My failure story: The entry mistakes I made when I started my business

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On the August 25 of 2013, I was packing up the rest of the clutter in our office with three partners from the customer team. Partner J sits on the floor and says, "This is my third startup failure, okay?" In fact, he means, in November 2012, he was responsible for shutting down his office in Beijing's east Quad, selling all the furniture and office supplies, and packing and withdrawing; in February 2013, he once again cleaned up our once large office with a team of even half of the staff who had just cut back (the one with all the big blackboard walls). , pack up and get ready to withdraw. This is his third time. Throwing things, packing, handling, carrying countless hours of overtime in the night space an empty moment. And the company is about to turn from a business to a part-time project run by interested people.

People always want to cover their failures. For their own reputation or image, want to be a legend or better. This is why we rarely read in the mass media the vivid, detailed, sincere entrepreneurial failure story.

On the contrary, the Hollywood-style reverse story, the success stories of the "Brick home interpretation" every day, like a virus on the same wave and wave in our micro-bo, micro-faith in the flow of information. But as Michael Lewis in his graduation speech in Princeton in 2013, winners always overestimate their decisions, seriously underestimating the importance of luck.

This creates an unprecedented illusion of social media amplification. Although the winners are like the protagonist of the disaster movie, each one of them lies behind 999 bit, but the media is like a deceptive camera, it makes it hard for me to feel the disparity. The more frightening illusion is that, looking at these stories of success, people feel that they can be invincible as long as they have diligence, cleverness, perseverance, willpower, and some good inspiration. This "ignorance of optimism" creates a waste of many talents and productivity.

So I decided to do something different.

Although even the guests have had some exciting moments, I just want to share with you the details of at least 100 big and small mistakes I have made over the past two years, and how they led to the failure. From "ignorant optimism" to "informed pessimism" to "informed optimism", these mistakes are the greatest gains of my wonderful experience.

Forget which wise man once said that success is simple-you just don't make the most important mistakes at every stage. I like this sentence very much. It is hard to hear the truth and sincerity in this time when the successful tutor is flying in the sky. Let's just say that "meditating 15 minutes a day" is a good idea for an entrepreneur, but Bezos is clearly not creating the Amazon Empire for 15 minutes of meditation (even if it comes from Bezos). To make things worse, the "140-word success secret" we received day after day is almost endless, and it's hard for an ordinary person to do them at the same time.

Instead, it is much higher to avoid 1000 roadblocks on the way to creating something than to meet 1000 "success conditions" at the same time. Success is always behind the butterfly effect as unpredictable reasons, but failure is because so Chibai wrong. So I want to put aside those successful cases and share only 100 or so mistakes that have caused the failure.

More importantly, my goal is to share these experiences and lessons with every single person, not as an entrepreneur in the traditional sense. Because you're going to be using them when you're reading this--after you get to know the startup thing.

Can you start a business? Look at yourself in the mirror. In fact, any student, a young white-collar worker with daily work, a pregnant woman who is unemployed at home, a middle-aged person who wants to start anew, or even an elderly person who has already retired, can take some time from the life to see the operas, play the game to create something, and derive benefits from it. This is the beginning of entrepreneurship. Don't think about whether you can make it big and powerful, it's a rookie mistake. And entrepreneurship is not what many people think (or the media is keen to report) that requires huge costs. If you're just starting a business, and you feel like you're spending a lot of money, you're probably making another rookie mistake.

The coolest part is coming--creating something (Hack something) is the best street lamp in life. Paul Graham, the Great God, once wrote such a passage in his log "The Power of the Edge" (marginal):

If I could go back to my age when I was more than 20 years old, I would tell myself to do something more: create something together. I spent a lot of time thinking and worrying about what I should do, like many of my peers, and I spent a little time trying to create something. Now looking back, I should spend less time worrying and spending more time creating things. When you don't know what to do, do something.

(If I could go back and redo my twenties, there would is one thing I ' d do more of:just try hacking things up. Like many arranges this age, I spent a lot of the time worrying about what I should do. I also spent some time trying to build stuff. I should have spent pager time worrying. If you are not throaty what to did, make something. )

Many people have asked me how to find what I want to do, my answer is: do something (hack something). If you don't realize it, there's a lot of free open resources on the Internet today, and every single person can easily use it on the ground. They make it easier and cheaper for a person to start a business than ever before.

So, I just want to see people in this article do one thing: try to create something.

This will open a door to your life, bringing new opportunities and visions to make you know who you are. And if you make a lot of mistakes (almost inevitably) in the process, acknowledge them from your heart, summarize them, share them in good faith, and learn to enjoy it. This is the only way to achieve "informed optimism".

Finally, I would like to thank all of my friends who have been concerned, supported, helped and encouraged me and even guests over the past 22 months. I would also like to thank all of you for criticizing and spitting out the friends of me and even the guests who have made me grow up and have the courage to share my mistakes with everyone else (look forward to seeing the one you want to spit out). We will continue to operate the company and keep thinking about how to get more people involved. And like you, my own hack something's journey has just begun. Who knows what will happen in the future?

The last time I walked into the subway bookstore and saw a successful memoir lined up on the bestseller shelves, I was thinking that there should be more people in the future who wrote such thick books about mistakes. Fewer people hide their mistakes, and less cynical people say, "This is the world, don't be childish," after a failure. So that the world can hope to be better. The success of learning tired, we need more positive energy failure to learn: More to do something, more optimistic to fail several times and grow from it.

Because we can't eat fat, we have to have a bento.

Getting started error one: Premature product

Even the first idea is to do a "different experience" of the trading market. In other words, is an offline experience consumption of Taobao. From the first day, I hope the team can develop a prototype product as soon as possible. After doing market research, writing business plans, and finishing the first batch of offline partners, I thought that developing a prototype product was one of the first prerequisites for this project, so it ultimately led to a huge limitation on the speed at which programmers developed prototypes.

And time is exactly the biggest cost of starting a business.

People who have heard of "lean Entrepreneurship" (Lean startup) know the idea of minimizing the viability of the product (MVP, minimal viable product)-testing the market's response with a product that minimizes the core requirements. The core principle behind the MVP is to reduce the time cost. Still, I have mistakenly thought that MVP still needs to develop a prototype product.

The fact is that in order to bring a project to market, it is not a prerequisite or even a necessary condition to develop a product for yourself. A product is simply a tool that turns an idea into a structured, automated service. But before you turn your ideas into automated services, what you should do is to first make sure that your ideas are workable, by looking for product-market fit. And then turn the idea into a universal automation service by developing the product.

In other words, before you decide to develop an automatic vending machine to sell drinks in the subway, please stand in the subway for one weeks to see if anyone is paying. The truth sounds simple, but myself, I've seen too many entrepreneurs turn these two steps upside down.

Is it feasible to test the product before developing the product? And in most cases, it's doable. There are so many ways to achieve this. One of the great things about this time is that there are too many open resources for our common people to use. Build a micro-blog, build a micro-letter group, build a forum (watercress Group/Baidu Bar), open a Taobao shop, build a template based Web site-the five most popular tools can achieve 80% product creativity.

If you re doing a service market such as a customer, Weibo + micro-letter + Taobao is enough to meet 90% of the function. But let's give two examples of other areas.

Suppose you want to sell high-end sexy underwear over the internet. You should not develop a Web site on your own (although you may think the high-end synonym is to have your own website)-You should open a Taobao shop first. Although you may think that Taobao is not high-end, many people in Taobao successfully do a customer price of more than 50,000 of the merchandise business. But considering opening a Taobao shop for a few days, and time is the biggest cost, you should not even open Taobao shop first. You should build a microblog (10 minutes) to post pictures and information about the erotic underwear you want to sell. Build a micro-signal (10 minutes) to add people who are interested in you as friends and build your core customer management system (CRM) through micro-letters. Find two or three more channels (online or offline) full of targeted users to spread this micro-blog and micro-letter message to study the market's response.

Similarly, suppose you want to do an online education community on the Internet in a building area. You shouldn't have developed a community site with a video function, or at least three months of being consumed. You only need watercress Group/Baidu Post Bar/discuz Forum + Youku. I think you know what I mean. Don ' t go for fancy points. maximally Fancy isn't why we build a startup.

Remember, the most important thing is what you do, not whether you develop a product independently.

Entry Error Two: Think of originality as secret

This may be the most common beginner's mistake in the early days of entrepreneurship, including myself. If you are reading the following story, can't help but want to say "silly fork", then please promise me one thing, that is, you will never make this mistake yourself.

In the first half of the month, when someone asked what the customer was doing, I replied, "Sorry, we signed a confidentiality agreement." In fact, in order for every full-time and part-time employee to have this sound cool excuse, we drafted and let each employee sign a serious confidentiality agreement (ah, what a waste of time).

When I realized how stupid it was after half a year, I started to open myself up, actively promised to date my friends, and talked to a lot of new friends about the model. It was then that I realized that I was not a fool.

In late September, my old friend A, who worked for a top-tier C-fund, came to me for dinner, hoping I would give some advice to the start-up company he was still in. In the financial circle has been doing for five or six years A is a very simple and sincere and social experience of friends, he told me that he encountered the problem is to start a business, write a plan, but can not find a senior industry experience partner. Although he has a target candidate, he is worried that if he tells his own ideas and patterns, he may be able to do it himself. When I asked him what the idea was, he answered with a slight reluctance that it was in the high-end food industry. I sensed his reluctance, and I did not ask him to go on.

After a, I've seen two of younger entrepreneurs who have stalling their secret protections whenever they talk about specific ideas. In retrospect, the more junior entrepreneurs are apt to make this mistake, because they often feel that valuable ideas are the core weapon of their subversive practitioners and companies in the industry.

In the internet age, anyone who has made this mistake has been poisoned more or less by a film-the social network that describes Facebook's entrepreneurial story (Social receptacle). In the film, Harvard's high-fidelity twin, Winklevoss brothers, told Facebook's ideas to Mark Zuckerberg, the "industry veteran", who had been plagiarized and preemptive, and turned into a banknote printing machine. So the movie man would have thought, even though my ideas aren't worth hundreds of billions of dollars like Facebook, at least they have the potential to make tens of millions of renminbi valuations. If the senior person also plagiarism, it is very sad.

To escape the abyss of thought, one must first understand what is at the heart of the idea.

In some people's minds, creativity is a cool product feature-it's a rookie mistake. The essence of an idea is to find a market demand, and to make a product to meet this demand. There is no use for a unilateral cool, but a chemical reaction to fit. So the core of creativity is product-market fit.

From this perspective, a good idea is indeed the most important of all entrepreneurial elements. My point is that product-market fit is more important than team and execution. What's more, for example, numerous famous serial entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and Silicon Valley great God Marc Andreesen are called the only Thing that matters. Interested friends can carefully read the deep logic behind this view, and this is not going to unfold.

But that doesn't mean you should protect your mind's ideas as confidential. On the contrary, you should share as much as possible with the senior people who know the industry. The reasons are as follows:

In fact, the probability of your creativity reaching product-market fit is slim when it is just conceived. You have the idea of a product, but not necessarily the most understanding of the market. Sharing your ideas with industry veterans will greatly help you adjust your product creativity to reach the most important product-market fit.

And if there are people in the industry who think your creativity is fantastic and you have the ability to make it happen, then normally, he should be working with you. This is a good thing for your entrepreneurial success.

You must be thinking, what if something is going to happen? I'm still afraid to take the risk. Well, let's analyze it.

If you have the ability, but he still chooses a person to secretly start alone from scratch (this is really a chance to pick one), then he lacks the ability to do a great deal of the people need to do-you have more advantages. In turn analysis, if you do not have the relevant ability, just have a creative, then this opportunity itself does not belong to you Facebook film is actually such a story.

In other words, you have no loss in either case. But through these exchanges your harvest will be enormous. You'll have the opportunity to avoid a lot of unnecessary attempts, take many detours, find product-market fit more quickly, and thus save a lot of time (remember? This is the biggest cost to the entrepreneur).

In fact, our creativity is just like our own children, it is easy for parents to overestimate their value. But when you move your child from a confined nursery to a natural environment for questioning, criticism, and attack, you will find that it is starting to thrive.

So now, every time I have a creative start-up, I will not only find industry veterans and listen to them, but also share them with friends who I think are the target users. The former can help me from the technical level and industry macro perspective from top to bottom to see a creative deficiencies, the latter can help me from the bottom to understand the target user's microscopic view.

A good idea is really the most important of all entrepreneurial elements, but 99 of the 100 ideas are bad. A lot of smart people make this mistake because they selectively ignore the simple fact (which is why the wiser are more likely to make mistakes). So when you have an idea, it's not about betting that it can hold a home run, but how to make sure it's not one of those 99 bad ideas in the quickest way.

PS: This blog was sent after a number of comments with Zang and Lei as a counter example. Personal point of view: the most likely reason to make this mistake is to think that their creativity is a decade to see the Facebook, the other is a decade of the small tie, they have made a successful product of the Zang, the other side is under the lei of more than 10 CEO-level talent. 100 Billion Dollar face book, 10 billion dollars of millet. The media hype has nothing to do with entrepreneurs just starting to survive and try to make mistakes quickly.

If you have any suggestions, questions, queries, or additions to the above content, please comment and participate in the discussion. Look forward to communicating with you. The two mistakes I've shared are just the beginning, and I'll continue to share other mistakes in the days to come. Author Weibo @ Cow Denny