Let's take a look at what some great companies did in the first year:
June, 5438+February, 2007, Lei Jun left his job two months after listing in Jinshan, and began to invest to find the direction of entrepreneurship. In his own words, he "started carrying a sack of cash to see who was doing the mobile Internet".
In 2008, Lei Jun and Huang Zhang became good friends and often went to Zhuhai and Huang Zhang to chat.
At the beginning of 2009, introduced by Kai-Fu Lee, Lei Jun met Lin Bin, then vice president of Google China Engineering Research Institute, and later became Lei Jun's entrepreneurial partner and president of Xiaomi Company.
On June+10, 5438, Lei Jun formally invited Lin Bin to start a business in partnership, and Xiaomi's entrepreneurial journey officially set sail.
20 10 March, small company registered.
In April, Xiaomi Company opened and developed some small APP practitioners: drivers' secrets, charming browsers, Xiaomi sharing and so on. How's it going? You haven't heard of these applications now, have you? Here's the thing. After the success of many companies, the light of success masks their original struggle for survival.
In June, MIUI was established.
Since then, after more than eight months of exploration and preparation, Lin Bin started business cooperation at the invitation of Lei Jun, and they finally launched the core products that became the pillar of the company. And if you want to calculate the time to find the direction before starting a business, it will take two and a half years.
In February 2005, three former employees of PayPal set up a dating website called ……YouTube! Yes, YouTube started as a dating site.
In June, the website ran for several months with few users.
They tried to advertise on Craigslist in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, asking girls to upload videos introducing themselves, paying $20, and no one came!
Instead of dating videos, users uploaded strange cat and dog videos. As a result, the team simply gave up the direction of making friends videos and began to transform. In this way, YouTube has really become a video sharing website.
In June 2004, ivan Wilhemlms, who founded Blogger.com and sold it to Google, and his neighbor Noah Glass established the podcast subscription platform ODEO. But a few months later, Apple released the podcast radio function of iTunes, and a third-party podcast platform like odeo could not survive at all.
In February 2006, Jack Dorsey, who was just an ordinary engineer at that time, discussed the development direction of the company with the founder. He suggested that you can make a product and share the status by sending text messages. He proposed this product six years ago (2000) and drew a simple wireframe.
The founders were not very optimistic about this idea, but they also agreed that Jack Dorsey should do it.
In March of this year, Twitter was launched.
In April this year, Twitter was spun off from Odeo, with Jack Dorsey as the CEO.
Twitter has been tepid for nearly a year. Until the following March.
In March 2007, at SXSW Music Festival, Twitter became popular, and the amount of information per day surged from 20,000 to 60,000. There are more than 60 thousand users.
Since then, Twitter has exploded.
It can be seen that it is not an easy task to go through repeated exploration from starting a business to the real outbreak of business. These are still successful companies. After long-term exploration, more companies failed to find a breakthrough point, and then they died.
It is important to realize this.
First, travel light. Don't invest too much money in the exploration period before the business breaks out. If the team cost is too high at this time, your cash consumption will be high and the runway you run will be short.
Secondly, we should be prepared to screen entrepreneurial ideas repeatedly. Good entrepreneurial ideas often need long-term screening to get really good ones. As Paul Gramham, the father of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, said, "In the worst case, you will spend a year, not just a weekend".