Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1254
Leaving the big factory system to start a business, the first step is difficult
Chen Xi (pseudonym), a former Ant Financial and Byte e-commerce engineer, decided to completely break away from the big Internet company system to start his own business, and he planned very carefully. When actually implemented, the first step fell off.
In September last year, he posted job advertisements on major Internet recruitment platforms. After waiting for a week, his mailbox was empty. He felt that the problem was with himself, so he opened a platform membership, and used the search function to leave messages, but he still couldn’t wait for the right person. It was only then that Chen Xi realized that it turned out that chefs could not be recruited in the direct recruitment of Boss.
Chen Xi’s entrepreneurial direction is Chaoshan cuisine pre-made dishes. In order to find a chef who can help him, he can only go to the local area to find a chef. When he arrives in the town, he realizes that it turns out that the best chefs change jobs through talent agencies.
Chen Xi has done “things from 0 to 1” in large companies, and believes that he has mastered the entrepreneurial method. In 2018, Ali launched a new project at the group level. He switched from technology to operation, from operation to project manager, pulling teams and looking for resources. He would feel that he was not a screw, but an internal business.
Only when he really left the big Internet company system and went it alone did he truly understand what that “0” meant.
Chen Xi’s first instant food was “Beef Ball Kway Teow Soup”. He originally thought that the industry chain was mature and factories would be willing to participate. But the factory managers were dismissive of his small company – “Can the food that leaves Chaoshan still be called Chaoshan food?” After traveling to more than 20 cities, he finally found a factory in Heyuan City, Guangdong.
During the months of polishing products with the factory, Chen Xi’s family lent a luxuriously decorated 140-square-meter house to a friend. He used to only live in a five-star hotel when he went out, but he could only live in a hotel for dozens of yuan a night in the county seat. He thought, I have to be able to endure hardship, and starting a business is to endure hardship. A friend was even more enlightened than him: “You are not sleeping on the bridge, why do you feel that you are suffering?”
I also took the bitterness that I thought I couldn’t eat before, but the success did not come. To make preservatives without preservatives at room temperature, it needs to be sterilized by high temperature and high pressure at 121 degrees, but the beef balls burst directly under high temperature, and they no longer have the strong taste of the original Chaoshan meatballs, and become soft. He eventually gave up this category and switched to pork knuckle rice.
In an Internet company, a function can be implemented within a week or two. In traditional industries, the “insensitivity” is about ten times or dozens of times. Workers need to check, schedule shifts, and don’t work overtime. It takes a month or two to wait for the result. After a series of failures and rebuilding, 4 months after the official business, in a factory in Lianping County, Heyuan City, Chen Xi finally made pre-made dishes in Chaoshan at room temperature.
Similar experience, Wang Kele, a former employee of Kuaishou, also has. He is a veteran of Kuaishou, whose job number is in the top 600, and is responsible for operations and marketing. After staying for 6 years, I have seen the valuation of this company rise hundreds of times, and I have also seen the management chaos, bad content, and internal corruption in the massive expansion. The sense of meaninglessness continued to increase. After 80% of his business was taken away by a Weibo professional manager, he was idle for half a year.
On the last day of September 2021, Wang Cola redeemed the first option. After getting a few million, he devoted all his energy to the business of craft beer “Human Jiuhua”. Product development took a lot of work, as expected. Most unexpectedly, he suffered a huge setback in what he did best, channel marketing.
The experience accumulated in Internet companies and the changes witnessed make Wang Kele believe that quality is the key to a product’s success in the market, and marketing is the key to getting out of the circle.
He knows very well how to use Internet tools to carve a new brand into the minds of consumers. When he joined Kuaishou in 2016, there were only a handful of well-known short video experts in the country. With the help of the platform’s traffic resources, he helped many current top Internet celebrities, “all the way is easy”. In 2020, after the marketing video “Hou Lang” of station B was screened, he spent 7 days planning the Kuaishou promotional film “Seeing” and invited Kuaishou user “Oli Gi” to give a speech, which became a popular marketing case of the year.
Unexpectedly, he came out to make craft beer, and reality slapped him in the face. After the product reached the mass production standard, he wanted to spray-paint the cans—after all, the appearance is also part of the brand—but when he found a factory, the other party said he would only accept orders for more than 300,000 bottles. It will take time to reach this number, and he can only put a circle of stickers on the outside of the can.
Back then, a friend complimented him when he learned that he had started a new consumer product: “Coke, you do this, just post a brand, put the product in the live broadcast room, and there is no problem in making five to one billion a year. “The original job allowed him to know so many internet celebrities and short video experts, and the relationship was maintained well. However, because Douyin’s beverage qualification requirements are relatively high, he needs to achieve a certain sales volume on Taobao and JD.
Really entering the real industry, Chen Xi has a deeper understanding of the difficulty and the heavy. The real economy has to invest money to buy machinery and build factories, and also bear the risk of not being able to sell the goods. Wang Kele also knows that industry is an industry that does not depend on luck. “For consumer goods, you have to honestly figure out each raw material, and you have to figure out every supplier’s 10 cents or 20 cents.”
In the second month after Chen Xi’s product was made, the epidemic relapsed. The number of orders dropped, the logistics also stopped, and there was no cash flow, so he had to cut half of the team of more than 10 people, and the investment of more than one million may have been lost. Before resigning to start a business, the new consumer wave gave him the message: “All consumer goods are worth doing all over again”; now, “No matter how well you do it, investors don’t look at this field at all.”
This is the price of independence. Wang Kele sighed with emotion that he used to be considered the kind of leader who saves himself in large companies, and can get a budget of several million every year. “To spend is to complete the work.” The input-output ratio should be calculated carefully. Recently, a single product was squeezed and deformed when it was delivered to the user. He changed all of them to Jingdong Logistics. The cost of a single order increased by 16 yuan. He was very distressed.
In April of this year, after the first beer was successfully bottled, Wang Kele posted a circle of friends. He said that the Long March has taken the first step.
ex-internet employee
Use what you get on the Internet to do things
At the beginning of the business, Wang Kele thought about the company’s mission, vision, and values, and integrated them into the employee code. The experience that was observed and acquired in large companies has become the methodology of starting a business now.
When developing the taste of the first beer, he extracted the parameters of the formula from the products with the highest sales on Taobao and JD. He uses mind maps to disassemble the user’s beer drinking scenarios and reasons; runs the core user model through private domains; and uses the small traffic test method to test the effects of different versions of marketing ideas.
Chen Xi and Wang Kele’s teams are very small, with less than 10 people, but they both use OKRs to manage employees. The idea of internet testing and rapid iteration was also introduced.
Chen Xi used the methods of grayscale testing and overall optimization and polishing of products, and also used agile iterative methods to quickly adjust according to the feedback of products that have been put into the market. The company’s slogan is: Renewing traditional food with technology and advocating food. “Renewing” means “reproducing freshness”.
Wang Kele is familiar with the traffic characteristics of different platforms: Douyin is a source of vortex traffic, as long as you spend money, you can gather a large amount of traffic in an instant; because of the bidding of game manufacturers on station B, the cost performance is low; Xiaohongshu is a piece of traffic In the depression, celebrities with a small number of fans can also get traffic.
He hasn’t made any money yet, and it is impossible to have the funds to catch the “elephant” of traffic. He focuses on the “ant colony” – the main attack on Xiaohongshu. 40 cases of beer were handed over to a blogger with only 20,000 followers. There were less than 40 people online at the same time, and 30 cases were sold instantly after opening the link. Although the single-time sales are limited, the process is “like holding a pot to collect small raindrops distributed on different lotus leaves”, which is laborious but effective.
When choosing a packaging design, Cola Wang used internet content marketing ideas. The color of the first beer packaging is green. In the marketing copy, he called it “forgive green” – the meaning of symbols is greater than the meaning of design, humorous, self-deprecating, catering to certain emotions on social networks, and can stimulate everyone to produce more Derivative discussions, there are more spread.
Entrepreneurs with Internet backgrounds who have experienced different companies and lived in different cities recognize the concept of “good products will be seen by users”. Just like Wang Kele said, “The first point of the mobile Internet is product experience, and the second point is social currency.”
Not all Internet employees who have left have the opportunity to start businesses like Chen Xi and Wang Kele. Their capital is given by the industry and the times. They are all born in the 1985s. When they join Internet companies, they still have the opportunity to seize the last wave of dividends.
Chen Xi graduated from a general undergraduate computer major in 2013. He described young people’s yearning for the Internet in that era, “You will be proud of being able to enter a company like Tencent.” When he left school after graduation, he was the one with the highest salary in the school. When he left Tencent two years later, his salary was twice as high as when he joined the company.
The second company Chen Xi joined was the Internet division of a securities firm. It was 2015, Alibaba had just created the myth of the largest IPO in global history at the time, and “traditional” companies were also accelerating Internetization. In the securities company, his colleagues came from big Internet companies such as Yahoo and Tencent.
He asked me to guess his monthly salary before his second departure. Based on my previous knowledge, I gave a number: 30,000?
“It’s funny, sixty thousand.” Chen Xi said, “Can you believe it?”
He put his savings and salary into the stock market, bought some virtual currency, and caught up with a big bull market. During his time at the securities company, he saved enough for the first million in his life. At that time, he graduated only three years later.
During his years as an Internet company, Chen Xi has traveled to dozens of countries, confirming that his entire life is not about maximizing wealth and freedom, but, “Can I do something meaningful in my entire life? , an earth-shattering thing”.
In Ali’s four years, Chen Xi has gone through four major business groups, growing from a front-end engineer to a full-stack engineer. Through the experience of one internal entrepreneurial project, he has trained his ability to be independent. Counting the financial income, by the sixth year of graduation, his assets have exceeded 10 million when he was less than 30 years old. These assets and experience are the source of Chen Xi’s entrepreneurial confidence.
Another way to get back into the real world with former employees
Above, we tell the story of the relative smoothness of the former employees of the Internet. There are many more people who have recently left the internet, either actively or passively, without much choice.
Feng Miao, who was born in 1996, joined Pinduoduo after graduation. He feels that he is quite lucky. It didn’t take long for his illusions about the internet to be shattered.
The company requires employees to rotate in customer service for 3 months. Feng Miao, who is HR, brainwashed himself and told them, “This position is very valuable. Although it is customer service, it is also an operation and a product. The things I have learned are the same.” But he couldn’t persuade friends and alumni in this way. According to the regulations of the department, if someone discloses the idea of resignation to him, he must report to his boss as soon as possible, otherwise he will be dereliction of duty.
Feng Miao proposed to transfer posts and was forcibly assigned to Kuai Tuan Tuan by the senior management. The leader said that in the future, he will come into contact with operations, products, and data. In fact, he will hold a user list of two or three thousand people and call until someone answers the phone or is willing to add WeChat. He saw that the supervisors in the same group with four or five years of work experience were recruited with high salaries, and they were making the same phone calls every day, “I feel broken.”
After leaving Pinduoduo, Feng Miao decided not to join the big Internet company. He returned to his hometown and rested for two months. The savings of his parents gave him the foundation. He no longer felt that he needed to earn so much money, five or six thousand, enough to spend.
Like many young people, he thought about postgraduate entrance exams, and he also took the civil service exam. The recruitment ratio for the post was as high as 1:500, and due to insufficient preparation, he naturally fell out of the list.
In June 2021, after nearly a year of rest, a high school friend invited Feng Miao to start a business together and do artificial intelligence education and training. It took Fengmiao three months to sign a publicity agreement with an international school, to prepare a project book, and to think about the shares of the partners. At the end of July, the “double reduction” policy was introduced, and the epidemic prevention and control could not enter the campus, and the short-term entrepreneurship was put on hold. With no other way out, Feng Miao found an operation job in an e-commerce company. In early 2022, the company moved to Hangzhou, and he was unemployed again.
He knew that his resume was riddled with holes, and from a traditional perspective, there was little hope for career advancement. The lost two years seem like a hole. In April of this year, the shelved education and training program was brought up again. My friend has already brought the project to a formal level in Canada, and has a certain amount of cash flow. I hope to break through the domestic market again.
Offline education and training is subject to the external environment, and Feng Miao knows that she is powerless. While promising his friend, he set a time node in his mind: one is summer vacation, the other is the start of school, “If you don’t do it well, then you should find a job with five or six thousand dollars.”
In August 2021, also affected by the “double reduction” policy, Dai Jing, a former employee of ByteDance vigorously education, completely ended his career as an online education video editor.
On the first day of unemployment, she was very excited because “finally living the life she wanted”. On the 15th day, she went to a company for an interview. She discussed with the interviewer how to do the content, and the interviewer was more concerned about “how to sell this thing”. But she doesn’t understand sales, operations and promotion at all.
On the 83rd day, after interviewing two more companies and failing, Dai Jing finally accepted that age was indeed a threshold. “No business is going to hire a 38-year-old to do something she hasn’t done before,” she said. She once broke through the “35-year-old curse” in the Internet industry. When she joined Byte, just after her 38th birthday, her friends sighed at the time, “It’s scary to be able to enter at this age!” Subordinates, when they reach the byte, become the grassroots again. She didn’t care too much, at that time she sincerely believed that “the plate will be very big” for byte education.
At the end of January 2021, she moved from Shanghai to Beijing, and the few days of annual leave settled for her last job were all used for moving. HR is very pressing: “You are my indicator a year ago, come quickly.” In March 2021, vigorously education accelerated its expansion, announcing that “10,000 people will be recruited in the next four months”.
Dai Jing has feelings and feelings for education, and is a standard good byte employee: he will spend extra time teaching colleagues who have just graduated how to write stories; he will also spend at least half a day preparing for sharing within the group, and he will not reserve years of experience. She also took the initiative to “supervise the class” on weekends, paying attention to the expressions and movements of the children watching the live class, observing whether they were amused by the stalks she wrote, and whether they could understand the knowledge points – this is not included in the OKR work.
On the 107th day, the “unemployment diary” became a “business diary”. Dai Jing stumbled and started a flower business in Beijing. She wanted to take care of a small business by herself, as she saw on a trip to Japan – a ramen shop owner is a well-educated young man, comfortable with opening a small shop in the country without having to go to a big city and a big company to compete The location is also decent.
Small businesses should also consider how to divert traffic from online. She is very disgusted with the routine of selling flower accounts on Douyin. Although a former colleague reminded her to spread more publicity in her Moments, she still felt that she was “not thick-skinned enough”. In the end, Dai Jing chose the most primitive way to get customers – setting up a street stall. She also designed a “National Ten Cities Settlement Plan” for herself. As a result, stalls all over the country failed due to the epidemic. When she set up a stall for the third time in Beijing, she was confiscated by the city management and fined 100 yuan.
The repeated outbreak of the epidemic has had the greatest impact on small and medium-sized brick-and-mortar stores. In June 2022, a friend who studied flower art could not get out of the community, so Dai Jing helped to remove the friend’s flower shop. She no longer expects to run a small physical store immediately, but set aside a room at home as a flower room, and only accepts online orders and community group purchase orders.
The hard work of selling flowers is concrete. Once, when she received an event business order, she couldn’t wait for the flowers in Yunnan. She went out at 6 am and took the subway from the West Third Ring Road to the flower market outside the Northeast Fifth Ring Road. It was the morning rush hour when I returned to the subway station, and Dai Jing squeezed in hard with a bouquet of seven bouquets. On Valentine’s Day 2022, she made 40 bouquets in a row. When I got on a shared bicycle when I got home, I felt that the handlebars were crooked. Replaced one, still crooked. “It’s over! It’s not about the car!” As he talked about Dai Jingle: because he has been working with his left hand, “I feel ‘hemiplegia’.”
Internet is not everything
If his company can go public successfully, Chen Xi will experience another “great increase in wealth”. The sudden suspension of the listing made the value of his options shrunk by half, and the realization time is still in the future. “There are some things that I can’t push myself.” Since then, he has wanted to leave. In the seventh year, he observed that the Internet used to attract “the elites at the top of the society” through high salaries. Later, “the water injection was relatively high, and the money went down, but people were not as elite as before.”
When Wang Cola resigned from Kuaishou, three-quarters of his options had not been redeemed. At the current price, it was worth more than 10 million yuan. He thought clearly about leaving, “For those who really want to leave, the door is closed lightly.”
Before leaving, he wrote a thousand-word article exhorting the management to “cherish the hard-won career.” “Although I’m gone, I hope everyone can stick to Kuaishou’s simple desire to make the product well.” He said.
After posting the article, he walked away and quickly moved out of Beijing.
The Internet industry once enjoyed all the praise, advanced, flat, high efficiency, and good welfare. It is the industry that has created the most intensively large companies and millionaires in the past 20 years. Yang Xiao (pseudonym), who was attracted from the consulting industry in the past, was once attracted by the booming Internet industry. Less than two years after joining Tencent, he returned to the consulting company. At Tencent, he saw the other side of the Internet.
The first is to rush to report to the top: if something is done but not reported, it is equivalent to not doing it; if something is done, it is reported by other teams, that is the result of other teams; if something is not done well, but the report is good, the result is still good of. Employees scrape together various numbers to cope with KPIs. In a project, different departments will count the same performance benefit as their own, and they all seem to have completed the indicators, but due to repeated statistics, it is difficult for most departments to complete the revenue and growth indicators. Frequent business changes and lack of feedback also let him down. After working overtime for three months to make a result, the boss suddenly said, change direction.
The reason why Yang Xiao left the Internet company was because he judged that if he stayed in a big Internet company, he was less likely to be promoted. Back in the consulting industry where salary increases every year and upgrades every few years, he has a stronger sense of certainty and feels that he is doing more practical things. This year, when the Internet company’s business and team shrank, Yang Xiao was even more grateful for his choice – his original department was one of the hardest hit areas for Tencent’s layoffs.
Leaving the Internet and seeing the macro-operational logic of various industries in the whole society, former employees are more aware that although the Internet is creative and influential, the Internet is not everything.
Ren Xinyi, a former Xiaomi employee, insisted on going to Beijing despite her parents’ opposition when she graduated from college, and only worked as an Internet product manager. Even if her resume is not passed, she will go directly to “Pa Mian” – at that time, large companies will open up special interview channels to welcome young people who dare to fight for it. With the thought of “if they don’t meet me, they will lose a talent”, whenever she sees an opportunity to open a small opening, she confidently rushes up to hold it open.
In 2016, when Ren Xinyi transferred to join Xiao Ai’s start-up team, she only had one year of work experience, and she had to learn AI and hardware from scratch. The general manager and the product director sat with her in an office of less than 15 square meters, and “just tilted his head and said” any task. She is responsible for the design of five or six important basic functions by herself, and half of them have become the top 10 users with frequency after going online. In July 2018, Xiao Ai was only listed for one year and four months, and the monthly active devices exceeded 30 million units, which were accumulated and awakened. More than 5 billion times. That was the happiest and most fulfilling time for her to join the Internet company.
After the product has taken the first step beyond expectations, it will only switch to the second stage more quickly – commercialization. The principle of making a product by an individual cannot influence the strategy of the company. In 2019, the brand icons of each advertiser began to appear next to the basic function interface. Advertising content is also embedded, for example, say “take me for a ride” to the speaker, and it will recommend you to buy a Ford Escape.
In 2020, Ren Xinyi left Xiaomi, and the AI field is no longer popular. When I returned to my hometown of Hangzhou, there were only Ali and “other companies”, and choosing Ali was “long past the best time to join.” Hangzhou Byte and Kuaishou poached her, but the salary of the same rank is only 80% of Beijing’s. She lamented that if she had been born a few years earlier, she would have received “something that better matches her abilities and ambitions.”
To be fair, Ren Xinyi is already lucky. When she started recruiting herself in 2018, graduate degrees accounted for 90% of her resume. It was hard for 211 undergraduates like her to have a good chance in front of Dachang.
In 2021, she chose to become a full-time insurance broker. The insurance industry is ideal for her now: unlimited salary, “being your own boss”, and fulfilling career ambitions. She also found that many Internet people in their 30s are looking for a new way recently, and she has to “make a hole in advance”.
The insurance industry brought her into contact with outstanding people from all walks of life, and re-understood the “normal” created by the big factories.
She once chatted with a doctor client and asked him how your industry can achieve an annual salary of millions. The doctor said that those with an annual salary of one million are in the surgical department of the provincial tertiary hospital, and they have to work for at least 10 years after graduating with a doctorate. Measured from the perspective of the Internet, the ROI is very low. Internet people used to change their jobs to increase their salary and get options, but some doctors have to start anew at the grassroots level of the new department when they change jobs, and can only achieve normal income after half a year to a year.
Internet people mocked themselves as “workers” and “social animals”, but some doctors once talked about heart palpitations when they were woken up by a phone call in the middle of the night, being scolded by irrational patients’ family members, and they couldn’t take care of their family members when they were busy — in her opinion , Internet people do not have to face negative emotions about life, old age, sickness and death at work, it is already considered “comfortable and lucky”.
She also sees that not all industries are as urgent as the Internet. When she was still in the Internet industry, young people around her rarely stayed in a company for more than 5 years. However, one of her clients in the investment industry has not changed jobs for 7 years. She is very confident in the subdivision direction she has chosen. She feels that she can work for a long time, and age is not a problem. He listened to Ren Xinyi to say that it was normal to get off work at 90 o’clock before, and said in shock, “I thought you said overtime work was until 7 o’clock.”
When they were in Beijing, Ren Xinyi and her husband’s friends were all young people from big Internet companies who served tens of millions of users’ products. They have a high degree of self-recognition and believe that “the Internet is very powerful, we are doing the latest things in China and creating the most services and value”. Every time she meets, she talks to her AI counterparts about new hardware products and how to implement in-vehicle scenarios. The Internet discourse system invisibly separates her from “outsiders”.
The longer she changed careers, the more Ren Xinyi liked her current work and life, and people from different industries expanded her outlook on life. “It made a difference to me, who was once absolute,” she said.
Now, she was seeing the logic of the wider world at work.
(Chen Xi and Yang Xiao are pseudonyms in the text, and Wang Kele and Feng Miao are their nicknames during their employment.)
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