How to turn ideas into business

The purpose of my writing this article is to summarize some of the industry rules that will improve the success rate and profitability of new ventures.

As a developer who has spent ten years watching the internet, focusing on startups, and now owns a profitable start-up, I must stress that the following are not all industry rules, and they don't necessarily apply to everyone.

I think the content will help you get a certain amount of money to launch the next big, risky project with a new venture. But please don't try to eat fat, obviously, Reddit and Facebook, which are already industry rules, are not what you want to do.

Rule 1: Commercialization

I know that's a bit of a nonsense, because it's not everyone's business to attract traffic to make money with advertising.

You have to sell something, otherwise the project is always a project, not a profitable "product", perhaps you will think that the Internet industry has so many VC companies focus on, a project can bring you a lot of money, so do not need to pay attention to profit points.

I do know so many people who have never sold anything to advertise and promote marketing for a living. But this is limited to developed countries and regions, and the investment is only a handful of the remaining companies, think about the Internet industry elsewhere (translator: for example, China), you can understand why I said so. The first thing you have to think about is how to make a profit unless you start with a lot of money.

Rule 2: Create a product that a customer can use to profit directly or indirectly

This is the extension of Rule 1, how do customers profit from your product? The two main ways are as follows:

Become a distributor of your products

Be a beneficiary of your product (for example, when your product is a Web design tool or SEO effectiveness analysis tool, or can replace some unnecessary labor)

Rule 3: Improve user experience and adhesion

Many people in Hacker news have sent their ideas up for identification, many of which are "good ideas", but not enough. A really good idea is this: when the idea is turned into a product into the market, the user will not be able to get away with it.

How do you do that?

In the form of demand-oriented design, what products can solve or mitigate the problems they encounter, make life simple, design what products, and make the product become indispensable-the customer leaves the product after the original problem will return, or new problems arise.

Rule 4: Improve the user's business model

After reading rule 3, you may feel that the train of thought is out of the way, so you have rule 4.

A simple way to make a product indispensable is to look at the business model of the potential user, which steps or procedures can be simplified, automated, or eliminated, and then help them improve.

For example, a codecademy reminder message, when a user registers longer than a certain length, but does not conduct any learning behavior, Codecademy sends an email alerting the user to learn to write code. In the absence of an automated solution, employees must manually retrieve user data and bulk mail, the consequences are obvious, this process will waste a lot of labor, greatly reduce the efficiency of the site. (The translator thinks this example is not appropriate, but enough image, more practical may not be easy to understand.) )

So, find the problem that is torturing the user, then provide the corresponding solution, the user taste the benefit will not hesitate to pay.

Rule 5: Streamline the sales process

Traditional sales need people to contact, including a lot of shaking hands, meetings, seminars and so on, as if compared to products, communication is the focus of the sales process. For example, car sales, buyers need to undergo a complex process, a lot of formalities to get the car.

The sales simplification I envision includes many aspects, such as online sales, a number of issues that hinder online sales processes, jet lag, means of payment, knowledge of the product, and so on, and you should devise solutions for these issues, such as hiring shifts, conducting product introductions, and so on.

Rule 6: Timely use of high technology

This is more complicated, and I think we should give an example to illustrate that--groupon company currently has tens of thousands of employees, because:

A large number of orders lead to a firm's "hard demand" for salespeople

A large number of orders led to the company's customer service personnel "hard demand"

Groupon is simply rough on a more demanding solution-hiring more people. It doesn't use any automated solution, so its balance sheet makes it feel like the entire company is in jeopardy.

The development of technology has provided the Internet industry with a number of options to reduce costs and workloads, which can be said to be half the success of the right approach.

Ps: To write here, I must point out that if you are designing an online medical record system, please read and adopt the advice of this article carefully.

Rule 7: Reduce reliance on other products or services

Take a forum-dependent product for example-

It's hard to build a forum.

It is very difficult to create a forum where users can be happy to speak.

Creating a forum that attracts a large number of active users is very, very difficult.

If your product trend is linked to the forum situation, you are subject to a lot of restrictions and you must ensure that the forum is in good working condition. And now many products are dependent on such other services, if unable to control these services, how can we guarantee the future of the product?

Rule 8: Build your product with familiar knowledge

Roll-Call, Youku, and potatoes are alive because of China's great internet situation, and it is almost impossible for us to create a company that beats YouTube or Basecamp. (This paragraph is the translator COS)

Entrepreneurs have different interests, origins and professional backgrounds, and these elements should be used. Planscope is a typical example, it is similar to the Basecamp function, but entrepreneurs because they feel that Basecamp does not meet their requirements, designed this convenient and transparent collaboration platform.

Rule 9: Confront competitors

This is not inconsistent with the previous, in the use of their expertise at the same time to observe competitors, they are reflected in the operation of your company mirror, market vane.

Competition.

Rule 10: Competition does not just include price

Low-priced dumping can cause damage to your company's reputation. Pricing should follow the 10x rule, if your product is priced at 99 USD/month, you should ensure that the product can bring customers a monthly value of 1000 dollars.

How can we create 10 times times the value of product pricing?:

Lower costs, now rental servers, storage and purchase bandwidth can be cheap, Basecamp Web site operating costs about 1% of total revenue of 37signals.

(Reference rule 4) to reduce costs for customers, if your service can replace the customer company's employees, each place will be able to save customers at least 1000 dollars/month of cost, customers will love you.

With a little bit of skill, when customers complain that 99 dollars per month is too expensive, you can say, "Treat my service like a 3.33-dollar ' employee"!

Last Words

The charm of the technology industry is that you can go your own way without fixing rules. The purpose of my writing is simply to provide some profitable advice to the "first venture", hoping that readers will choose their good.