It is good to have passion and confidence, but starting a business cannot be an impulse without rational thinking. Before starting a business, I think there are several key things to think about.
Ask the initial heart
We should think clearly about what is the purpose of our business and why we should start a business.
In enterprises, the motivation for many technology entrepreneurs to embark on the road of entrepreneurship is that they feel that they have touched a ceiling.
For example, he sees the future of this industry, but the enterprise's execution ability is insufficient or the mechanism is not effective enough, or it may be a problem of the team and organization, so he can't meet his own needs.
So he hopes to take this company or this industry to a new height through his own strength. In fact, these people are very lonely in their hearts, because the development trend of the industry they see is far away, but what they want to do may not be recognized and supported by many people in the industry, so they choose to embark on the road of entrepreneurship themselves.
In fact, the biggest test of embarking on this road is to be excited about the future, but it will take a long time to reach the expectations of the future, so this road is actually a long marathon.
In such a long-distance running process, entrepreneurs have to experience great experiences. You may need to keep putting out fires, especially at the beginning of your business. You are short of manpower, have a bad relationship with customers, have insufficient personnel for product development, and the technical level of the recruits is not good enough. One minute there was a security incident, and the system was down again.
Perhaps more seriously, several core developers have experienced mood swings, and one or two of them have been poached. Whether it is technical problems, financial problems or personnel changes, these will make you tired for a long time, because there are many things to deal with.
Moreover, in such a painful entrepreneurial process, although you are often on the verge of collapse, you must be very strong in the face of your own internal employees, external customers and investors.
You still have to let them see a bright future. When your heart is about to break, you still have to encourage and cheer for everyone, so this is very challenging.
Finally, why do you have to bear such pain? Because after embarking on this road, there is a responsibility that can never be put down. On the one hand, this responsibility is the responsibility to the team, the responsibility to investors and the responsibility to customers.
When others can't solve the problem, as entrepreneurs and founders, we can only bear it bravely. So starting a business is really hard. We need to ask ourselves, am I really ready for this kind of exercise?
Make things and situations clear.
A large number of technicians start businesses because they believe that technology can drive value. This initial intention is very important, which determines how long entrepreneurs can go and support us when we are difficult to do.
Secondly, when we want to know what we are doing, we should consider the second thing. What is the business we are doing? To understand this second thing, we need to be clear about what we want to do and where we are.
The first level, things.
We need to find out what we want to do when we start a business, where the target customer market is, what the user group is like, what to drive users, what the user characteristics are, why we use our products, where the core features of our products are, whether our solutions can completely solve the problems, and so on.
This series of problems need to be considered in many aspects. Target customers are the most important thing I need to think clearly. Because when we start our own business, we are often not as active as we think, and we don't consider the market first.
How to make a browser better? Let's take a look at the more successful browsers on the market now. What are they? UC is a good business. Dolphins used to be famous, but how is it developing now? Is their browser good?
I think there is no doubt that everyone still recognizes them.
Today, let's compare these browsers. When people entered this market very early, they did well. But from the perspective of a third party, can we help them define which market they are roaming in, which market dolphins are playing, and which market UC was the first to play?
We can do such a simulation exercise, that is, we should think like this when starting our own business.
I have such technology, and I will meet the needs of whoever needs it, so naturally there is the core pain point he has to solve. To find his core pain point, you have to design a set of value propositions. It is very important that we need to have the ability to think in scenes when designing value propositions.
Everyone will develop scenarios, but I think scenarios and value propositions are closely related, because in the past, as technicians, most of us talked about what my function schedule is, but when we start a business and solve problems for customers, we often don't take functions as the boundary, but closely integrate with the market according to customers' needs in specific scenarios.
Of course, after you have a value proposition, you have to think about what kind of solution to use in technology and what kind of key resources are needed to make it come true.
These key resources may be that I built a browser. How can I let users know? How to let users know where its core value lies? How to find some channels to plan it and so on.
Who is my main partner? Should it be pre-installed or exchanged with others? We need to have a preliminary idea in the early stage. What kind of cost structure and income structure will I have if I do this? These problems determine what kind of cash flow I will have in the future.
When I do the first step, I may look at three steps, think about two steps, and then walk through the current step steadily. Even at any time like 123, although this path has been changing, I will always see where the road ahead is.
The second level, potential.
It is the general trend, and this is very important. All of the above are at the micro level, but it is very important whether one thing can achieve great success or not.
Small success depends on the first level, and great success depends on this general trend. The ancients said that "a gentleman likes to cheat", and our business environment, economic environment, social environment, scientific and technological development environment and natural environment are the biggest "potentials".
"Times make heroes", every successful entrepreneur conforms to the development of the times and promotes the development of enterprises with the potential energy throughout the times. Small success depends on people, great success depends on potential, and so does entrepreneurship.
For example, the environment of our whole country, the popularity of its smart terminals, the development of bandwidth, the level of tariffs and so on. Looking at today's mobile Internet, we will see when 5G will rise, and what will happen to the price and tariff of 5G compared with 4G?
Because of the high bandwidth and higher density, can there be new entrepreneurial opportunities here? In addition to the technical environment, your judgment on the social environment and business environment is also very important. For example, in China in the next decade, there are several trends that I think are particularly important.
The first is the transformation of economic structure. In the past, our resource-driven economy has been transformed into an innovation-driven economy, such as the dual-innovation project that the country is doing. In fact, it is not a unilateral need of the government. Even if the government does not vigorously promote it, China's economy will develop in this direction.
This is also the reason why I started my business, because I firmly believe that technological innovation will be the core driving force of China's economy in the next decade.
Then this megatrend will also affect various industries in internet plus. It is not necessarily called internet technology, but we can call it digital technology and information technology. Digitalization and informatization will be integrated into all traditional industries.
We say that artificial intelligence will change the way we do many things in the future, such as our finance, credit investigation and even our financial management.
Today, technologies like this are still scattered, and are used in information applications, finance, telecommunications and other industries. In fact, from the general trend, it will continue our past special traditional industries, such as agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fisheries.
In fact, we have seen it now. For example, big data is increasingly used in agriculture to do agricultural finance. We have seen the impact of climate change on crops and finally extended it. I may turn it into some long-term effects, affecting agricultural futures trading and so on.
This trend needs to be understood by every entrepreneur. And the two are an iterative process. You find these judgments in the situation, which in turn affects what you do and how to make some adjustments and changes.
In the process of adjustment and change, we need to constantly think about what is the gap between my team and the general trend, what is the ability of my own team, what are the shortcomings, and what kind of ability I need to fill.
When I choose a direction, what initial resources do I have for me to do? Another key point is the road to development.
Just now I talked about the situation of three steps, so that we can better assess the situation. In a rapidly changing environment, our ability to make plans for risks can be slightly stronger, and we should be psychologically prepared to adapt to the changes of the times as soon as possible.