Entrepreneurship is not a fantasy drifting

The beginning of the thing is like this, a friend asked me: Now there are millions of funds, there are two technical cooperation, just do not know what to do.

I would say that this is an unrealistic problem because entrepreneurship never starts like this. Entrepreneurship usually comes from intrinsic motivation or extrinsic motivation, and when intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation are combined, entrepreneurship starts.

The intrinsic motivation of entrepreneurship refers to a person's understanding, location, work expertise or a particular profession. A person may initiate research because of a certain interest, because there is a deep understanding of a certain field, a person can, and then a place in this field. A person may also because of past work experience, into a certain industry, work for a long time, the industry has in-depth understanding, profound experience, so the formation of special work expertise, has a professional. Professional understanding or expertise, usually directed at a particular field or industry, and therefore not difficult to become the best worker in the industry. And once a worker moves the entrepreneurial heart, it's easy to put it into action. This is the initiation of entrepreneurship by intrinsic motivation.

As for the external motivation is from the market observation, we can look at what industry in the community flourish, what industry hot, as to whether to invest in the basis. But such cursory industry observations usually do little to help start-ups, and entrepreneurial choices require more subtle observation. More subtle observations need to be done from specific industries. For example, the traditional industry needs to first select a subdivision area, carefully observe its upstream and downstream supply chain, production flow, raw materials and supplies, to see if all smooth. If there is inconvenient, inconvenient place, there is room for intervention.

Many of the innovations come from insiders in the industry, because only the peers know the potential demand gap in the sector, but also to find innovative ways to meet it, all from the careful observation and understanding of an industry. And such entrepreneurs, if it is from the professional workers in the industry, this is fully consistent with the internal motives of the dynamic, combined with the observation of external opportunities, the formation of a natural entrepreneurial action.

Usually entrepreneurship comes from an experience, a sign, a profession, a kind of understanding, entrepreneurship is a lot of fantasy out.

External observation also has an effective way to find the life around the unsatisfied. Anything in life, as long as they feel inconvenient, bad use, not good enough, may be able to become entrepreneurial opportunities. In theory, as long as a person feel unsatisfied, magnified to the whole society, there will be many people are not satisfied, this is the origin of thinking about entrepreneurship.

Now some people start a business, just have the conditions, but lack of motivation, write out of the BP very meticulous careful, but no practical value. For example, the market analysis mentioned above, just open a copy of BP, the beginning is a voluminous and illustrated market situation or forecast. To be sure, choosing the right market is more important than the ability and the product. Unfortunately, most of the founders I saw didn't spend much time researching the market he was aiming for. To make things worse, a lot of people just read two research reports and assume that he already knows his market.

This way of working is very dangerous. First, based on budget and time constraints, these institutions usually do a small sample of the market, and then use the data to insert the overall situation. Such a report can only tell you a vague idea, but it is not the basis for the formation of a strategy. If you are going to travel abroad, it is impossible to arrange a trip by Lonely Planet, which was published two years ago.

More importantly, all the information you spend 30 minutes on the internet is basically public information. It is almost impossible to create any unfair competitive advantage by taking public information and how it evolves. So you have to do your own market research, get key proprietary information to make good market decisions based on these information, and upgrade the opportunity to build a long, healthy and profitable business.

First you need to communicate a lot with the real participants in the market, which is the most basic. Chat with consumers, channels, platforms, partners, supply chain vendors, and get real information from their mouths. The point of this job is to have to do a lot, because every market watcher has his bias, so you have to absorb it extensively to get the whole elephant's appearance.

Then you need to be a first-class questioner. Soon you'll find that the point is not to talk to them, but to ask good questions. Unfortunately, the ability to ask questions is not in our education, so it needs to be tempered. Don't be defeated by the initial setbacks, and back into your comfort zone-don't doubt it is the trap that most startups fall into. Please continue to communicate with people, and in the process of consciously hone their ability to ask questions.

Also remember that the market is not a static system, so the information you get today is likely to expire tomorrow. So the focus is on the ability to effectively access information, including understanding who is the key owner of the latest market information. By the time you pay a certain amount, you will find that you have more extensive market information than a lot of people. At this time, do not just harvest, but also timely to provide information related to friends.

Finally, the market is a huge, complex, and constantly changing system. Therefore, you will never be able to master it 100%. But to a certain extent, you can make quite accurate assumptions about it, and then use the actual product to verify these assumptions.

You'll be amazed at what sounds like such a cliché job that more than 90% of entrepreneurs can't do it. So, if you can overcome the instinct of wanting to make products at home and really go into the crowd and dig out the real facts about the market, you're probably already defeating most of your competitors.

Why are Silicon Valley's top investors, who are usually good serial entrepreneurs? This is the same as the reason for entrepreneurship, only to get rid of the network, the media mad transmission of the noise, to learn to question the old elder opinion of industry, to really in-depth understanding of an industry, several companies, may be able to see what people do not see, the market goddess of all ages. Good entrepreneur, I think so.

Another example of business model, many people imitate the "new generation of business model," the book provided by the canvas tools to scrutinize, seems to be the key to the Almighty. In fact, all good tools are the same, if you do not understand the limitations of use, the more powerful tools are more likely to mislead users to make poor conclusions, give two familiar management tools as an example:

The SWOT analysis that beginners like to use most. If you're planning a strategy for the next 3-5 years, it's likely to be blinded by the fact that the tool is "just for a quick diagnosis of short-term planning," not to mention that many people simply don't look at the s&w inside the enterprise and identify the external o&t, Just to copy the report of a certain research organization to do, and thus lose the meaning of diagnosis.

Gradually powerless analysis of the five forces. For example, the entrepreneurial competition is very fond of the Porter Five Force analysis, if you have not read the original works, do not understand a few basic assumptions, it is very easy to mislead users into the "competition is the only way out", "down the opponent = win the market" thinking, but the cooperation of the situation brought about by the effect is far greater than each other, "down the opponent" is no longer a guarantee of winning the market, because consumers have the ultimate option of "not buying".

To the Internet field, the problem that the continuous progress of science and technology brings is: if abruptly put the practice of business enterprise into "the new generation of business model" inside 9 house, affirmation tragedy. You'll find that some business models don't have the means to fill all the blanks. So the 9 elements should be just tools to help users analyze, not the basis for "creation and design." The value of the business model, the most powerful competitive advantage lies in "innovation", if every entrepreneur uses a unified model to "make" business model, then these so-called business model is probably the same as rubbish, nothing new.

So is the business model a completely confusing issue? Not necessarily. Tools can evolve over time, but the basic principles and problems are fixed. If you go back to the beginning of a wide variety of tools and theories, you will find that the so-called Business Model, in fact, is to answer the most fundamental question of a business:

"How on earth are you going to make money?" ”

And this fundamental problem can be understood in three simple sub questions:

Why: What kind of problem do you want to help users solve?

What: What products or services do you provide to solve such problems?

How: what is the source of revenue and cost structure to address user problems and provide product services?

It's easy to see that these three basic questions cover all the elements of the business model canvas, and even allow you to think about the nature of the business by jumping out of the 9 big elements frame. A lot of things have their own sayings, often make us dizzy don't know which one to believe? Instead of using a little of a smattering of management tools, think about how you're going to make money. "The starting point is to design a unique business model.

As for the financial forecasts that often appear at the end of BP, they become stereotyped. This work is simple and simple, the Excel form collation, the income and expenditure related items put a, fill in a few formulas, draw a few tables can be done. But before you can do these easy jobs, the items you enter in almost every Excel cell rely on a lot of data collection, even from the experience of the industry, to start a series of "seemingly reasonable" predictions. For example, you want to do the app, so how much CTR? How much should CPC, CPM and CPA be? How to calculate ARPU rationally? Then shove these things into the Excel table and knock on the keyboard, and the financial projections are done.

Unfortunately, these figures are bullshit, even if our actual operating conditions are lucky to meet the key figures in a certain line, but if we really want to do business, it is only to accelerate the demise of the figures on BP.

Why? In fact, the real problem is not that the figures we have obtained are precisely inaccurate, because for each business, the "key figures" for every business need are unique, and the so-called "best solution" and "standard answer" are not there at first. It's not going to work if you take it straight. Every company, every business is different, no two companies have the same situation, "key numbers" of course not exactly the same. The art of doing business is this, even if the scale, the business model is the same, but different operators, and upstream and downstream vendors of different relationships, these can not quantify the commercial characteristics, will eventually be quietly reflected in the results of financial figures.

Because in the field of business, there is no so-called standard answer, only reference answers. But the answer is no way to help a company survive, so the most reliable way is to open your business sensory radar, and constantly adjust, one after another dedicated to their own business model, the company's "key figures."

Some companies look at the amount of turnover, some cling to the bottom line of gross margin, some strict inventory, and some pay special attention to the ratio of accounts receivable conversion to cash ... In addition to finding the key indicators, we have to grasp the key indicators to achieve what standards to be qualified.

And if you want to really set up a sustainable business model, not to draw a few business model diagram, apply some management theory, run a few financial models can be done, really go down to try, from the failure of smart learning, until in the dark to catch a glimmer of opportunity.

Finally, in the absence of preconditions, how to choose the general direction. My view is to choose "Rich", this "rich" and "tuyere" is not a meaning.

Every age of human economic life has the most abundant resources of that era (for example, a century or two ago oil, now it is the web), and the driving force behind the economy is one entrepreneur after another to "waste" these "riches", making many of the past costly things cheaper because of these "waste". As for investors, his job is to identify "the fullness of the time" and then to find the "most wasteful industries & companies" investment.

Amazon, for example, reduces the cost of searching for retail products by wasting network bandwidth; Google also wastes the same resources that make it easier for you and me to find things that exist all over the world on the web; century Jiayuan, 58, worry-free recruitment, will help you reduce the opportunity to find another half, find a house, find a job cost ... There are many examples of entrepreneurship can be mentioned, but the great entrepreneurial concept of various times, although the application of "rich", "technology" is not the same, but are nothing more than to solve the "time", "cost", "energy" and other three aspects of the problem.

In the last 20 years, the biggest power "network" for the consumption side, is the continuous reduction of the network and the cost of peripheral products and services, so that new requirements can be released; The popularity of electric dealers, even in the last more than 10 years, has undermined the existing business model of traditional retailing, which allows consumers to obtain cheaper products or services. For the side of the supply side, the fast-falling costs make it easier for web developers to create products and services. Amazon's AWS, for example, is an important driver for reducing the cost of online entrepreneurs and boosting success rates. Today, we can see Dropbox, Pinterest and many of the world's network start-ups, and AWS has helped a lot, and many of the country's small and medium-sized entrepreneurs are heavily reliant on cloud services. And when these costs are removed, we can see the growing network ecology. When the fixed cost factor of the server is eliminated, we can see that the advantages of the large network companies are also removed, so we can see more start-ups, and as consumers we can enjoy better, faster and cheaper services. And the most "waste of rich" manufacturers, you can create huge wealth in the process.

No matter which direction you choose to sail, the end of the feast is to let you move forward with the greatest momentum.