Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1348
Liu Yi is the CEO of a startup company. Although he is a post-90s generation, his life exudes a “sense of retirement” everywhere.
He wakes up naturally every day, but it is at 5:30 in the morning; in the morning, when the weather is good, he wants to bask in the sun; at noon, he cooks a few dishes by himself and puts them into different styles of Japanese-style ceramic plates; at 7:30 in the evening, Play table tennis for over an hour.
He is very strict with his employees: no overtime is allowed. There is no need to rush the development schedule. “The revenue will not have any impact because of a release.” He and his subordinates said. This is the principle of his business: applications that allow users to improve their quality of life cannot come from a sweatshop.
As a mature developer, he has long stopped brushing the App Store list frequently, because the growth of product downloads usually follows the laws of the market.
July 27 is an exception. At 6 o’clock in the morning, his newly developed product “MD Vinyl” suddenly soared to No. 10 in the App Store US download list, surpassing Snapchat. Nine hours later, it surpassed YouTube, Google, Instagram, and TikTok to become the second overall list. He felt “very surprised” that this product did not spend money on promotion, but surpassed the products operated by large companies on a large scale.
That night, Liu Yi invited his colleagues out for drinks to celebrate the moment when he might become a champion. I didn’t get the championship title until I finished drinking. “At the end of the day, I consoled myself and celebrated second place. Second place was great,” he said with a smile.
When he got home, Liu Yi didn’t sleep well, and he woke up every one or two hours to check the rankings. At 5:57 in the morning, it was finally time for the first place. He was so happy that he sat up on the bed and couldn’t help laughing all the time. He posted the top-ranked screenshot to the indie development community he organized, and said to the group, “Anything is possible.”
Being a champion is not easy. Many years ago, Liu Yi worked in mobile application development in a large Internet company. The company with a market value of hundreds of billions of dollars has also vowed to enter overseas, and has invested a lot of funds and teams, but no product has ever reached the first place in a large overseas market such as the United States.
While the entire industry is talking about the disappearance of the traffic bonus, small teams like Liu Yi are increasing and revenue is improving. In May 2022, a third-party analysis report cited by Apple stated that from 2019 to 2021, the revenue growth of small development teams in China (products with less than 1 million annual downloads and annual revenue of no more than $1 million) 94%.
These most successful small-team entrepreneurs often have similar experiences: focusing on technology or products, some have done well in development positions in large Internet companies, and some have worked as partners and CTOs in startup companies. They can still get a good income in an environment that many people yearn for, but they leave.
They are no longer chasing the once-standard Chinese Internet narrative: big market, big investment, big growth; no longer catering to China’s largest user base, but making products they really like, expecting to find users with common needs; no longer frequent Work overtime and give up life for iteration.
On this road, technology fades away from the halo of the “money printing machine” era and returns to the essence of rational tools. A product has also regained its natural growth law, and has been acquired and recognized by more users in the long and continuous years of polishing.
Their success depends on changing circumstances. Not only in the world, but there are enough people in China today who are fed up with the uncontrolled pop-up advertisements, instalment reminders, and data abuse by big companies, and are willing to pay a cup of coffee for some products that respect users.
Endless growth is no longer a fact. In the new environment, big companies are still big companies, but entrepreneurs and users have more choices.
A relaxed CEO, “playing” with making products
On July 28, the morning of the app’s summit, Liu Yi woke up his wife Liang Yilun-she is the co-founder of Mystery Technology and Liu Yi’s “pillar”.
“We are number one.” Liu Yi said.
The wife was very calm, replied with a sound, and went back to sleep.
Liu Yi has been working on iOS development for 11 years. “This summer, I have accomplished many of the goals I had planned for ten years,” he said.
Liu Yi (first from the right) and members of Mystery Technology
Mystery Technology was established in 2018 and will not welcome its sixth employee until the end of June 2022. More than a dozen apps convey the team’s temperament: young, smart, and sometimes a little naughty.
For example, “Puzzle Clock” has a “neon” theme. When you charge your phone, the neon tube-style dial will light up one by one – inspired by a level Liu Yi encountered while playing a puzzle game; Go to the “Blocks” theme, shake the phone, and the digital blocks will fall like real blocks.
In the first year of its launch, “Mystery Clock” was downloaded almost 500 times a day. Liu Yi still insisted on updating and adding good ideas in his mind until the product accumulated 19 themes and more than 100 widgets. Almost no one on the market can copy it. In May 2022, “Mystery Clock” became the App Of The Day in the App Store in 132 countries; in June, it was nominated for the Apple Design Awards.
Small ideas can grow slowly. The “Mystery Clock” was originally priced at 12 yuan, and the price was raised to 18 yuan and 25 yuan with the version upgrade. In 2016, Liu Yi paid attention to the trend of Apple’s official encouragement of the subscription system: buy out products, Apple will share 30%, and the subscription system will only share 15% in the second year. He believes that this is a healthier development model for small teams: users spend more than ten yuan to buy out products, and developers can only keep adding new ones if they want to survive. When there are only old users left after three or five years, it is difficult to have the motivation to make the product better.
In 2021, he added a subscription. Sometimes Liu Yi feels that the price of his products is a bit expensive, but he separates his personal feelings from his perception of the market: “There are too many people on the earth, just find the part of people who are willing to pay for your products.” He is confident that the product will provide equal value.
“Puzzle Clock” designer’s hand-drawn sketch
“Mystery Vinyl”, which will be launched in February 2022, is the fastest app of Mystery Technology to reach 1 million downloads. This music widget visually simulates a vinyl record player: when the music plays, the album cover spins like a record.
This is a product that will never be set up in a big company: no market research, no data, and it comes entirely from the developer’s hobby.
Buying second-hand records has a special joy: gently pull out the disc while holding the sleeve, and the “Easter Eggs” drop randomly – a newspaper clipping from fifty years ago, with a recommendation for the album, left by the previous owner. Liu Yi started playing vinyl a year ago, bought a box of 60 records, opened them one by one like opening a blind box, washed the dusty records under clean water, and dried them. It never occurred to him that he could interact with music like this.
Liu Yi sat on the floor and listened, staring at the record and turning it round and round, until it was over before he got up to turn it over. He wanted to pass on the beautiful feeling of listening to music to more people, so he started to design a mobile music plug-in application.
He cut off all the player functions that might be distracting, and repeatedly emphasized to the designer “to be immersed”. The main visual record player of “Mystery Black Glue” was drawn according to Liu Yi’s house.
The design process does not do A/B testing, which is essential for Internet development. He put the iPad on the ground, put the record UI design sketch on the full screen, lay on the sofa, looked sideways from time to time, and imagined whether the user would want to look at it all the time. Products that are attentive, users can feel. Many people commented “staring at it for a long time”. Liu Yi was very pleased: “This is what I want.”
In July, a trend of spontaneously recommending “Mystery Vinyl” gradually emerged on TikTok: young girls showed surprised expressions, the next shot was cut to the mobile phone desktop, and the “Mystery Vinyl” record player slowly turned on the mobile phone. Some videos even only have a screen recording of playing music, and in just a few seconds, they have received hundreds of thousands of likes. These videos are tagged #mdvinyl.
Leaving a big company, one person’s product, 1MB persistence
It took a little more time to find Cheng Kai, an indie developer.
It takes nearly 2 hours to take the subway from the Northeast Second Ring Road in Beijing. After getting off the subway, you can only find Hello Bikes. It will also prompt: You are on the edge of the operating area, do not ride out. In a slightly desolate area, two huge cuboid buildings are inserted together, with hundreds of small windows of different sizes on the surface, which looks too modern in the surrounding environment.
It was a library and where Cheng Kai worked every day. His “station” was in the electronic reading room of the library, a desk in the corner.
His working hours are 3 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the afternoon – when he used to work in Zhongguancun, the commute time was 3 hours. On average, he writes no more than 100 lines of code a day, because “a lot of features don’t happen in one go.” The time after returning home at night is not part of work. He reads books, watches movies, and sometimes plays the video game FIFA.
For the past 7 years, Cheng Kai has devoted his time and love to one product, the X browser (Android only). It is a mobile browser application and currently has 300,000-400,000 daily active users.
Every mobile phone comes with a “sufficient” official browser, which is a stock market – user growth is like a gentle slope of “almost no change every month”. There will be no big companies pouring their manpower into a new mobile browser, which is a good thing for independent developers. The product development and maintenance of browsers can take ten years, and the iteration and polishing in the middle cannot be surpassed by crowd tactics.
He maintains the discipline of being a good developer, maintaining weekly or bi-weekly version updates for 7 years. He likes to challenge technical problems, spend a long time optimizing the response speed of ad blocking rules, and go for a walk when he gets stuck. When the inspiration came, I immediately went back to the library and typed the code. The time to import 100,000 rules was reduced from 100 milliseconds to 20 milliseconds. All this happened in a place where the user was not aware of it, but enough changes were added together to attract enough. crowded.
Cheng Kai also does not make super apps, and does not pursue the online time that devours users through a super product. He insisted that the X browser be only 1MB in size, almost to the point of obsession.
Some people complain that the page switching is not smooth enough, but he does not change it, because a UI framework for transition animation requires 3MB; if you want to implement any functions, you can write your own, if you integrate other people’s frameworks, it will be 2-3MB; it seems that the very basic scanning function requires At around 700KB, he designed it as a plug-in for users to download on demand – when people are used to applications of hundreds of megabytes, a 1MB browser “will definitely exceed expectations.” He thought it was cool.
Keeping the product minimal and fast also means restrained profitability. The default home page of the X browser has only one search box and “favorites” and “history” buttons, and there is only one most basic way to make money: use search association words to attract traffic to partners such as Baidu, and get a share.
Cheng Kai estimates that his current income is twice as much as when he went to work seven years ago, and if he continues to stay in a big company, it will definitely exceed this number. In the case of satisfying daily life, he does not want to accept advertisements that affect the user experience. He has a self-consciousness: “Be clear that you are serving niche users, don’t have so many desires.”
X browser product development, project progress management, front-end application programming, back-end development, post-launch testing and optimization are all done by one person. In the 1990s, when the Internet was new, it was an old-fashion encouraged and admired by Silicon Valley.
Over the years, software development in large companies has already become labor-intensive, and they no longer need full-stack engineers, not to mention the “10X engineers” once admired by Silicon Valley (ten times engineers, one person for ten uses, can solve various problems complex issues). The technical job subdivision is an advancement in engineering, where individuals solve definite problems more than creative work. Engineers in large corporations are well aware that their jobs are not enough to undertake their technical aspirations, but salaries and positions have certainly increased in the past and have stabilized the vast majority.
Before starting his own business, Cheng Kai was the one who helped the company grow rapidly.
In 2015, he resigned from his position as the manager of the Maxthon department and went to a medical and beauty startup company to be the CTO “in pursuit of money”. It is estimated that in a few years, he can earn several million dollars by exercising power. This is a strong operation-oriented business, and no one cares about what technical architecture is used. He buried himself in the photos of cosmetic beauties all day, thinking about how to make the postoperative effect more eye-catching and increase the click rate.
In the second month, he suddenly found himself checking his watch frequently every day, looking forward to getting off work. In the past, he was the kind of person who would take the initiative to work overtime. He asked himself: Do you really care about that money? After he figured it out, he quickly helped the company recruit the next CTO, then resigned and returned to his old business: making mobile browsers.
In 2015, the wave of tool applications going overseas reached its peak. Cheng Kai also wanted to go overseas as a browser, “come a dimensionality reduction attack.” This is a word often said by highly confident Internet people at that time.
When he went to talk about investment, “he was very repulsive to things like gorgeous PPT”, so he just said it. The investor is the founder of a head game overseas company and a well-known serial entrepreneur.
Contradictions then emerged: Investors hoped that Cheng Kai would only focus on products and technologies, leave marketing to them, and demanded commercialization within the product as soon as possible. Cheng Kai believed that this would most likely affect the user experience. Investors hope to quickly verify and let products developed for two or three months go directly to Google Play, which is not the rhythm expected by Cheng Kai.
The 200,000 yuan online promotion fee was smashed. “I imagined that it would be a hit, but how is it possible?” Cheng Kai was once again asked to cede the company’s dominance.
“I don’t think you look like a CEO at all…you don’t have big ambitions at all.” The investor spoke directly. As a result of the communication, Cheng Kai returned the money and announced to the team to break up.
Cheng Kai heaved a sigh of relief when he sent away the colleagues he had recruited with painstaking efforts and left the position of the investor company he had borrowed. He knew even more that not all product creators were suitable for being an Internet entrepreneur in this era. I may not want to be the CEO,” he said.
have been involved in the entrepreneurial boom
In June 2014, Zhongguancun Venture Street “opened a street”, and nearly 600 entrepreneurial teams were incubated in the following year, of which more than 350 teams received a total investment of more than 1.7 billion yuan.
Entrepreneurs chatted excitedly about projects at the garage coffee, fantasizing about “taking VC money to change the world”. Some people of unknown origin may hand in their resumes after hearing a few words. That is no longer repeated in the history of China’s Internet. The tornado-level wave of “mass entrepreneurship” has swept countless smart and ambitious young people, and also caused some people to lose their objective rationality.
In 2015, Liu Shaonan, the founder of the note-taking app flomo, started his business for the first time and created a food picture community called “Food Color”. Financing was easy. The 1 million RMB in the angel round was invested by the former leader. The money went to his personal account before the agreement was signed.
After getting the money, he and his partner immediately rented a house in a small villa in the center of Shanghai. He once visited Xiaohongshu, who was working in a western-style building in the French Concession at that time, and “the moment he entered, he was too fancy.” Someone from Xiaohongshu once told him, “The success rate of hiring a place like this is very high.”
Starting a business in a foreign-style place was a popular trend at that time. In fact, he was very uncomfortable in the villa: transportation was inconvenient, there were no public facilities for shared space, the small garden with the house had to be cleaned by himself, and he had to argue with neighbors from time to time.
Liu Shaonan fell into a state of frenzy and confusion. The daily activity of the product quickly reached 100,000, and he raised the pre-A round without even writing a business plan, this time it was 1 million US dollars.
The smooth sailing in the early stage of his business made his judgment scale out of balance. When 100,000 new pictures were added to the product every day, he felt that it was “possible to fight” with Dianping, which had an increase of 300,000 comments at that time.
He clearly remembers the nightmare of chasing numbers. In order to catch up with lower prices, we open Weibo “Fantong” at 12 o’clock every night to buy traffic, set the alarm clock to get up at 4 or 5 in the morning, and then turn off the “Fantong”. The background refreshes every second, and the balance on the account will drop by one or two hundred yuan, and at most, two or three thousand yuan will be burned in one night.
Is it worth the money?
“Other people’s money is rootless water. If it hits your account ‘boom’, just spend it,” he said.
Driven by anxiety and conceit, Liu Shaonan decided to say goodbye to the “picture community” he was good at and like, and only made “food”.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t have dining experience. “Isn’t it just opening a restaurant? Study!” At that time, Liu Shaonan thought so. In those few years, many people who started businesses in the Internet field would feel that “traditional industries are scumbags”. At that time, he often said that Meituan: I can’t, but I can learn.
After writing down the vision of “a new generation of central kitchens that de-cook” in PPT, Liu Shaonan brushed dozens of investors. It was 2015, and no one was willing to pay for this story.
His wife calmly commented on his business of selling lunch boxes: “neuropathy”.
Liu Shaonan replied, “You don’t understand.”
At that time, he dared not admit that the dream was getting more and more distant.
He rented a back kitchen on the second floor of a food stall, and started preparing meals at 10 am every day, heating the pre-made packets, and putting them in the lunch box together with the steamed rice. He could make 220 meals at noon. He sometimes feels that his team is very powerful. He has a self-developed data system to predict the number of orders, which is very efficient, but he feels more time-consuming. “Every day I think about how to deliver the cigarettes to the takeaway brother and ensure that the things are delivered on time.”
The money on the account is “burned”. The team didn’t know what to do either. They ate a hot pot and then broke up. Everyone was relieved. Only then did he realize that “how people can deceive themselves”. In the three years of starting the business, Liu Shaonan received a monthly salary of 12,000 yuan and a mortgage of 6,000 yuan. He lived very hard in Shanghai.
“Idiot.” He scolded himself at the time.
Between being obsessed with growth and surviving, earning decently and serving users decently
Looking back now, companies with poor financing capabilities and insufficient growth have little chance in the future. The development of platform-based companies often uses free products, or even subsidized money to exchange scale, and then realizes cash, practicing again and again “when a product is free, the user becomes a product.”
The products of big companies are getting bloated and boring. All kinds of dazzling entrances can lead to new business and promote the platform. Even taxi software will invite you to buy food and borrow money. When there is no longer a huge imagination for user growth, this network must become more complicated. to get more value from the same person.
The route of taking money to do big things isn’t for everyone, and the market doesn’t have that much money anymore. Small entrepreneurs want to support themselves, and the business model is often more straightforward: make a paid product or service, rather than making users expect something free.
Independent developer baye has made 8 products, and has hardly done active promotion – he is not good at business, and he does not believe that promotion can make the income of independently developed products exceed an order of magnitude.
The reason he creates a product is often the actual needs of himself and the people around him, those that cannot be satisfied by big companies. For example, tracking the follow-up of hot news, automatically coding private information in pictures, and filtering spam messages.
In 2017, iOS 11 launched a spam filter interface and a new machine learning framework, Core ML, which can process machine learning data locally, eliminating the need to send user information to the server. This is exactly in line with baye’s proposition: do not use cloud technology, do not request mobile network permissions, and maximize user privacy.
At that time, there was a very popular application for filtering spam messages. The product design was very primitive, and it was necessary to manually add keywords such as “unsubscribe” to identify advertisements. baye realized that was an opportunity to better solve an old problem with new technology.
There is no precedent, no user data, and no helper. At first, he could only use the local method: export the tens of thousands of text messages he received over the years from the backup, mark them one by one, and make the first product of the product “Panda Eat SMS”. A machine learning sample – that is his important masterpiece in the future.
Two weeks later, the “Panda Eats SMS” model had a success rate of over 90% in identifying spam text messages.
In the field of SMS filtering, there are many competing products such as Tencent Mobile Manager and 360 Anti-harassment Master, and “Panda Eats SMS” is still successful. It has been recommended by the App Store many times, topped the iOS paid app list, and gained more attention after being recommended by a Douyin blogger in 2020.
The samples of “Panda Eat SMS” are all based on user feedback. There are 10,000 to 20,000 messages per month, and the number will increase by two to three times during the “Double Eleven” period. baye also frequently initiates polls on social media, using the results of one or two thousand votes to help decision-making. Users can put forward demands and suggestions to him at any time, and he will basically reply.
This is something that a product manager at a large company cannot do. “Panda eats text messages” is priced at 3 yuan, a one-time buyout. In addition to the income from other independent development, although not as much as working in a big factory, it was enough for him to live decently in Beijing at that time.
Entrepreneurs who do not have to serve capital are more likely to respect users.
After starting flomo in 2020, Liu Shaonan and his partner Lightory wrote the business philosophy into the product description: no financing, “to ensure that you do not deliberately pursue scale and growth”; no advertising, “because selling users’ attention and note-taking services hope to solve the problem. The problem is the opposite”; using subscription membership as a revenue model, but not selling permanent members, “The last one who sold permanent members was LeTV. How long is the permanent membership?”
They believe that if the overall user value is increased first, the return will “follow you like a shadow”, and it doesn’t matter if it comes later. In order for flomo to exist for a long enough time, they strictly control the cost – flomo does not do SMS verification code login, because each SMS costs 0.04 yuan.
The clearer the boundaries of doing things, the freer people are. Liu Shaonan came to the small office in the entrepreneurial park at 8:30 in the morning. He took a lunch break after 11:00. He moved an outdoor chair and read a book in the sun in the park. When the sun was hot, he went back to work and finished work at four or five in the afternoon. He often walks in the natural scenery, taking pictures of the green shade in the depths of Longjing Mountain, the hazy landscape of West Lake, and a small piece of blue sky surrounded by small bamboo forests in the park – he is one of the few, which reminds people that Hangzhou is a “paradise on earth” ” and not just entrepreneurs in the “Internet Capital”.
Liu Shaonan sometimes works outdoors in the park
Lightory works from home in Shanghai, making sure to complete a task that is “large enough to affect the end result” every day, and spends a lot of the other time reading. Extensive reading made him build a cognitive network in his brain, and he reaps joy in this thinking game. They schedule at least one “non-problem-solving” meeting every month, spending a whole day climbing or hanging out, discussing “How Wittgenstein PUA Russell.”
Flomo’s slogan “Continuously record, the meaning naturally emerges” is also chatted while wandering. Do not do editors with many functions; oppose information hoarding, do not support one-click import; do not want users to have “intentional or unintentional desire to perform”, do not do social functions such as check-in; there is no brand logo for sharing notes.
On the road of restraint, it is necessary to constantly fight against the instinct of desire.
In May 2021, they developed a “navigation card” function, where the tags typed in the notes will be linked to form an information network. During the internal test, users are generally unable to use it. They began to reflect on themselves “whether the ego is too big”. “Although I said verbally before, we’d better make it smaller, but I still think in the deepest part of my heart that I have to make a big thing like Notion.” Liu Shaonan said.
Not too much tangle, the new version of the “navigation card” function was cut off by them.
A friend of a large factory told Lightory that he did not understand and could not make this decision: “If this function is made by one of my subordinates, it is his KPI for a quarter, what if it is not online? How to evaluate his work? “Lightory won’t let this happen on a tiny team like flomo. “The accumulation of faulty features will increase the cost of subsequent decisions exponentially, and if you can accumulate one error, you will accumulate ten more.”
“We don’t raise money,” Liu Shaonan said with a smile and summed up the reason why he was very comfortable in starting this business. In entrepreneurship, Lightory adds, “there’s not that much that’s really worth doing.”
The two founders of flomo collaborate remotely, this is a “rare group photo”
Decent does not equal easy
However, the group of people documented in the article may just be the lucky few in the small team.
The actual average income of small domestic teams is much lower than their level. A senior independent developer observed that most of the current domestic independent development products have a monthly income of less than 5,000 US dollars, which cannot be included in the statistics of Sensor Tower, a well-known third-party mobile advertising data monitoring platform.
According to the “2020 Survey Report on the Survival Status of Independent Developers in China” released by the developer technology community Sifu, nearly half of the independent projects have a monthly income of less than 1,000 yuan – lower than the monthly minimum wage of all provinces and cities in China; One of the independent projects has a monthly income of more than 20,000 yuan – if this is the monthly salary of a large factory, fresh engineers will feel that it is not worth mentioning.
Leaders are also being challenged in a tougher market environment. The X browser is mainly aimed at geek groups, and it is originally low-value traffic defined by advertisers. In the past six months, as the partners have further tightened the evaluation criteria, the product can get a lower share.
Cheng Kai considers himself to be a chronic person, and in the past few years, the Internet has mostly been about businesses that require quick volume. He thought quietly about the worst possible future: an 80% cut in income. “It’s like taking a pension.” Cheng Kai said, “From an anti-fragile perspective, doing things alone is my biggest advantage. I can survive the winter.”
According to QuestMobile, in May 2021, the growth rate of mobile Internet users in China experienced a negative year-on-year growth for the first time. The countless spam messages blocked by “Panda Eats SMS” have witnessed the five years of consuming the Internet: e-commerce promotions were once marked as “normal” by users because the discounts were so strong. P2P and online education have also been the “protagonists”. In the past year, the promotion of the “digital collection” platform has emerged for a short time, and the collection information has continued to increase.
baye wanted to do a “really big thing”. After staying in Beijing for eight or nine years, he felt annoyed at the peak: he couldn’t read the book, so he subconsciously swiped Douyin, and when he recovered, he uninstalled it again. A friend suggested that he “find a good chat with people in the industry”. He went to the party of former colleagues, and everyone chatted hotly, chatting about the currency circle, and chatting about “who made how much money”.
Investors often invite him for coffee, and they keep bringing the temptation of new information: AI, social networking, all directions look good. He finally decided to pass up these ethereal opportunities—what he now calls noise. He wants to create his own, instead of helping others fulfill their dreams.
In June 2021, he completely moved to Qingdao to settle down, and decided after only two viewings.
New inspiration “will come out at any time”, even when registering – he took his parents to see a doctor, and the hospitals did not communicate with each other, so he repeatedly registered and did the same test. He wanted to optimize the medical information system, but it couldn’t be done. Obviously, it’s not a technical problem.
There are also more practical inspirations. The decoration designer who made the whole house customization for his family just put together a few templates and delivered it. He wanted to use technical means to generate a real customized solution, and then get the materials directly from the manufacturer; the clothing industry in his hometown still takes a low-end route. I want to digitize all textile machines, and then attract designers to produce with IP elements…
These imaginative things are too challenging for him personally. The digital reform of traditional industries is a bigger adventure, requiring him to do a lot of things that he has never done before, or even resisted, such as discussing financing and integrating industry resources.
“I think I’m a slurred, introverted person, is this correct perception or self-limiting?” Baye thought about it for the first time. He started buying a lot of books on philosophy. A book says: Philosophy does not solve practical problems.
Sometimes he is also annoyed: “I went through that era with Zuckerberg.” From high school to the present, he has been following the top Internet entrepreneurs. Now, he has decided to “partially reconcile” with himself.
When the entire industry begins to get used to the “cold”, small entrepreneurial teams want to find new growth points and more constraints.
In 2021, after understanding the development difficulty and rewards of enterprise SaaS, Liu Shaonan and Lightory gave up on the direction of enterprise collaboration – which has long been led by giants: at the end of 2019, DingTalk and Alibaba Cloud will be integrated to gain more medium and large enterprise customers. In February 2020 and March 2022, DAU exceeded 100 million; by the end of 2020, the number of active users of enterprise WeChat exceeded 130 million, doubling from the beginning of the year; in the same year, Feishu was free and open to all enterprises and organizations, and began to cooperate with Dingding, enterprise WeChat competes head-on for the market.
Big growth opportunities are scarce and a fair test for teams of any size.
If the business is unsustainable, getting the investment will lead to a wider disaster. Ofo, Eggshell, and Daily Youxian are all examples. Investors, users, employees, and suppliers have all become victims. As the largest companies begin to adjust their rhythms and adapt to their new environment, a generation of entrepreneurs will eventually learn to control their desires.
Title picture source: The movie “Apocalypse Now”
This article is reprinted from: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1348
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