Demand is king

Before entering the investment industry, I made Internet products. All http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/6900.html "> Product personnel, the first thing to do is to study the needs of users. Into the investment industry, the analysis of many companies, found that this is a universal truth.

One of the most spoken words in startups and VC circles is Business-model. It seems that model is right, can have a great success of the beginning. For a while, the entrepreneur will say "Our model is ...". I do not mean that the model is not important, the model is the core of all business, but the demand is the core of the model, if there is no demand support, the model is mirrors, no root wood, bricks.

User requirements This topic is very large, if you want to say, enough to write a book of more than 500,000 words. But you can start with a word--do you know who your user base is, there are no specific cases, what their goals and mentality are, where they will find you at what time, where, and by what means, and choose the services you offer them, and how you can provide them with the best possible satisfaction, And it's best to have the motivation to share this satisfaction with friends in some way.

People/crowds are always more complex than business models. Hao123 is to use a very simple model, to meet the needs of a group of users, and through a strong market promotion has been successful. In many cases, success is not the ability to create new patterns, but the ability to tap into the potential needs of a particular group of users. The so-called mode, technology, is just a tool to meet user needs.

There are indeed some successful people in this market, they did not understand the user needs at the beginning, the mistake has been successful. But I believe two points: 1. The ability to grasp the demand can greatly improve the success rate of entrepreneurship; 2. To achieve a successful model, may rely on luck and feeling can have a good start, but the long-term development motivation still stems from the accurate grasp of user needs.

Many entrepreneurs often show me a bunch of survey data when it comes to proving business models, and it seems that by relying on this data, the market has a demand for the model. I do not deny the value of customer surveys, but many times the survey data does not represent the user's true behavior. Social psychology studies have long proved that people's "attitudes" and "behavior" often vary enormously. If you are a marketing veteran, you will also find that most of the time the customer's first positive "stance" does not prove that he will support you or buy your product.

So I prefer to look at data based on user behavior and gain knowledge of user needs. For an internet business, it is not difficult to do this, because a lot of user behavior can be extracted from the log data in the background. When making products in the early years, we often by the user "slap", the so-called "slap", that is, from the background statistics to find the user's actual behavior and product personnel expected a huge difference. It's time to sit down and study where there is a problem. In fact, the user "slapped" the time, we will be very happy, this is a challenge, a fascinating learning process.

In fact, research needs is a lifetime career, when you go into society, all the time to ponder is how to meet the family, love, friends, employees, partners, customers, users ... The founder of a company or key product planners, if the user needs are not conscious to grasp or understand, we usually do not invest, not that such companies will not be successful, but the risk is too big.

Meet user needs, sometimes a technology, sometimes an art. From the perspective of technology, there are a series of mature methods and means to better study the needs of users, and even design automated systems to provide users with personalized services. A good example is Amazon's automated referral system, which studies the potential needs of users when buying items through large-scale excavations and recommends users the most likely products to buy. From the artistic point of view, to meet the needs of users does not mean that all the functions to the user is a good, too complex system, seemingly meet the needs of all users, but the actual will cause users to use confusion and obstacles. It's like you show the best things to a girl, but you don't necessarily get the heart. Most of the time the hardest part is trade-offs, which require experience, analysis, and talent and inspiration. Sometimes you experience painful self-denial.

Some entrepreneurs are obsessed with technology and models, and it seems that technological superiority and model leadership are the determining factors for success. In fact, meeting customer needs is paramount. Indeed, some foreign models have very good reference value, but must be based on the needs of domestic users, to do the localization of the transformation to succeed. For example, the success of Sina Weibo, not only based on Sina's influence and user base, but also in the transformation of products has been a very big effort. Some models do not even have foreign models can be used for reference, such as hao123 and the pattern, the latter is based on the nature of advertising, advertising audience analysis and the need for advertisers to accurately grasp the above.

In short, a thorough understanding of users, to maintain a keen observation and insight, based on user behavior, the mind is flexible, the courage to self-denial is a magic weapon to improve the success rate of entrepreneurship.

Source: http://blog.jianjiang.net/?p=384