Original link: https://macshuo.com/?p=1889
AI drawing software Midjourney is considered a leader in this wave of AIGC. Recently, I have been watching the growth story of this company. With 11 full-time employees and 0 financing, it has accumulated more than 10 million users and 100 million US dollars in revenue in one year.
When I participated in Hammer’s entrepreneurship, I really liked opening and closing, and hoped to have the largest scale. However, from Hammer to Geek Time, and then to Mowen Xidong, my thinking changed. Scale is not important, and small companies can also do it. event.
Midjourney was founded in 2021. The founder, David Holz, is a typical technical man. Before that, he also co-founded Leap Motion, a company in the VR field, as CTO, mainly researching gesture tracking technology.
Let’s start with the story.
At the beginning of its establishment, Leap Motion attracted much attention, and quickly obtained more than 40 million US dollars in financing within three years. The team was proud and wanted to make some products that could change the world. Later, Apple proposed to acquire Leap Motion. But Holz felt that the other party’s bid was too low, and that Apple without Jobs had no innovation. He didn’t want to work for those people. He wanted to create an innovative new company by himself.
In 2013, Leap Motion successively released several of its own products, including PC and VR, but they were all moderate and did not cause much splash in the market. This does not bode well for startups.
The market feedback was not good, and the growth could not meet expectations. Leap Motion naturally could not get new financing. But it’s hard to do without money. Their ability to produce blood is not enough, and they need money to support the team and continue to develop new products. As a result, the company reluctantly laid off employees, and excellent employees were lost one after another, which seemed to have entered a downward channel.
Holz and another founder led the team to continue to toss, which is also the normal state of entrepreneurship, and it takes a process to do things right. Leap Motion revisited the company’s early mistakes, adjusted its strategy, and continued to explore the interaction mode between humans and computers in the future.
But judging from market feedback, their business has not improved much. Until 2019, it was acquired by another company in the same industry at a low price.
The first story is over, and a new legend has begun.
Holz later founded Midjourney. This time, he does not raise funds, does not pursue team size, and pays more attention to the company’s profitability. These business ideas should be his response to the first period of entrepreneurial experience that was not successful.
I participated in Smartisan’s entrepreneurship, and independently created the product and brand of Geek Time. Now I’ve come out to make Mowen Xidong and Mowen Sticky Notes. Many ideas can find resonance from Midjourney. Perhaps many successful startups in the future will be similar to Midjourney.
Why?
1. The correct solution is to have a small but good entrepreneurial team. Fewer people does not mean doing small things. Midjourney achieved 13 million users within a year with 11 employees, and annual revenue of 100 million US dollars. I am also starting a business, and I often tell myself that limited resources are a good thing. Limited resources will constantly force the team to think about what is most important.
2. When operating Leap Motion, Holz has a high probability of being coerced by capital. When someone else invests in you, you must consider exiting, and exiting will most likely rely on IPO. But for entrepreneurial teams, too much focus on results and growth will cause the team to lose its original intention and deform its actions. If you have the strength, you don’t need to take financing, and you don’t need to recruit so many people at the beginning, just take your time. It’s also a new, common-sense way to start a business.
3. In the process of starting Leap Motion, Holz has accumulated a lot of trust and appreciation for his contacts. When Midjourney needed 10,000 GPUs, some friends gave generously. Therefore, craftsmanship, influence and connections are all important. Don’t favor one person over another.
4. Holz said that he left Leap Motion to start Midjourney in order to change the environment, because he didn’t want to stay in a big company backed by venture capital, and hoped that he could do cool projects and have fun in the next 10 years. And a small team can focus more on what he wants to do. After all, they don’t have the pressure of sales, and they don’t have the idea of becoming a listed company. All you have to do is do what you like.
5. Without relying on financing, the team needs to consider profitability earlier. Many entrepreneurial teams in the past would do user growth first, and then make income when they are almost done. But Midjourney has no money. When they design products, the first step is to think about how to make money. These days, don’t take pride in starting a business and how much money I raised.
6. Midjourney’s profit model is very simple, subscription system, monthly or annual payment, a total of three levels: basic, standard, advanced. There is no free version anymore. The charging model of the product, the simpler the better.
7. Don’t pursue innovation from 0. Midjourney’s model was originally an open source model based on CLIP and Diffusion, which was trained on public data, and then quickly launched the Open Beta version to occupy users’ minds. Don’t be obsessed with cleanliness. It is an ability to quickly learn from other people’s experience.
8. Midjourney has only 11 full-time employees. but you know what? They also have 60+ part-time Discord operations. For some jobs that can be standardized and have no barriers, it is an idea to use part-time jobs to get them done. Do not multiply entities unless necessary.
9. Know what is important and what is not, and dare to choose. Up to now, Midjourney has neither an independent app nor a website, and all interactions with users are on Discord. If you, dare to do this? Don’t grab your eyebrows and beards, and don’t pursue perfection. “In the long run, Midjourney will have its own website, its own user interface, but now the company doesn’t need to spend time building the entire user interface.” This is Holz’s judgment.
10. However, it is not clear from the beginning that it is carried in Discord. After user testing they realized that 90% of people didn’t know how to tell it what they wanted, so they added a teaching element. Later, I found that many people don’t like to draw alone, and prefer to play with friends. They realized that Midjourney is a social thing, adding social elements. “The most important part of building a product is being open to discovering the true nature of things.”
11. “The biggest limitation of technology is not scale, cost or speed, but how people interact with it, which fundamentally determines what we can do.” The operating system and the various software on it are the way we interact with computers now , but looking at history, from instructions to keyboards, to touch screens, dialog boxes, voice, and even gestures, the lower the threshold for human-machine interaction, the more things can be done, and the deeper the liberation of productivity.
12. AI is not a replica of the real world, but an extension of human imagination. What Midjourney does is to help people expand their imagination. The command to write prompt is “/imagine”. Following this direction, I think Midjourney will become a productivity tool in the design field. This wave of AIGC products should all go in the direction of productivity tools to have a future.
13. Imagination is really important. Zhang Yiming said something before, “Empathy is the foundation, imagination is the sky, and logic and tools are in the middle. A/B testing is just a tool, and it cannot measure user needs. Empathy is the important foundation.” .If there is no empathy, the products made must have no soul and cannot meet the needs of users. But empathy alone is not enough, so that only useful products can be made. To make colorful products, imagination is very important .”
14. Large-scale model technology will not replace human beings, it is an extension of human beings.
15. Never try to design a complete product experience out of thin air, you just need to find ten seemingly unrelated experiences, choose the coolest three, put them together, and then improve the details to make people feel that it is It’s good and I like it. This is how a good product is made step by step.
16. If a tool wants to live well and live for a long time, it must always embed itself into the user’s business process. Simply put, it must either help him make money or save him money. The generated pictures are very commercial, which is why Midjourney stands out from other tools. The simple prompt can generate beautiful pictures with obvious sci-fi features, which can significantly improve the efficiency of design users with a large number of users and strong willingness to pay. Start by impacting creativity and end by impacting productivity.
Attached picture: Mr. Chen Xiaowei said, using AI to draw the portrait of Li Xiaojuan, the heroine of my novel “Sparkle Like a Diamond”. Finally know what she looks like.
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