Sunflower collection for Internet Startups [ZT]

By Lei Jun

 

 

A friend, who has been developing software for ten years in a software company, wants to start a business and asks me what to pay attention. I joked that to succeed, you must learn about the "sunflower Collection" of Internet entrepreneurship ".

 

Large software companies have a lot of resources, good R & D capabilities, and a variety of promotion resources, but few have developed excellent Internet products. It seems that there are many reasons, such as the difficulty in mobilizing personal enthusiasm and the difficulty of internal management and coordination. I think another important reason is that the method cannot be used. A large company has many resources. An Internet innovation project, after a large amount of resources are invested, the company's expectations are high. There are naturally more problems to consider, but it is not easy to do well.

 

If you leave a company to start a business, you need to "take the initiative" to eliminate this practice, reduce costs as much as possible, and concentrate on resources to solve one or two core problems.

 

Do not think too much, do not make too long a plan, especially the plan cannot be too complex! The success of a business requires the ability to discover opportunities and make quick breakthroughs, plus luck. Large companies have too much work experience, and sometimes they will limit their own practices. Internet entrepreneurship is simpler and easier to succeed!

 

1. Focus: To solve a user's urgent needs, the problem can be clearly understood in one sentence.

 

(1) A product that is clearly and urgently needed by users can easily find a specific user group. In this way, after the product is developed, it is not easy to be biased. (2) The selected user needs must be universal, which determines the future market prospects of this product. (3) there are few issues to be solved and the development speed is fast. It is also easy to control the initial R & D costs and risks. (4) products that solve clear problems are easy to clarify to users, and promotion will be relatively simple.

 

2. Ultimate: To achieve the ultimate of all similar products in this function, do the best to win.

 

(1) The ultimate is the core of Internet products. As long as the ultimate is beyond the user's word of mouth, a word of mouth effect is formed, which brings great convenience to the later promotion. (2) only by focusing can we achieve the ultimate goal and beat our competitors.

 

3. Fast: the development cycle must be limited to three to six months.

 

(1) in the Internet era, user needs have changed rapidly and competition is fierce. Rapid development makes it easy to adapt to the pace of the entire market and saves costs. (2) If problems are found during the user trial, the response speed should be fast and updated as soon as possible. In the early stage, I thought it was necessary to maintain the update speed within one or two weeks.

 

4. Word of mouth: in the initial stage of marketing, we insist on spending less or even no money to see the true appeal of products to users.

 

(1) After the product is completed, do not worry. First, try it out in a small-scale user group and listen to user feedback. (2) Large-scale promotion will bring about two problems: 1. After a large amount of market cost is invested, user expectations are high. if the product is not perfect, it will easily lead to negative reputation, this leaves hidden risks for future promotion. 2. The test results obtained by large-scale marketing are inaccurate. If the product is not perfect, or even the demand is incorrect, it will be covered up by numbers. After the promotion cost is stopped, the user volume will not increase or even decline, and it will be too late to change. Successful internet startups in the past few years have actually spent very little money on marketing, but these companies have spent a lot of energy on marketing. (3) The most important promotion skills at the beginning were search engine optimization and viral marketing.

 

The sunflower collections for internet startups are "Focus", "extreme", "fast", and "Word of mouth "!

 

A perfect Internet start-up, preferably a combination of technical and product experts to start a business, complete the product in three to six months, and then test and improve the product in six months to a year, reach the initial success threshold, seek financing, find a successful business model, and then invest a lot of marketing resources to form large-scale business.

 

The criteria for initial success vary with business requirements. I have a simple standard for your reference, that is, when the product was launched for six months to one year, the website page exceeded 1 million PVS, or the client product installed 10 thousand times a day, and the number of users continues to grow. What needs to be considered after achieving this goal is how to explore a good business model while maintaining the growth rate.