Zhou: Business model is not a money-making model venture to find the target user

I have participated in many entrepreneurial competitions, have seen a lot of passionate entrepreneurs, on the first talk about their business model, a business model is the next three years to make how much money.

In fact, these entrepreneurs do not understand what the business model is, thinking that business model is the way to make money.

They do not know that the core of a business model is the product, the essence is through the product to create value for the user.

Business model also includes positioning, looking for the most demanding user groups, with smart promotion methods to contact these users, in contact with the process of continuous product polishing, and so you have a huge user base, is sure to make money.

However, if you are anxious to make money, I am sorry, if you are lucky, you may make a small profit, and the bad luck will come to a dead end.

What is a business model? In fact, the business model is not a money-making model, it contains at least four aspects: product model, user mode, promotion mode, the last is the income model, is how to make money.

In a word, the business model is what kind of products you can provide, what kind of users to create value, and in the process of creating user value, how to obtain business value.

The first is the product model, which is what kind of product you provide.

I think the company that really can be big in the Internet is a product-driven company. All business models are built on the basis of a product model. Without the product and the user's thinking, the company can not be big, can't go far.

所以，你提供的产品是什么?能为用户创造什么样的价值?你的产品解决了哪一类用户的什么问题?你的产品能不能把贵的变成便宜的，甚至是免费的?能不能把复杂的变成简单的?我认为，这是任何一个创业者在回答商业模式的时候， The first thing to consider.

Second, in the product model, but also to speak of user mode, that is to say, as a start-up, you must find the product needs the most strong target users.

If you say your product is a universal product, is a universal product, it means you have not been seriously thinking.

For example, the recent Nasdaq-listed yy is a voice chat tool that was initially targeted at game unions. These people want to play games, to fight, to rush to operate the keyboard and mouse, there is no time to type.

Moreover, the game in the communication is not one-on-one chat, is a lot of team collaboration. Therefore, YY developed this kind of voice chat tool to help these game union people, these people are the product feel the strongest, the demand of the most powerful group of users.

Another example is UC Mobile browser, the original UC browser is a WAP browser, when the mobile phone traffic is very expensive, slow speed, high tariffs, for the use of WAP Internet users, traffic is the pain in their hearts.

UC Browser mainly for this part of the people, not only to solve these people's Internet browsing problems, but also to solve the problem of saving the flow of the Internet, this is the UC browser long-term focus of the demand, and thus established a reputation. This is user mode, UC Browser is a good case.

The third is the promotion model, which means that you find a way to reach your target audience.

In China, never believe "the wine is not afraid of the alley deep." If only by natural word-of-mouth, even if the product is done well, has not touched the majority of target users, it may be first by the internet giant stare. Others imitate a bundle, your years of painstaking efforts even in vain.

However, many people think about spending money when it comes to promotion, but the promotion of spending a lot of money is not necessarily a good model. Your product is good, but no money to promote, you may force yourself to come up with many methods, many companies in the promotion mode of innovation are forced out.

Once there is financing, more money, companies tend to throw money directly to do the promotion, this time even if the pig to do the marketing director, as long as enough money to him, he can think of taking money to brush the subway, bus, brush signs ads, can also hit a few bubbles out of the market.

But I think this is not called promotional mode, the real promotion model is based on your user base, according to your products, to design the appropriate promotional methods.

Another problem is that the money-throwing campaign or in large companies, there are enough promotional resources to support, often bring wrong judgments, people have the illusion that "a push on the spirit", so that no longer study user needs, no longer focus on product experience, in fact, this is the most dangerous.

Judgment is not a real promotion, the simplest standard is to promote the resources to withdraw, no longer hit the money, to see the product user is not down. If the user volume suddenly fell down, this means that the promotion is ineffective, the product must have problems.

You and the team will have a very big challenge if you do not adjust the product at this time. The real promotion is the continuous improvement and promotion of the products. In the process of promotion, you have to study the market, dealing with the target users, understand the real needs of users, understand the user's use of products encountered confusion and problems, and then feedback to the product to improve, and thus constantly adjust and improve.

In this way, even if the promotion did not achieve the desired results, but through the promotion, you found the product of the problem, you understand the real user needs, you found a new user base, these gains far more than the simple installation of products to be more valuable.

The final step is the revenue model, which is to obtain a huge user base through the product, and consider how to get the income under this premise.

In fact, the revenue model in the business plan is fundamentally unreliable, and if a start-up company does, it will find that the revenue model of the company is often quite different from the design of the business plan. In the company's development process, the income model is often constantly adjusted, sometimes really depends on luck.

For example, Google's two founders of genius to do search engines, for several years can not find a way to make money, only to Yahoo such as a portal to provide search technology services to make a point of living money. This time, the sky fell down overture this big pie.

What is Overture? It is the originator of the search engine pay-for-click Model, overture specifically for advertisers to provide paid-for-click Services. If you think of Google as the media, then Overture is a fine advertising agency company.

Then, Yahoo bought Overture, integrated into Yahoo search, Google's AdWords borrowed from the overture pay-click Mode, the formation of the search engine business model. So, for entrepreneurs, talking about income models, talking about how to make money, is the most unreliable and meaningless thing.

When it comes to overture, I sometimes think that all the search engines in the world use the paid-for-click advertising model it creates, but overture can't grow up to be a scale company and finally fall into the trap of being acquired (of course, for investors, Overture is the best option for Yahoo's takeover. )。

The reason is that the paid-click mode created by Overture has indeed created commercial value for advertisers, but as a parasitic search engine enterprise, Overture has not created value for users. Instead, Google combines the search engine's user value with the Overture Pay-per-click Model.

So, in the Internet, if the entrepreneur is ambitious, not thinking about making a few pennies, then he must know what the nature of the business model is, but also need to learn from Google's story: No user value, there is no commercial value.