Some people say that the passion for entrepreneurship also flows in the blood of Zhejiang people. This passion is innate and endless. I think this is not only a passion, but also a mission. For this, I have struggled and prepared for ten years.
In 2000, the Internet was in full swing. As a fresh graduate, I joined an Internet company without hesitation. It was a company that specialized in making websites for enterprises. It was quite popular at the time. Because I majored in computer science, the company assigned me to be responsible for website production, but I felt that I should know more about the market. It happened that the market feedback at that time required marketers who knew more about technology, so I took the initiative to ask Ying to join the marketing.
After a few months, I had a good grasp of how the company worked. I discussed with my classmates whether we should jointly open a company, and it turned out that we could do it in one go. To register a company, the sub-district office helped us solve the problem. They happened to have task targets, so we paid a few thousand yuan for the registered capital and it was done. For office space, we rented a house with three bedrooms and one living room. We work and live together.
As for the office staff, the main employees were my classmate and me, a part-time accountant, and later two salesmen. The company persisted for less than four months. Due to the small business volume, the profit sharing between the two was not as high as the salary at work. In the end, I thought about closing down.
With the benefit of hindsight
1. The two of them are reluctant to invest. If other companies have Santana car racing business, some factory companies will let them pass. Our salesmen cannot pass the gates of many companies. There are other things like advertising that I don’t even dare to think about.
2. Not persistent enough. I still feel sorry for this when I think about it later, because the company has just started and it is normal for the business volume to be small. Moreover, we took over the development order of a higher-end hotel website at that time. It's a pity that at that time, they just thought that it was so hard and tiring, and their income was only so little, so the two of them were hovering around the food and clothing line.
3. There is still a lack of experience in salesman management training. At that time, we could not recruit better salesmen, so all the salesmen we recruited had to be trained, but the so-called training was also done casually. Therefore, the last two salesmen did not bring in a single business.
In 2001, I went south to Shenzhen, and my classmates went north to Shanghai. Why I chose Shenzhen is because my friends in Shenzhen said that Shenzhen is the cradle of high technology. The first Hi-Tech Fair was held in Shenzhen, and Premier Zhu went there to attend the event.
After arriving in Shenzhen, I went to the talent market. At that time, online job hunting was not popular yet. One month later, I successfully joined the planning department of a foreign-funded company. I was mainly responsible for the maintenance and management of the company's website. I still have that restless heart. I was originally very relaxed about website maintenance work, but I was also very enthusiastic about other tasks in the planning department, so the manager of the planning department had a good relationship with me. Later, after the manager of the planning department resigned, I naturally took his place. Location. During this period, I have been doing some hard drive box sales with my friends in my spare time, because his company is selling hard drive boxes, and I basically play a role in partnership investment. In 2003, I thought the opportunity was ripe and decided to start a business with my friends. There are several reasons:
1. The popularity of hard disk boxes is getting higher and higher, and MP3 players are also gradually beginning to show signs of popularity.
2. Our channel dealers across the country have been established (accumulated in the past).
3. We also know the manufacturers, and they can help us OEM produce hard disk boxes and MP3 players.
4. We also have some funds
So we started to register the company and then started to create a brand, because OEM sales are the power of a brand.
1. Registered trademark LOGO, the trademark is Blue Eagle
2. The registered domain name www.71666.com is homophonic to “Business Niu Niu Niu”
3. Rent the Green Net Garden Building in the center of Shenzhen to give customers a grand impression.
Then the office was renovated and salesmen were hired. Soon the company was successfully opened and on track, with sales rising steadily. But the good times did not last long. Hard drive boxes encountered low-price competition. Although our products were of good quality, the prices were not as good as others. During this period, our MP3 players started to go on the market. Our products were easier to sell when they first came on the market because MP3 players were cheaper than similar products. A month later, a dealer said that MP3 players were being repaired. Gradually, more and more people were returning for repairs. Oh my God, the number of repairs reached more than 50%.
The dominoes fell. MP3 repairs were considered to be of poor quality. Hard drive cases of the same brand were also considered to be of poor quality. Dealers began to delay payment and stopped purchasing goods. In 2004, when I was worrying about the next month's rent, I received an interview call from ZTE. After passing the interview, that's when I closed my own company. To summarize the experience of this failure:
1. Market reaction and decision-making speed are relatively slow. When the hard disk box encounters a sales bottleneck, it should cooperate with the dealer to do some promotions, emphasizing the importance of quality and the preciousness of hard disk data, such as promising a three-year warranty and replacement. When the MP3 is returned for repair, the dealer should be given some compensation and then the OEM manufacturer should be quickly replaced.
2. Don’t have the spirit to burn everything. When encountering operational difficulties, what we should do more is to persist in integrating existing resources. At that time, we could make copycat mobile phones because our OEM manufacturers were already producing them. We didn't make mobile phones because we were afraid that repairs would be too expensive. Indeed, the mobile phone solution was unstable at the time. But later, the MTK solution became more and more mature. At that time, companies similar to ours made a lot of money and created many multi-millionaires.
3. I didn’t cherish the channel. I acted out of impulse and had conflicts with the dealers. Although it was obviously their fault, the relationship should not be stalemate. You must know how to make money by being harmonious.
After 2004, I have been responsible for some planning work related to mobile phone value-added at ZTE. At that time, I realized the importance of personal connections, so I worked hard to make some friends who would be helpful in my future career. Participate in some summit forums and some Internet gatherings to express some opinions and gain some insights.
In this way, a technical expert from Huawei and a market expert from Baidu entered my entrepreneurial circle.
In 2009, we decided to integrate our respective resources to create a project, which is an SMS platform. Currently there are numerous SMS platforms on the market, but none of them are engaged in intelligent development. Our SMS platform is enterprise-level, intelligent, convenient and simple. Because we have some interpersonal resources from ZTE and Huawei, we can more easily access the backbone networks of telecommunications and mobile. Because we have some resources from Baidu, it is estimated that our publicity expenses will be reduced a lot.
The main form of our project is the website, so the website is a base. We still use the domain name 71666.com because everyone agrees that digital domain names are easy to remember, and Enterprise Niu Niu Niu is also suitable for enterprise-level applications. Our project is named NiuNiuNiu SMS. We are currently developing some communication protocols and then turning them into a gateway to facilitate various technical interfaces.
2010 is the implementation year of our project, when everyone will put all their efforts into starting their own business. After learning from the experience of my previous two entrepreneurial failures, I will be more mature and stable this time:
1. Once you decide on this direction, you must stick to it. At present, the approval of the two shareholders has been obtained and relevant legal documents have been signed. Of course, various issues such as equity distribution and exit mechanism are also included.
2. The funds are relatively abundant this time. The registered capital this time was paid by a few of us who have real money. We will not do anything that we are reluctant to invest again.
3. Our management experience has been greatly improved. I am currently in a management position. The shareholder of Baidu is doing market management work.
4. Fully understand the input-output ratio of advertising, and we will do targeted marketing in this regard.
5. Pay more attention to the maintenance of relationships with customers and agents, and take their interests as our own responsibility.