercial profit for its own sake.

This distant dream led Distinct, from its very founding, to distill its philosophy into a single phrase — return to the essence of medicine.

Before Distinct emerged, the dominant logic of private healthcare in China was the "traffic business": high customer acquisition costs, excessive testing, high-margin drug sales. Distinct sought to offer Chinese people a "clean" alternative for their healthcare choices. Yet reality never follows plans: from the initial failed attempt at "community general-practice convenience stores," to pivoting to pediatrics for single-point breakthrough, to ultimately establishing the multi-specialty large-clinic model of "the Costco of health services" — Distinct has traversed a difficult yet rational evolutionary curve.

Over thirteen years, Distinct has maintained an almost stubborn, intellectual purity. This "purity" is evident in the founding team itself.

From Wang to the subsequent additions of Yi Shi, Yan Zhu, Tao Li, and Fang Zhou, these veteran co-founders remain at the helm of Distinct's key divisions to this day. This group of Peking University-educated intellectuals seems to have stumbled almost accidentally into the torrent of commerce; they do not attempt to create myths, but rather, within the rules of medicine, science, and business, strive to be as idealistic as possible.

This logic manifests in the financial data as a kind of extreme, restrained tension: Distinct's drug revenue ratio has long been controlled below 10%, while marketing expenses account for only about 1% of revenue. In an industry where customer acquisition costs run high, this borders on the mythical.

Wang says: Distinct doesn't rely on walk-in traffic, but on an 80% repurchase rate among existing users and a 67% membership renewal rate. In his view, once the "trust flywheel" begins to turn, it becomes the true competitive moat.

Clearly, for Wang and Distinct, this listing is neither a summary of hardships nor an explosive celebration, but rather a long-distance runner reaching the first aid station after establishing a high-barrier business model. For the many companies wrestling with "people versus efficiency" that take professional talent as their core asset, the path Distinct has traveled and the rules it has followed may serve as a source of inspiration.

Below is the conversation between An Yong Waves and Wang Zhiyuan — also the first time Distinct has publicly shared what it considers its "commercial code":

1. Alignment of corporate commercial interests with user health interests, reconstructing the consumption logic of health services through "curation + trust," transforming "medical gaming" into "health entrustment" based on trust.

2. Building a closed loop of "quality service → word-of-mouth accumulation → high-frequency repurchase → low customer acquisition cost," a trust-driven low-cost growth flywheel that operates efficiently through word-of-mouth replacing marketing.

3. Emphasis on long-term user stickiness, with needs expanding from single-specialty to multi-specialty, per-household annual health spending rising continuously over extended cycles, truly achieving dual-wheel long-term growth of "user quantity growth × per-user spending increase."

4. Scientific management of "high-self-esteem" core assets, with "empowerment" rather than "control" at its core.

5. A prudent, financially-minded approach to healthcare operations, maintaining substantial cash reserves to ensure the capacity to fulfill long-term commitments to users.

Part 01

The Costco in the Clinic

An Yong: For today's secondary market, healthcare services is clearly not a "sexy" sector. During this listing roadshow, what was the core story you told?

Wang Zhiyuan: It's true — most investors would rather hear stories about AI or embodied intelligence. To many, healthcare services is too heavy, too slow. But in my eyes, its value lies in being a business with "stable beta and strong alpha potential." If I had to summarize the story I told investors in one sentence: Distinct aims to be "the Costco of health service consumption."

An Yong: How should we understand this? Costco employs a low-margin, low-price strategy in business, yet Distinct's prices — even against first-tier city incomes — can hardly be called cheap.

Wang Zhiyuan: That's a common misconception. Costco's core is absolutely not just cheapness, but "curation" and "trust." It filters out mediocre, uncertain products for its customers — you can shop with your eyes closed. Distinct does the same: we want to help patients filter out non-evidence-based services, unnecessary tests and medications, driving our drug revenue ratio below 10%. We don't profit from drug markups, but instead earn users' long-term trust through high-frequency, high-quality health services.

An Yong: In your view, is "trust" the core of Distinct's business model?

Wang Zhiyuan: Yes. We have a very clear growth flywheel — by recruiting physicians best suited to Distinct's style, providing a dignified, pure clinical environment, we build word-of-mouth; word-of-mouth drives high-frequency repurchase and lowers customer acquisition costs; this in turn enables us to recruit more talent, densify our network, and optimize our model. Marketing expenses account for only about 1% of our total revenue — rare in private healthcare. Because Distinct doesn't acquire customers through "walkie-talkies" (walk-in traffic), we rely on word-of-mouth from existing patients.

An Yong: I know Distinct's founding team has highly educated backgrounds, and you yourself are a Peking University graduate. Relying on word-of-mouth rather than marketing — is this an intellectual's arrogance? Over more than a decade, I can't believe you've never had growth anxiety.

Wang Zhiyuan: Medicine differs from many industries in that it has its own intrinsic laws of development. Even a cursory study reveals that respected medical institutions at home and abroad have all grown step by step through word-of-mouth.

Looking back at Distinct's nearly 14-year entrepreneurial journey, one of the most important reasons we've survived and steadily developed among many peer healthcare startups is this: we set out with reverence for the medical industry. The phrase we use most internally, "return to the essence of medicine," is our plain understanding of medical development laws: do what aligns with medical essence, don't do what doesn't.

Of course every entrepreneur has growth anxiety. Solving growth anxiety through word-of-mouth rather than marketing wasn't Distinct's invention — we simply chose this path at the outset, and in the process of development continuously validated that it's the most suitable, most sustainable, and highest-ROI path for Distinct. Naturally, we've become more steadfast in continuing down it.

An Yong: How did investors respond to this model during the roadshow?

Wang Zhiyuan: Healthcare services is definitely not the hot concept, but many institutions can still see past concepts to what makes us different.

Zooming out, there haven't been many successful listings in private healthcare services. Just as before Starbucks or Haidilao went public, few believed coffee shops or hot pot restaurants could scale.

Distinct wants to be "the Costco of health services" — not treating serious or critical illnesses, but leaning toward health management. Our current clinics are mostly 2,000 square meters. Under this new positioning as "the Costco of health services," we plan to upgrade most existing stores to approximately 5,000-square-meter "Costco"-type locations within the next two years.

An Yong: From 2,000 to 5,000 square meters — what's the core change behind this? Capabilities, capital, or user demand?

Wang Zhiyuan: The logic is very similar to Costco's. The categories are fairly comprehensive (dental, medical aesthetics, ophthalmology, pediatrics, physical exams, sports rehabilitation, etc.), but it's not everything — rather, curated priorities. Users can accomplish several things in one visit; this one-stop experience is a unique format.

An Yong: Can seeing a doctor really be "one-stop" like shopping?

Wang Zhiyuan: A family comes in — child sees ophthalmology, mother sees dermatology, father sees general practice. In business logic, this is called "cross-flow." The incremental investment to expand a clinic to 5,000 square meters is roughly 15 million RMB; while upfront investment increases, from an operating cash flow perspective the payback period is only 12 to 24 months. I hope to replicate Costco's single-store efficiency within the clinic format. In Distinct's past operations, we've already observed that annual household health spending at Distinct has been continuously rising over the long term, reflecting users' long-term recognition and stickiness, with more needs "one-stop" choosing Distinct.

An Yong: To achieve "one-stop," how do you "curate"?

Wang Zhiyuan: All specialties have grown from the origin point of "pediatrics." We started pediatrics in 2014; at one point it accounted for 90% of our revenue. Later we discovered that when a family builds trust with Distinct through their child, their needs rapidly expand. Starting in 2018, we formally shifted to a multi-specialty model.

My observation is that pediatrics is the true starting point for many families' engagement with healthcare services. Once parents establish trust with Distinct through pediatrics, needs naturally extend: the child's teeth need fluoride, eyes need vision tests, adults themselves need dermatology or general physicals. Developing to today's 5,000-square-meter clinics, we've gradually filled in mental health, physical exams and chronic disease management, and sports rehabilitation. None of these steps were arbitrary — they're all rational inductions based on user demand.

An Yong: Private healthcare faces far greater revenue pressure than public hospitals. How do you decide what's "mandatory" versus what's "off-limits"?

Wang Zhiyuan: We weigh two things most heavily — frequency and rigor of evidence-based medicine. Some projects may be highly profitable, but if they can't stand up to evidence-based scrutiny, or carry attributes of "money traps" or "intelligence taxes," we absolutely won't touch them. This is a well-known red line internally. Our commercial logic demands that user health interests and corporate commercial interests must align. If I sacrificed our stickiness foundation for short-term revenue, Distinct's renewal rate couldn't reach 67%, and our repurchase rate couldn't exceed 80%.

Part 02

Facing "High Self-Requirement" Core Assets

An Yong: Distinct currently has over 400 full-time physicians, many from top-tier hospitals. This group is typically considered the hardest to manage, the most prideful professionals. As your core asset, how are they assembled?

Wang Zhiyuan: Still through word-of-mouth. Currently, referrals account for over 90% of our physician sourcing.

For physicians, changing jobs is a major life decision — especially from public to private, where their entire path and habits undergo tremendous change. They evaluate new environments very rigorously, and this evaluation depends heavily on observing those already working at Distinct. Without accumulated word-of-mouth, this highly educated group is very difficult to "recruit" in.

An Yong: Private medical institutions love to bring in "veteran experts" to anchor their practice, but looking at your physician roster, it's almost entirely young faces.

Wang Zhiyuan: That's right — we mainly recruit mid-career backbone physicians aged 35-45, and they join full-time.

An Yong: Can this be understood as a way for you to control costs and improve management efficiency?

Wang Zhiyuan: If cost control were the goal, part-time arrangements or lowering hiring standards might work better (laughs) — but these are clearly not wise options.

Our hiring profile focuses on mid-career backbone physicians because it's highly aligned with our core philosophy, values, business model, service types, and customer positioning — you could say it's the result of comprehensive screening across these dimensions. For example, we look at whether physicians recognize and practice evidence-based medicine, whether they have the willingness and ability to Care for clients, whether they possess whole-person medical thinking, whether they have strong self-driven motivation for continuous learning, whether they're willing to join full-time and go all in, whether they can communicate with clients as equals, and so on.

An Yong: How do you confirm through the hiring process that a physician is this kind of person? Are there operable methods to confirm a physician's "Care" capability?

Wang Zhiyuan: We break down a physician's capabilities into three dimensions: self-drive, empathy, and clinical technical ability.

Clinical standards and technical skills are relatively easy to train — backbone physicians from top-tier teaching hospitals generally already have solid foundations. But the core behind "Care" — self-drive and empathy — are relatively difficult to train, and some aspects may be untrainable.

At the operational level, we have a very systematic screening and assessment mechanism —

First is the "Standardized Patient (SP)" assessment. During interviews, we arrange trained "standardized patients" to simulate consultations with physicians. We don't just look at whether they can prescribe correctly, but more importantly how they respond to patient anxiety in the consultation room, how they explain conditions. This is a very heavy component of quality standardization assessment.

Second is shadowing observation. We observe whether they can truly find fulfillment through serving users in real scenarios.

Recently we've also introduced technical methods, using AI to record consultation conversations. AI analyzes physicians' communication quality and provides suggestions, so "Care" is no longer merely a feeling, but becomes an objective behavior that can be continuously optimized through quality management.

An Yong: "Care" can be a source of fulfillment, but for a company manager, can "Care" be objectively measured? What are Distinct physicians' KPIs?

Wang Zhiyuan: Your first question is a classic "industrializing emotional logic" problem. Many people think "Care" is vague, even see it as the enemy of commercialization. But in my logic, if something can't be presented digitally, it can't be managed. Medicine itself is moving from experiential science toward evidence-based medicine, empirical medicine — management is the same.

How does Distinct set KPIs for physicians? This is an old question we're repeatedly asked. Simply put, Distinct has never set revenue-generation KPIs for physicians, because this easily leads to problems like over-prescribing, excessive testing, and off-label treatments — over-treatment is what evidence-based medicine most abhors.

So how does Distinct evaluate physicians? Mainly medical quality and client experience.

An Yong: Specifically?

Wang Zhiyuan: For example, NPS (Net Promoter Score) — this is the most basic user feedback, which you could understand as word-of-mouth. But more interesting is the follow-up visit rate, which is a very rational "thermometer." Suppose the industry-standard follow-up rate for a certain condition should be 70%, but at your location it's only 30% — even without customer complaints, the data would tell me our pricing might be too high, or the physician's communication has problems.

Beyond this, our core mechanism is "Peer Review." With patient privacy protected, physicians' medical records and treatment plans are randomly sampled at certain proportions. If a physician violates medical principles for some purpose, or performs insufficiently "Care," they must face inquiry from the professional quality control team. For this group of high-self-requirement physicians, the influence of reputation and dignity far outweighs so-called revenue KPIs.

We apply the "iceberg theory" to managing safety incidents. To suppress the 10% of major accidents above water, you must stare relentlessly at the 90% of small oversights below — an expired bottle of medicine, a slip-and-fall risk. We've set our highest-level safety incident target below five per million.

An Yong: In a healthcare service organization, what kind of role are you as CEO?

Wang Zhiyuan: I often say I'm not "managing" physicians, but "empowering" them.

This really isn't empty talk. For this kind of core asset, the place they should most be unleashed is the examination room. The administrative team's role is "servant." Physicians aren't good at negotiating rent with landlords, haggling with suppliers, or even communicating with regulatory authorities. We take on all this "dirty work."

I'm the designer of Distinct's entire management architecture, and my design goal is to let physicians be pure professionals with complete peace of mind. This extreme professional division of labor is the fundamental reason Distinct can maintain an ultra-low turnover rate of 2.5%.

Part 03

Healthcare Services Must Be Prudently Operated

An Yong: In the private healthcare industry, not participating in public health insurance is almost equivalent to abandoning a massive traffic pool. Many institutions rely on public insurance to drive traffic for survival, yet Distinct declined public insurance from its Shenzhen beginnings. Why?

Wang Zhiyuan: I'm accustomed to looking at macro trends. The logic behind this decision is actually quite simple: public insurance contributors are the working population, and China's working population has already peaked and begun declining. Meanwhile, the aging wave is arriving, with surging medical demand. This is a classic "scissors gap."

If an institution joins public insurance, it must follow public insurance rules, meaning constraints on pricing power, service selection, and so forth. When Distinct was founded, we'd already decided to be a differentiated medical institution. We chose self-payment precisely to force our team to find services that public insurance doesn't cover, that users genuinely need, and that they're willing to pay a premium for.

An Yong: In your view, what is the relationship between Distinct and public healthcare?

Wang Zhiyuan: I tend to see this relationship as a "complementary" one based on functional differentiation.

Public healthcare in China is an extremely efficient guarantee system. When it comes to critical illness treatment, major surgery, or emergency care, public hospitals are the absolute ballast — that's not where Distinct competes. Matters of "life and death" are the public system's strength.

Distinct's role is a company with more "health consumption" characteristics. We address needs beyond "life and death" — about "health management and quality of life." Chronic disease management, child development, dental, ophthalmology — these areas where the public system struggles to deliver high-quality service are precisely our space for survival.

An Yong: There's a perception of high-end private healthcare as "extreme service competition." How do you avoid being dragged into this kind of involution with competitors?

Wang Zhiyuan: This is a crucial boundary question. Many people equate "Care" with "service," even with hotel-style tea-pouring, but in my view these are completely different dimensions.

What we want to avoid is precisely that inefficient, purely consumption-side "over-packaging." The reason Distinct's model is called "the Costco of health service consumption" lies at its core in efficiency and cost-effectiveness. If our cost structure includes too much luxury decoration or marketing expenses unrelated to medicine itself, we would necessarily have to raise unit prices, ultimately passing costs to users — which is wrong.

Our true "competition" isn't "competing on service," but competing on "professional transparency" and "operational efficiency" —

First, returning "Care" to the essence of medicine. Our understanding of "Care" isn't how brightly a physician smiles at you, but whether they can spend 20 to 30 minutes listening to you finish describing your condition, whether they can give you an evidence-based treatment plan untainted by commercial interests. Users' core pain point at medical institutions is solving health problems; if you achieve extreme professionalism and trust at this node, those superficial, ritualistic things become less important.

Second, differentiated competition. Large high-end private hospitals covering orthopedics, cardiology, oncology and other serious conditions require heavy asset investment and guarantee systems; they need higher unit prices, and much of their service demand is low-frequency. What Distinct does is high-frequency health consumption: pediatrics, dental, ophthalmology, dermatology, physical exams, psychological counseling, and so on.

An Yong: In the current economic environment, won't persisting in not joining public insurance become a burden?

Wang Zhiyuan: Cost itself is a barrier. Once users become accustomed to Distinct's conflict-of-interest-free, pure consultation model, their probability of churn is very low.

Moreover, healthcare services can't be rushed — you can't turn it into an aggressive expansion business. If you only have 100 million on your books yet dare to pile up traffic and go all-in, that logic might work in consumer goods, but in healthcare it's extremely irresponsible.

I believe operating medical institutions should be like operating financial institutions, like operating insurance companies — with prudence. Medical institutions' commitments to users often span cycles: for example, orthodontic treatment lasts two years. If your company disappears, what happens to the user? What happens to the physician?

An Yong: Is "prudence" also your attitude toward capital? I understand Distinct's financing has an "80% shareholder resolution mechanism." To many startups trapped in buyback clauses in recent years, this seems incredible.

Wang Zhiyuan: This is to prevent the company from being held hostage by short-term demands. Many entrepreneurs don't pay enough attention to buyback clauses when signing agreements; once an individual minority shareholder demands exit, the entire company can fall into deadlock. With our design, unless 80% of shareholders reach unanimous resolution, individual shareholders cannot demand buybacks or forcibly change the company's direction. This mechanism ensures that even in poor capital environments, we can maintain a long-term rhythm, rather than being forced into distorted business moves.

An Yong: Then how should we understand Distinct's acquisition of a children's hospital in Wuhan? Some interpret this as a sign Distinct is turning aggressive.

Wang Zhiyuan: The acquisition wasn't for scale, but for "acquiring users" and "training troops." That hospital had accumulated over 90,000 quality pediatric users in its history — this was the asset we valued most. Going forward we'll also treat "user acquisition" as an important M&A strategy: acquiring quality users through mergers and acquisitions, moving single-specialty users into the Distinct system to convert them to multi-specialty services.

I believe M&A integration is a strategic-level capability — you can't wait until you need large-scale expansion to learn it. We're willing to spend two years integrating an institution, from finance, quality management to key systems. Only by mastering this integration capability of "converting single-specialty users to multi-specialty services" does Distinct's billion-scale vision have a foundation.

An Yong: In capital's eyes, wouldn't two years be too long?

Wang Zhiyuan: Medical institution integration isn't simply changing a sign. We need to import our DMS (Clinic Management System), conduct quality standard re-assessments, and especially achieve team integration. This capability can't be bought — it can only be ground out by bringing our own people in. I'd rather go slower, ensuring the "single-specialty to multi-specialty" conversion rate is real, than build houses on sand.

An Yong: Can we understand it this way: your prudence is buying "insurance" for a larger, more standardized healthcare system?

Wang Zhiyuan: You could say that. In this industry, surviving long is more important than running fast. As long as your underlying logic is right, time is compound interest.

Part 04

Toward "Million Members, Billion Revenue"

An Yong: After several years of the pandemic, what changes have you observed in users' healthcare psychology?

Wang Zhiyuan: The pandemic popularized a great deal of health knowledge — people began understanding immune systems, respiratory systems, and grew accustomed to online consultations and antigen self-testing. This actually laid groundwork for us to promote "health subscription services."

We're experimenting with a new O2O business: not just waiting for users to get sick and come to the clinic, but through online traffic generation and offline delivery. For example, long-acting lipid-lowering drugs (one injection every six months), allergy desensitization treatment, weight management. These quality-of-life-enhancing services are long-cycle; we manage them through WeChat groups and digital systems, transforming users from "seeing a doctor once" to "subscribing to a health plan."

An Yong: Will AI technology, so hot in recent years, be a new opportunity for Distinct?

Wang Zhiyuan: With good prompts, AI's diagnostic capabilities already exceed most physicians. But this doesn't mean physicians will become unemployed. I often tell our physicians: AI excels at Tasks, not Jobs.

Physicians' roles will be reconstructed. You can think of physicians as "pre-sales and after-sales engineers" for this powerful AI software. AI handles precise diagnostic suggestions and documentation generation; physicians are responsible for explaining results to patients, alleviating anxiety, responsible for that "Care" that algorithms can't simulate. What we need to do is use AI to "reclaim" physicians' time and give it back to patients.

An Yong: What is Distinct's current progress in AI-related business?

Wang Zhiyuan: We're currently solving two problems: "memory" and "trustworthiness." Large AI models are prone to "hallucinations," but if we can organize users' existing case data into personal health memories, AI's suggestions become highly personalized and precise.

An Yong: Standing at present, what role do you judge AI will play in Distinct's vision?

Wang Zhiyuan: AI technology, biopharmaceutical technology — all are rapidly developing. Healthcare services face a "great transformation unseen in a century." We're fortunate to encounter this era of simultaneous challenges and opportunities.

An Yong: Beyond deep cultivation of the domestic market, I've also seen your moves in Singapore, Malaysia, and elsewhere. What's the logic of taking Chinese clinics overseas?

Wang Zhiyuan: This step is still globally exploratory; our approach is to build some physical presence at very low cost.

The business logic behind this actually focuses on two groups —

The first group is foreigners coming to China. The composition of foreigners coming to China is changing — traditional Europeans and Americans may not be as numerous as before, but many Saudis and Southeast Asians are coming. These people also have medical needs after arriving in China. We have touchpoints on Facebook, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp overseas; these overseas layouts are essentially helping us channel resources.

The second group is Chinese going overseas. Large numbers of people are striving abroad, but their families remain in China. For Chinese people in foreign countries, seeking medical care is extremely difficult — they're unfamiliar with local healthcare systems, often limited to running to pharmacies themselves. We provide some medical rescue and assistance services overseas, essentially "making friends" abroad. When we establish trust overseas, these families become our members domestically.

An Yong: Looking back at the 2012 dream of building "China's Mayo," walking this path, how do you think Distinct is doing today?

Wang Zhiyuan: In 2012 at the beginning, there was indeed a kind of entrepreneur's "romanticism," thinking we could rapidly replicate an ideal model. But walking these 13 years, I've also become more pragmatic: first become an excellent enterprise that creates health value for users and brings investment returns to shareholders.

We've preliminarily proven the "Costco of health service consumption" model, proven that relying on professional service and word-of-mouth can sustain survival. Our next goal is "million members, billion revenue." I hope within ten years at the slowest, we can truly serve 1 million Chinese families, so that when they face health decisions, they can trust Distinct's recommendations with their eyes closed.

An Yong: What kind of entrepreneur, what kind of business person do you think you are?

Wang Zhiyuan: An entrepreneur striving to be responsible to users, shareholders, and employees.

Layout | Nan Yao Image Source | IC Photo

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