How to learn to start a business at the age of 23 and sell it to make a lot of money

Intermediary transaction SEO diagnosis Taobao guest Cloud host technology Hall

Source: Round Review

Now Dan shipper, who is on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, knows he wants to build a real software company with customers who are willing to pay and stable performance. Last month's high light was vividly visible: graduating from school, and selling the company's Firefly (dorm Reactiveness Fund's first company) to Pegasystems, bringing in millions of dollars in cash.

No one is surprised that shipper can have today's achievements. He was a child prodigy when he was a boy, and has been favored by many companies when he was a sophomore. But he did not accept those positions and chose to stay at school. ' I haven't finished my studies yet, ' he said. Now, having experienced his first company from scratch to leaving it, shipper not only gained a degree, but also had a sense of what startups and young businesses needed most in growing up.

In an exclusive interview with First Round Review, shipper shared the three biggest strategies for himself and Firefly, and how to succeed in his first venture.

1. Spend more time understanding failure or success

The total income of the first 10 months of Firefly was 11,000 dollars. When shipper and his co-founder Justin Meltzer (right on the cover) just solved a big technical problem with the company-without the help of other software that allows two people to browse the same page simultaneously-the company's sales are not ideal. ' It might also be a reasonable decision at that time, shipper said.

"Because the information available is very limited, people tend to stare at the existing message to come to a conclusion." "For example, you talk to someone who loves your product very much, and when the conversation is over you will be filled with a blueprint for the product, and you will think I must make it the most successful work ever." In another perspective, you see the product related to the bad speech, feeling that they have the lowest point in life, and then began to look into the dead, asked why they have to hit the wall. In fact, your company's development prospects will not be affected much by the above-mentioned events that have made your mood fluctuate.

Humans are not very good at dealing with things that are uncertain, so people's minds tend to tilt toward a side that looks more trustworthy. If you happen to know Firefly's first 10 months of bad results, you'll find it hard to keep the company going. But according to shipper, "in fact, the initial poor performance helped us a lot." Once you know what you're going to decide, it means you can find the solution. ”

Also, think about what you've learned-not just the bad numbers on the surface.

"Instead of searching every day who says what, or how many people sign up for a website, think about summarizing existing data." "So maybe your goal is to add 1000 new subscribers per month, and don't think this is going to happen based on previous registrations," shipper said. Instead, think about the bad registration data of the past few months that explain what the user's psychology is, how to solve these problems, and how to get the company's services into people's lives and work. ”

For Firefly, shipper and Meltzer have struggled to learn everything that matters to the customer service industry--because the service industry is the main audience for their products. The secret is to study the latest 10 months of data to determine whether the company needs to change its business. Just look at the Firefly, they did not deviate from the initial goal, but in the development process made a little debugging. It also allows them to close large businesses to avoid future gains.

"When you're focused on customer data, you start thinking about whether your company's existing business really fits people's lives and whether it really helps people who have purchased your product." "This is the best way to regulate psychology," says Shipper. Because studying your client mentality is more directly effective than caring for monthly reports that usually lag behind. ”

Firmness is a quality that many entrepreneurs recognize. You want to be determined to find the market positioning of the product. You are trying to build your product diligently. If you want to succeed, you will never stop-you must strive for your goals every moment. Of course, shipper agreed to make people become efficient, but also very easy to hit the wrong chicken blood lead into the lost, unable to know back.

"Just being firm is not enough, so it's easy to get into the operational conditions loop." It is possible that you have tasted the sweetness of a network event, and you feel you can do it over and over again to achieve a goal. Even if it's not directly related to the company's macro goals. ”

So you have to get to know new ideas every day.

"In addition to the need for a strong belief, it is best to maintain a passionate morale." ”

As a small, self-sufficient start-up, Firefly every step of the company to consider whether the company can afford the time and money costs of the next decision. Small companies on the road to success there is no other way, can only give themselves to cheer themselves. Shipper said that this is also a few people they find suitable for the company's development direction of the magic weapon. "We put our eyes on the customers and try to sell them to them," he said. There was a time when all the people in the company did it. The best way to know if customers will buy your products is to sell them face-to-face. ”

The essence of the spirit will make people humble. And sometimes at the very beginning of the stage, modesty is the best selling tool.

"Many entrepreneurs--especially young entrepreneurs--don't know much about the next industry when they enter an industry. When we started doing Firefly, we were not very familiar with the customer service industry, but since we have to do firefly we have to get to know the industry. If you want to come up with a good sales strategy, you have to invest time and energy to collect information about the industry. "In the early days, shipper and Meltzer actively collected customer information by dialing sales calls. There is no way to implement a sales strategy after the traditional collection of information from all parties and comprehensive information. "We do a lot of things, but we don't actually reach our potential users with the information," he said. After this we have to think about what is the wrong step, to avoid the next one again. ”

"Getting out of the office and being face-to-face with your clients is the best way to get information." ”

"Early startups don't work if they want to rely on existing information to summarize and generalize." You can't just follow the footsteps of the past, the future of the project will not 1:1 follow the rules of the past development. The rule of this thing, it is found to apply to many industries, but the entrepreneurial line is absolutely no template to rely on. If the firefly is simplified by law it will become ' the company's first three months to make 1000 knives, so its team should be packed home. ' You have to understand why they've only made 1000 of dollars over the past few months, to be able to tell if the company isn't making a profit because the business is not in the right direction or for another reason. Sometimes the managers of startups don't know what to do, in part because the part of our brain that is responsible for emotions is using general rules to determine what we should do. ”

In the theory of evolutionary biology, one of them is called discontinuous equilibrium theory. The theory explains that in biological evolution, there is little change in the Millennium years, unless you experience millions of grades. The sudden upheaval is not because of a catastrophe or a dramatic change in the environment. All of a sudden, the evolutionary speed of biology suddenly increases to the highest point.

"In the early stages of start-up, the process was particularly similar to the theory of biological evolution." One day a month you start a business, work hard, and then get the investment or have a big customer orders or with your products related to a large story, so you enter the next stage. Then something happens and you suddenly find that everything is different. The problem is that, usually, people can't predict when this big event will happen, and it's impossible to determine whether the big change is real. So you can only work day after day. Because you can't predict what's going to happen with your previous trajectory. Take DuckDuckGo example, DuckDuckGo in its official website has the public DuckDuckGo daily search query chart. DDG was founded in 2008 as a search engine company, its slogan is not to track the user's search behavior. The NSA surveillance scandal was disclosed around July last year, when DDG's average daily search volume turned nearly twice-fold. ”

From the firefly we can learn that for a long time shipper and Meltzer have been aggressively changing the direction of the company's operations. Nor do they have a clear idea of which business needs to be abandoned and which business is worth sticking to. "If you try to sell a product to a larger organization, you will find that they have a lot of layers and sell something to a considerable number of people," shipper said. Basically you just wait, wait, wait, it's like crossing a road and waiting for the green light at every intersection before you get to the end of the road. The process of doing business with a big company is long. ”

"There was a cooperation that we had already pressed on all the staff, and suddenly the company said that they had to reconsider their cooperation." What's more, other companies simply broke up with us. We didn't even know why, and no one came forward to explain to us. Obviously, in most cases, big companies are less willing to work with startups. So they will want to know the attitude of the start-up companies, whether they are sincere enough to do this business, whether they can guarantee the quality of their services. The only thing we can do is to stand in front of the company and attract everyone who passes by to persuade them to use our new product. Finally, Firefly alive.

It's not that every start-up company should seize the last straw. Although no one knows the result, no one wants to be defeated so soon. "The best way is to solve the inconsistency between what's going on and what's expected." Are they really not experiencing these problems and really don't need the services you sell? Can you make sure your products can help others, and can provide perfect service for every single transaction? ' You have to really ask yourself, ' said shipper. As long as you give yourself enough time to experience failure and savor success, many things will become different.

2, starting at the beginning is three words: Selling products

The previous company is the first to have their own satisfaction with the product, and then began to sell around the product. Firefly not. Firefly started selling before the product function was fully built. It turns out that this is one of the smartest decisions the company makes. "We made a lot of deals by making phone calls, and we did a lot of telemarketing and emails, and it was annoying, of course," he said. But from a research standpoint, this is much better than buying a keyword. Shipper said, "many people told me that to test the feasibility of a creative, as long as the online a homepage, buy a few keywords, and then look at the number of clicks on it." This is by no means a good idea unless you have quite a lot of experience buying keywords. It takes a lot of time and effort to do a good job in the online market. Therefore, most people are likely to buy some keywords that no one will click on, or to attract people to the homepage, as a result of the site has no real material content, the customer will immediately turn off the Web page. Obviously, this group of customers just lost. Clearly the key word to buy wrong, advertising copy failed, but no one knows why. ”

One of the unique feats of Firefly team success--small ways can be a big gain.

"Our company already has the technology, we know the market position of the company, we are the most help in which industry-everything is all right." So we started trying to get into that industry. ”

Shipper and Meltzer are starting to look to companies that already have online customer service chat plug-ins. This type of plug-in pops up the dialog box when the browser user opens the page. They found that providing online customer service, if you can share the browser screen to indicate specific problems, can help the customer service company to further improve customer service quality. They made a list of companies that had installed customer service chat system Plug-ins, and then sent an e-mail to all the companies saying whether they were interested in providing screen sharing firefly.

"We've also done another thing, and we've been looking for people who have customer support or customer service experience in these companies to talk to them." They came out of the original intention is 100% pure chat, because we want to the product can do all the said to them. But actually, we'd rather listen to them. In the chat process, we hope that they can have more statements. They didn't understand where they were, or when they were demonstrating the product, they didn't know which step they were going to do, and they asked the most questions about what they were doing. The product is the medium that we obtain the outside information, through using the product we can know how can improve the product experience better. ”

Even though Firefly is still being perfected, shipper and Meltzer have been able to use it to bring their early customers. They say to customers, Firefly is designed to enhance the customer's life and work experience. They are responsible for each client's consulting results.

"You don't know what you're going to do until you sell the product successfully." ”

Of course, the sales strategy from the start is only useful when you're serious about product feedback. Any feedback you receive will need to be immediately reflected in the product function. Shipper and Meltzer Most value email responses and face-to-face chat materials. This is a feedback loop which brings together the customer feedback, can bring the most real and shocking change to the company, let Firefly become a real software company.

When asked about how Firefly was able to achieve a simultaneous growth in product experience and sales performance as a small team, shipper said that not only did everyone in his team understand the economy, but also the plenary programming. It sounds as if you have to invincible five Almighty to work at a start-up. But the more you know, the more likely it is to convince customers to use the company's products. In addition, the message to the customer can be more timely. "Everyone knows what the company is doing, why it is doing it, and it's easier to make everyone feel more at heart," he said. We do sales during the day, and we write code together at night. "In the initial stages of start-up, this strategy is quite practical.

' It's clear that the feedback from the product is not necessarily all about improving product services, shipper said. Their previous strategy also helped their sales plan. "We did go to every company that used the online customer service chat system to sell products, but in the process we found that most of these companies were small companies," he said. It was then that we realized that even if all these companies registered Firefly services, there would probably not be many orders. After we talked to these small companies, the company decided to sell the products directly to companies selling online customer service chat systems to these small companies. In contrast to these small companies, companies that sell online customer service chat systems are bigger, more profitable, and more competitive. "During the investigation, Firefly's team found that customer service chat modules were fairly fragmented in the market, with as many as 60 companies selling almost identical features. In such a market environment, Firefly's collaborative browsing function is that it can stand out the magic weapon.

This is the opportunity for Firefly to look forward to fame and noise. Since then, the company has been moving in the direction of its current development: An application Programming interface model--whatever the purpose, allows everyone to use Firefly code on their own platforms. Strictly speaking, Firefly no longer belongs to the company that provides customer support. "Based on our software, you can create any kind of collaborative application." "For example, a financial advisor can browse the same online portfolio as his clients without having to share the information on the screen," says Shipper. We have today's results because we found out that instead of selling the company's services to a company that uses the service, we might as well sell it to the company that sells it. ”

3, as far as possible to make the company small and fine

"It is not advisable to make the company bigger and less necessary," he said. Small companies have the advantage of small companies. Shipper said, "in small companies, you can fully understand your industry and your customers, but also serious research products in the future direction of development." You have plenty of time to focus on product technology, which is the cornerstone of a company's success. Eager to expand the scope of business companies, managers are often also foggy and can not down-to-earth entrepreneurship. ”

Although the small company has enough morale, but it always makes people feel that the capital is insufficient, casually will collapse. Shipper's advice is to firmly grasp the small company's savvy and morale can actually grasp the direction of the company's development. If you're just a small fish in a big pond, you can save yourself a lot of trouble, and even save yourself some of the trouble of starting a start-up in the medium term (security issues, understaffed, external pressure from investors). "Your freedom will be greater when dealing with company things." And you can keep the right to finance and invest. ”

Shipper said it was his personal advice. Shipper control of Firefly as he controls his life-simplicity first; All information must be in his own hands;

"It's hard to refuse a lot of money to be delivered to your doorstep," he said. But I have been asking myself and asking my team: if we really get so much money, what can we do with it? Our real bottleneck is not that it's more money or less. The dilemma for our company is that we haven't found a really useful marketing strategy yet. How can we effectively answer questions for our users? These are the problems we need to solve. "A lot of managers are stuck in a vicious circle: they think that they have more employees and they have more time to work together, so the company can achieve more goals," shipper said. But they forget that hiring more people means they need to spend more time recruiting and equipping more equipment. Not to mention they're busy raising money to pay for all their employees. ”

If you believe the early bright notes and the investor's wonderful commitment to the development of the company, it will really make the rapid growth of start-up companies into a dream. Shipper said: "If you are looking for entrepreneurial goals at the beginning of the stage, analysis, research, strategy, you will need a small team to fight together." There is no money-related concern when working with the team. When I found out, I stopped thinking about money. ”

One of the first problems that a start-up company can make is to look for venture capital and give someone a grand wish that they won't be able to achieve in a short time. "I think every startup has a point at which to decide whether or not to expand the size of the company, or decide to keep the company going at its own pace." Many people think this is the day when they started designing the company's products. But I think the opportunity in your real sense to know more about your company that day, and the arrival of this day is very long. ”

"Even if you didn't mean it, you would have overpaid." ”

"The prevailing view is that you should raise more money than expected, and I agree that this is true," he said. "But it only works when you have a lot of confidence that" money can boost your company's growth "--and that's when the company must be on the right track, and you just need more money to make a quick move for the company. In fact, most companies are not in this situation. "When you don't have that confidence, the less money the company spends, the better." "To be honest, most of the products that have been raised in the early days are 50,000 dollars," he said. ”

If you can't raise money in a few rounds of big financing, you'll be willing to spend more time thinking about what kind of investor and advisor you want to work with. For shipper, such a period of time, let him through the mail and occasional face-to-face conversation more in-depth understanding of customer needs. So he knew who would be interested in Firefly. "You need people who can communicate with themselves, they are the people who really know the market, they know things about the company and the industry." You need people who can work together for long periods of time, and they will help you succeed without wasting your hours on trifles. ”

Coincidentally, Firefly's emphasis on small but refined strategies also attracts employees of the same type as the company. "When you don't raise money, close the door and do your own thing, you don't talk outside." Honesty is an obsession that must be echoed. Of course, the company is likely to expand its size. But we won't speak out, we'll hire you, and then let you work harder. Because you love the atmosphere of the company, you have to work here. And you're willing to be a part of the company's self-sufficiency, and not be afraid to retreat. ”

All of the elements added together make Firefly a takeover target for big companies, Shipper said. Starting from the beginning of the sales strategy, to early performance failure also did not shrink, Firefly products finally ushered in their own moment. Customer service companies are beginning to add collaborative browsing capabilities to their systems.

"More importantly, I think we give ourselves a lot of leeway to choose the future business." "You can't sell your company without a buyer," he said. I think Firefly has been running for so long in our own minds, and now it has found the most suitable buyer. ”