Reflection after the failure of entrepreneurship: avoid premature production

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In this context, I would like to thank all the friends who have been concerned, supported, helped and encouraged me and even guests over the past 22 months.

On the August 25 of 2013, I was packing up the rest of the clutter in our office with three partners from the customer team. Partner J sits on the floor and says, "This is my third startup failure, okay?" In fact, he means, in November 2012, he was responsible for shutting down his office in Beijing's east Quad, selling all the furniture and office supplies, and packing and withdrawing; in February 2013, he once again cleaned up our once large office with a team of even half of the staff who had just cut back (the one with all the big blackboard walls). , pack up and get ready to withdraw. This is his third time. Throwing things, packing, handling, carrying countless hours of overtime in the night space an empty moment. And the company is about to turn from a business to a part-time project run by interested people.

People always want to cover their failures. For their own reputation or image, want to be a legend or better. This is why we rarely read in the mass media the vivid, detailed, sincere entrepreneurial failure story.

On the contrary, the Hollywood-style reverse story, the success stories of the "Brick home interpretation" every day, like a virus on the same wave and wave in our micro-bo, micro-faith in the flow of information. But as Michael Lewis in his graduation speech in Princeton in 2013, winners always overestimate their decisions, seriously underestimating the importance of luck.

This creates an unprecedented illusion of social media amplification. Although the winners are like the protagonist of the disaster movie, each one of them lies behind 999 bit, but the media is like a deceptive camera, it makes it hard for me to feel the disparity. The more frightening illusion is that, looking at these stories of success, people feel that they can be invincible as long as they have diligence, cleverness, perseverance, willpower, and some good inspiration. This "ignorance of optimism" creates a waste of many talents and productivity.

So I decided to do something different.

Although even the guests have had some exciting moments, I just want to share with you the details of at least 100 big and small mistakes I have made over the past two years, and how they led to the failure. From "ignorant optimism" to "informed pessimism" to "informed optimism", these mistakes are the greatest gains of my wonderful experience.

Forget which wise man once said that success is simple-you just don't make the most important mistakes at every stage. I like this sentence very much. It is hard to hear the truth and sincerity in this time when the successful tutor is flying in the sky. Let's just say that "meditating 15 minutes a day" is a good idea for an entrepreneur, but Bezos is clearly not creating the Amazon Empire for 15 minutes of meditation (even if it comes from Bezos). To make things worse, the "140-word success secret" we received day after day is almost endless, and it's hard for an ordinary person to do them at the same time.

Instead, it is much higher to avoid 1000 roadblocks on the way to creating something than to meet 1000 "success conditions" at the same time. Success is always behind the butterfly effect as unpredictable reasons, but failure is because so Chibai wrong. So I want to put aside those successful cases and share only 100 or so mistakes that have caused the failure.

More importantly, my goal is to share these experiences and lessons with every single person, not as an entrepreneur in the traditional sense. Because you're going to be using them when you're reading this--after you get to know the startup thing.

Can you start a business? Look at yourself in the mirror. In fact, any student, a young white-collar worker who has a daily job, a pregnant woman at home, a middle-aged person who wants to start over, or even an elderly person who has retired, can take some time out of their lives to operas and play games to create something and derive benefits from it. This is the beginning of entrepreneurship. Don't think about whether you can make it big and powerful, it's a rookie mistake. And entrepreneurship is not what many people think (or the media is keen to report) that requires huge costs. If you're just starting a business, and you feel like you're spending a lot of money, you're probably making another rookie mistake.

The coolest part is coming--creating something (Hack something) is the best street lamp in life. Paul Graham, the Great God, once wrote such a passage in his log "The Power of the Edge" (marginal):

If I could go back to my age when I was more than 20 years old, I would tell myself to do something more: create something together. I spent a lot of time thinking and worrying about what I should do, like many of my peers, and I spent a little time trying to create something. Now looking back, I should spend less time worrying and spending more time creating things. When you don't know what to do, do something.

Many people have asked me how to find what I want to do, my answer is: do something (hack something). If you don't realize it, there's a lot of free open resources on the Internet today, and every single person can easily use it on the ground. They make it easier and cheaper for a person to start a business than ever before.

So, I just want to see people in this article do one thing: try to create something.

This will open a door to your life, bringing new opportunities and visions to make you know who you are. And if you make a lot of mistakes (almost inevitably) in the process, acknowledge them from your heart, summarize them, share them in good faith, and learn to enjoy it. This is the only way to achieve "informed optimism".

Finally, I would like to thank all of my friends who have been concerned, supported, helped and encouraged me and even guests over the past 22 months. I would also like to thank all of you for criticizing and spitting out the friends of me and even the guests who have made me grow up and have the courage to share my mistakes with everyone else (look forward to seeing the one you want to spit out). We will continue to operate the company and keep thinking about how to get more people involved. And like you, my own hack something's journey has just begun. Who knows what will happen in the future?

The last time I walked into the subway bookstore and saw a successful memoir lined up on the bestseller shelves, I was thinking that there should be more people in the future who wrote such thick books about mistakes. Fewer people hide their mistakes, and less cynical people say, "This is the world, don't be childish," after a failure. So that the world can hope to be better. The success of learning tired, we need more positive energy failure to learn: More to do something, more optimistic to fail several times and grow from it.

Because we can't eat fat, we have to have a bento.

The first Bento has been released at the same time-"Getting started wrong one: premature production"

The following is the full text:

Even the first idea is to do a "different experience" of the trading market. In other words, is an offline experience consumption of Taobao. From the first day, I hope the team can develop a prototype product as soon as possible. After doing market research, writing business plans, and finishing the first batch of offline partners, I thought that developing a prototype product was one of the first prerequisites for this project, so it ultimately led to a huge limitation on the speed at which programmers developed prototypes.

And time is exactly the biggest cost of starting a business.

People who have heard of "lean Entrepreneurship" (Lean startup) know the idea of minimizing the viability of the product (MVP, minimal viable product)-testing the market's response with a product that minimizes the core requirements. The core principle behind the MVP is to reduce the time cost. Still, I have mistakenly thought that MVP still needs to develop a prototype product.

The fact is that in order to bring a project to market, it is not a prerequisite or even a necessary condition to develop a product for yourself. A product is simply a tool that turns an idea into a structured, automated service. But before you turn your ideas into automated services, what you should do is to first make sure that your ideas are workable, by looking for product-market fit. And then turn the idea into a universal automation service by developing the product.

In other words, before you decide to develop an automatic vending machine to sell drinks in the subway, please stand in the subway for one weeks to see if anyone is paying. The truth sounds simple, but myself, I've seen too many entrepreneurs turn these two steps upside down.

Is it feasible to test the product before developing the product? And in most cases, it's doable. There are so many ways to achieve this. One of the great things about this time is that there are too many open resources for our common people to use. Build a micro-blog, build a micro-letter group, build a forum (watercress Group/Baidu Bar), open a Taobao shop, build a template based Web site-the five most popular tools can achieve 80% product creativity.

If you re doing a service market such as a customer, Weibo + micro-letter + Taobao is enough to meet 90% of the function. But let's give two examples of other areas.

Suppose you want to sell high-end sexy underwear over the internet. You should not develop a Web site on your own (although you may think the high-end synonym is to have your own website)-You should open a Taobao shop first. Although you may think that Taobao is not high-end, many people in Taobao successfully do a customer price of more than 50,000 of the merchandise business. But considering opening a Taobao shop for a few days, and time is the biggest cost, you should not even open Taobao shop first. You should build a microblog (10 minutes) to post pictures and information about the erotic underwear you want to sell. Build a micro-signal (10 minutes) to add people who are interested in you as friends and build your core customer management system (CRM) through micro-letters. Find two or three more channels (online or offline) full of targeted users to spread this micro-blog and micro-letter message to study the market's response.

Similarly, suppose you want to do an online education community on the Internet in a building area. You shouldn't have developed a community site with a video function, or at least three months of being consumed. You only need watercress Group/Baidu Post Bar/discuz Forum + Youku. I think you know what I mean. Don ' t go for fancy points. maximally Fancy isn't why we build a startup.

Remember, the most important thing is what you do, not whether you develop a product independently.