Letters from high school students: the road to entrepreneurship, why we Fail

Several high school students, invested 100,000 yuan, adhere to 4 months, in a second-tier city, a vigorous creation of the field industry, what are the lessons?

People often say that the perfect life needs to accomplish two things, a desperate love and a walk on the trip. But I want to tell the readers of salt technology, in fact, this life, is still imperfect, because, you still lack of a vigorous entrepreneurial!

Although I am less than 20 years old, but the idea of entrepreneurship is always in my heart around, so in my high school, there has been the first Internet entrepreneurship attempt! Although it has been two years, but my O2O entrepreneurial experience, still vivid, whenever I think of always sigh unceasingly.

A complaint from my sister became my source of business

Ma Yun once said: there are complaints where there are business opportunities. And my O2O entrepreneurial inspiration, but also only from my sister's complaint. 2011 Midsummer Day, I accompany my sister in the hometown of Sichuan province Congzhou shopping, the sun baked under the store signs reflect the dazzling light, we big fellow dripping down in the street, there is a little bit of the sun is melting feeling.

At this time, the sister suddenly complained that: "The sun is so big, shopping and tired and hot, poor Oh!". I secretly replied: "You want to go shopping, and do not want to be baked by the sun, which has such a good thing?" unless you visit the city complex, and Congzhou such a small city, there is no such thing!

But the next word of my sister, opened my O2O entrepreneurial vision, she said: "If you can go shopping at home just fine." "Ah! It's a good idea, go shopping at home, maybe we can really achieve it." Back home that night, I began to think, "at home can go shopping," this, whether can use the Internet to achieve it?

After a sleepless night of excitement. The next morning, I called several like-minded students, and we had a whole day of discussion. Finally, we decided to try to use the website to virtual a city of shops.

Succinctly said, our project is to let a city of all businesses, in my website open shop, display their own goods, and the details of their stores published in the online shop, users through the Internet to buy goods, so that the realization of the home can go shopping. As for the deal, it still retains the traditional business model of face-to-face transactions.

Salt tech readers, you might say, this is no different from Taobao. Indeed, the rush to skim the project and Taobao really no difference. But in fact the biggest difference between this project and Taobao is regionalization. Taobao's coverage is the whole country, and even the outside of the shops, commodity trading depends on express, return goods is very inconvenient, and we only targeted at Congzhou this city.

E-commerce development to today, a large range of online shopping platform has been a lot, so we can only small areas, do fine, in order to survive. At the same time, our project is not only regionalization, but also does not support online payment, retaining the traditional business face-to-face trading model, the buyer's choice of risk reduction, the cost of the sale of the business has been reduced. This is the biggest difference with Taobao, but also I am determined to practice the momentum of the project.

We promote the idea that "face-to-face trading is safer". Online shopping, the biggest problem is fake and shoddy products too much, and even some online shopping platform, is the symbol of fake, for example: if I say you "wear a Taobao goods", you will be very unhappy with me, right? In fact, unless it's a security issue, it's a hassle to return.

And what do we do? We just put up the site, so that women shoppers to our website to go shopping, select and then to the offline entity shop to buy, so it will save time. And Congzhou is a county-level county, the scope of small, regional offline trading, very convenient.

At the same time, you can not only go shopping online, but also on the internet to try clothes. We also planned to develop another feature--3d fitting! Consumers only need to enter their own measurements, our site will automatically generate a 3D body model, you can choose a pair of clothes directly on this person. This function is our own thought out, there is no ready-made can use, do it ourselves.

First official, incoherent, shaking hands

Just do it! in the summer of 2011, I and a few students, through various means, together 100,000 yuan, began to start this project. The entire team of 5 people, including technical members and marketing members of each 2, the remaining 1 to do management.

We team up to do this project, also not a lot of ambition, is to make the project, not to achieve what life value, the purpose is to make everyone's life better.

Every household to do the investigation of the shop is too troublesome, so we think, can be from the trade and Industry Bureau to understand the age of some shop operators to determine their acceptance of the network. To deal with government officials, we are very disturbed, so we will be prepared the night before, and generally have to talk about two or three points, want to say to go to sleep.

The first time I went to the trade and Industry Bureau to find deputy Director, I was alone. I'm going to whisper to the salt tech readers that it was very, very nervous at the time, standing at his desk, my hands were shaking and I couldn't express what I wanted to say. My main task that day was to give him a brief introduction of our website, hoping to get their support, to create a feeling that I was a very motivated lad.

Because it's incoherent, so this time it's just a clear idea of what we want to do. Let us never think of is that the trade and Industry Bureau for our group of young men very much support. Then we went back to the details again and they gave us a lot of advice.

We've chosen at least three ways to promote it.

We are all young lads and energetic. After hours and nights of overtime, we took only half a month to make the site. In the test, a variety of good performance, in order to save the cost we choose to rent the server.

In the development phase of the site, we have regularly distributed leaflets to the city's businesses. It is worth mentioning that, although the dissemination of leaflets is an enduring way of publicity, but this time we have in the leaflets printed on the content of innovation.

We send out all the leaflets on our service information is not described, we are just constantly to say business and shop owners of high rents between the fierce contradictions, and constantly inspire businesses for high rent dissatisfaction, and hinted that businesses can choose some new ways to promote their own sales information.

In this way, we send a lot of days of leaflets, and every day is different. First arouse the merchant's dissatisfaction with the rent, and then tell them that to expand sales to make up for the rent, and we do now is to give you a no money promotion, you want?

At the same time, we have also selected 50 shops as our early promotion target, before the launch of the service to send them an invitation and detailed information on our services.

In addition, we have selected a number of other promotional models. For example: in the station to advertise, tell the first time to Congzhou people, can quickly understand Congzhou on our website. At that time our website also designed a function, that is to enter the user's street name, want to buy something our site can quickly find out where to buy recently.

In addition, the salt technology readers, we also selected a promotion method-in the Internet café to do promotion. For example, Internet cafes do not allow minors to enter, the entire desktop should be to remind minors to prevent the hint. Then, we will give these internet cafes to take money, to this ban minors into the hint, add a prefix of our website.

In the official online operation of the website that day, but also the first day of our project really started operation, we again distributed leaflets to the city, the finishing touches, formally introduced our service content. The site began to continue to accept the business, we recruited the marketing team also began to the large shops door-to-door invitation to the small and medium-sized shops to carry out many ways of invitation to settle in.

Our expectations are very low, that is, 100 stores in one months will be good. But in fact, our website online 10 hours, the successful invitation to 120 businesses to the site. Finally, our highest acceptable volume is 297. The so-called settled, is the merchant on our website has its own page, put the product up. These 297 shops, mostly women's clothing and building materials, these two accounted for the big head, ranked third is catering.

Brilliance was short-lived, and after four months we failed

In fact, the shops are settled quickly because, we pave for their special many (for merchants do a tutorial), we also do search engine optimization in Baidu. In other words, you Baidu search Congzhou, you will be able to see our website, this is very attractive to the shops. There are more than 10 of corporate feedback, after settling into our website, they have become more and more frequently consulted.

We wanted to make money by advertising. The homepage of our website, there are a lot of boutique advertising bit, this can be sold. Moreover, if the shop wants to put its own shop to the home page display, also need to give money. Large enterprises can also go to our website to put ads, to do their own publicity. Salt Tech readers, that's all we had at the time.

In order to attract advertising, we also went to the city of two industrial zones, because the enterprises there need to attract the attention of local downstream enterprises, so there are several companies in our advertising. We just wanted to get back a little bit. So the charge is very low, the largest advertising is only 500 yuan a day, all advertising revenue is about 20,000 yuan. and choose to pay their store to the home page of the shop is not much, also more than 40 bar.

However, the problem ensued, and after the site, we encountered at least two major problems:

One, want to do too many things, too miscellaneous. At first we just wanted to do a shopping site for clothes, but then we actually did everything. As long as the shops are selling things, we accept them. We do not do very few things, drugs do not do, because the state stipulates that the drug must apply for qualification; Cooked food does not do, such as duck necks, because most deli shops do not have sanitary permits. In addition to these two, we are really doing everything, and doing everything, in fact, will do nothing bad.

Second, the Web page is too complicated for the merchant. From our point of view, the merchant uploads several pictures, fills in the number is very simple matter, but is still complex for them. First of all, they are two or more than 30 years old, although they all use computers, but it is difficult for them to operate a system. So at that time hired more than 10 people, to help them shelves products, but the cost of all of a sudden went up. This is a big burden. Because we are playing the brand is free, so we can not reach the merchants to ask for money, and this adds to our burden.

Whether or not to stop, at that time we were very entangled, because this thing we eight were divided into two factions, this is our cooperation is the only unpleasant. I advocate the abolition, because the project is in the state of burning money, the return of funds is too slow, late input will be more and more. If you continue, the next promotion is to Congzhou the most bustling street Billboard pack down, so do the words can work capital is very few.

The other is to be a little more capital to drag away. They only see cash flowing in, but they don't see cash flowing in. But overall in the loss. If we're going to drag it off, I don't think we have 500,000. And there is a technical staff to go to Japan to study, he went to find technical people have a high cost.

Another reason is that the business is weak, the new few, due to the problem of web design. As long as there is a new store, the old shop will be squeezed home, the consumer came to the point half a day to see their stores, businessmen feel very troublesome, very not cost-effective, as time passes, people do not want to come to the settled. Business more one-sided understanding of the "free", they feel that they should immediately have a return, I think this is actually a problem of age, they can not understand the Internet information is needed process.

In this way, due to a variety of reasons, the number of businesses settled in fewer and less, the project in the last 4 months after the announcement of failure, the site also offline.

Five lessons I've summed up

For the failure of the project, I summarize the following five points:

The city is small in size. We choose to start a business in a county-level county, the city has 700,000 people, 86% of the population distribution in various townships, urban population less than 100,000, that is, the population base to determine the size of the business, the population is too small, restricting the business size of businesses to expand. In other words, the population is less, the sales information publicity is so good that only a little people to understand. So, salt technology readers, if you want to do a similar venture, we must first investigate the good market.

Second, the development of the city limits the development of this project. Although we say that the Internet and computers have entered every household, the real sense of the internet has not yet entered everyone's subconscious. The lag in urban development has led the city's people to understand the usefulness of the Internet is not clear enough. This point again when we carry out door-to-door promotion when there is a clear embodiment. No matter how our promoter interprets the image, many businesses just can't understand the benefits of the project.

Third, the Prophase Market survey and data analysis is not in place. We are in the opening of the current market research, using the form of questionnaires, feedback back to the information, we see the vast majority of businesses are willing to accept the new way of promotion. But really because we do not understand the data analysis, there is no effective screening of feedback information, do not correctly distinguish between the real demand and false demand. At the same time, some of our data also come from some relevant departments, the relevant departments of the data is, after all, timeliness, may not represent our time at the point of the actual situation.

Iv. experience and executive power are insufficient. In the case of no experience at all, we have a few small partners all by their usual accumulation and their own planning to lead the business, which also laid the foreshadowing of failure. At the same time in some details, such as business feedback information tracking and analysis, we do not perfect.

The estimate of the merchant is too high. This should be a common problem for many entrepreneurs, simple is that each do Taobao think there will be a lot of people to shop for their own things. Startups fail to realise that overly optimistic estimates are fatal for startups.

Salt technology readers, in fact, everyone wants to have a vigorous and successful start-up, but the vast majority of entrepreneurship is because of impulse. So, before starting a business, we must constantly ask ourselves: Am I really ready? Is there any room for improvement in this project? Remember Kai-Fu Lee said a word: young people should first participate in entrepreneurship, and then lead the business. I would like to share this with all the entrepreneurs who are reading the Salt science articles or the friends who are ready to start a business.