1. Complaints: Discover low-risk entrepreneurial opportunities from complaints

In this section, we mainly talk about "complaints". The three major sources of inspiration for finding problems. In my opinion, the most important thing entrepreneurs should do when looking for problems is to often collect complaints. You need to see who is complaining about what things around you. This is a very important way to start a business. .

Many people get angry when they hear the word "complaining" and say, "This is negative energy", "People who complain often have no future" and "Don't complain". As everyone knows, when you say "no complaints", you may have missed out on a lot of wealth. You know, complaints are likely to contain good low-risk entrepreneurial opportunities.

Facebook was originally an internal product of Harvard University. I remember Mark Zuckerberg revealed in an interview that at that time he heard many classmates complaining that it was sometimes difficult to find the contact information of other classmates, and that there should be a Harvard roster (Facebook) instead of It is particularly difficult to promote this at the school level. Zuckerberg felt that he could do it faster and better than the school, and Facebook was the product of this complaint.

I can give you a few more examples around you. For example, people who often go out to do errands complain that "it's getting more and more difficult to take a taxi." Therefore, Didi Taxi and ***enjoy travel; morning and evening peak hours People who commute to and from work complain that "the distance from the subway entrance to work is too long, and they are often late." Therefore, ofo and Mobike have become the most popular bicycle sharing business. Although this project is currently in a difficult situation, I still think that Dai Wei and the others have indeed found a good entrepreneurial direction, but they are moving too fast; for example, people often complained in the past that "instant noodles are not delicious, they always have the same flavors, and eating them often is unhealthy", so there is Meituan and Ele.me have created the extremely popular Internet food delivery industry.

This is the entrepreneurial opportunity hidden in complaints. Whenever you hear someone complaining around you, you can think about whether it is possible to find a way forward from this complaint. It's best if you can think of a solution. It doesn't matter if you can't think of it. At least you have exercised your business sense and thinking skills.

Although there is no suitable solution to a certain complaint yet, with the development of the times, the emergence of certain emerging technologies may allow you to find a suitable solution. Start now, listen carefully to the voices of complaints around you, find out from these voices what customers really need, and then start solving them. Low-risk entrepreneurship sometimes starts simply like this.

Insight: In-depth insight into the life and soul of customers

After talking about complaints, let’s look at insights, which is the second source of inspiration for finding problems.

Many market opportunities cannot actually be obtained from people’s complaints, so insight is needed. Steve Jobs once said a rather classic saying: "We will not go out to do market research. Only bad products require market research."

Customers will always only need things they already know. , and the demand is mainly reflected in aspects such as better, more, faster, cheaper, etc. It is difficult to have other more demands. Back when everyone was using Nokia and Motorola mobile phones, did you ever think that a mobile phone only needed one button to perform all functions? You can't think of it at all. All you can think about is whether the quality of the mobile phone can be better, whether the battery can be more durable, whether the price can be cheaper, and whether the appearance can be more beautiful... It can be said that Nokia has achieved the ultimate in these aspects. However, it still lost to Jobs's disruptive innovation.

Jobs’ point of view comes from the famous saying of automobile magnate Henry Ford: “If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘a faster horse.’” In Cars Before it became popular, the most familiar means of transportation for people was horse-drawn carriages. If you ask a customer at this time, he will naturally say horse-drawn carriages, and no matter what, he cannot imagine a "four-wheeled steel monster".

Where do disruptive ideas like cars and iPhones come from? Ideas certainly don’t come from current customer complaints, but from the insights I’m going to highlight in this section.

What is insight? Insight is looking deep into a customer’s life and soul. You know your client better than you do and you bring yourself completely into his life. Only then can you gain insights into opportunities.

The risk factor of being Party B is extremely high

I wonder if you have read an old book from the 1990s called "The Art of Innovation" by one of the authors. One is Tom Kelly, the boss of IDEO, a well-known innovative design consulting company. IDEO was once the most creative company in the United States. They helped Apple design its first popular mouse, helped Wal-Mart design a stroller that was easy to operate and allowed children to sit in it, and helped Crest design a twist-and-turn cart. Toothpaste cap that can be broken off.

Having said this, let me give a reminder to entrepreneurs who are Party B. What IDEO does is Party B, and it is the best and most famous Party B in the world. However, every innovation it makes requires extremely high R&D costs, but it can only get a one-time return, and the risk factor is extremely high. . No matter how large the amount of this return is, it is still non-replicable. If you change Party A, you will have to do it all over again. Therefore, I have always believed that the business model of Party B is very dangerous. The day you run out of talents will be the day the company collapses.

2. Insight into the customer’s life and soul

Getting back to the subject, when Tom Kelly introduced the source of creativity, he focused on insight. In his opinion, customers are all "fools", or far inferior to him, because they don't know what they need. Tom Kelly's views have influenced a large number of people and made a lot of achievements.

Once, when Tom Kelly was giving a keynote speech on insight in Poland, an audience member rushed up to take a photo with him and bowed in thanks. Tom Kelly was puzzled and asked him why. This viewer explained: "I heard you say you need to have insight, so I did it when I got home, and I got rich soon."

What does this person do? He sells cold drinks at the train station. His business was very dull before. After listening to Tom Kelly's speech, he stood on the platform every day and observed passengers. As time went on, he really observed the doorways.

He found that before getting on the bus, many passengers would first take a look at his cold drink stand and then look at their watch. After looking at the watch, they would not buy a cold drink and just get on the bus and leave. But there is still one minute left after leaving the car, enough time for passengers to buy cold drinks. Why didn't the passengers do this? The reason is that humans are sometimes irrational. The irrationality here is caused by tension. Although there is still one minute left after leaving the car, it is clear that you can buy a cold drink, but under psychological stress, passengers tend not to make decisions.

I found the problem, how to solve it? This guy's solution is super simple, yet extremely effective. He spent 5 zlotys (the currency unit of Poland) in the supermarket to buy an accurate clock and placed it in front of the cold drink stand. It was such a simple move that doubled his sales of cold drinks. Passengers turn their heads before getting on the bus and can see the clock and drinks at a glance. When passengers can fully grasp the time, they will no longer be nervous, but choose to walk to the stall, look at the clock to buy a cold drink, and then get on the bus and leave.

An investment of 5 zlotys can be exchanged for doubled sales. The secret lies in insight. If entrepreneurs can master the skills of insight, they will find that there are too many entrepreneurial opportunities in life.

3. Experience: Forget your identity as a founder

Philip Kotler is known as the father of modern marketing. I like his words very much: "Strictly speaking, , there is no product at all, the only thing customers pay for is experience.” Because of this, I listed “experience” as the third source of inspiration for low-risk entrepreneurship.

The so-called experience is to forget your identity as a founder, treat yourself as an ordinary user, and try your own product yourself. The key to experience is to forget one's own abilities, background and identity. Zhang Xiaolong, the product manager of WeChat, has a point of view that is quite praised by colleagues in the industry. He calls it the "Xiaobai" mode, which means thinking like a "Xiaobai" on how to make products. This coincides with my philosophy.

Don’t get me wrong. In my opinion, “Xiaobai” has no insulting meaning.

There is no omniscient and omnipotent person in the world, and stories of "being born knowing" are always just legends. When faced with a field that they are not familiar with, people generally know nothing. After all, there are only a few experts. From this perspective, the vast majority of people are “noobs”.

The "curse of knowledge" will amplify entrepreneurial risks

One of the most common mistakes industry experts make is to place their position too high and value their personal feelings too much. They are so familiar with the industry that they have formed inertial thinking, artificially magnifying the risks of starting a business. I call it the "curse of knowledge" - when you have been immersed in a certain field for a long time, your mind is filled with too much professional knowledge. When you are young, it is easy to be burdened by this professional knowledge and think that others have the same professional qualities as yourself. This is a misunderstanding that must be avoided when starting a low-risk business.

Bill Gates is a business predecessor I have always admired. Without him, there would be no PC era. However, no one is perfect, and he also has obvious problems in experience. Windows is indeed a cross-generational product, but it is certainly not a perfect product. There are various loopholes and bugs. It needs to be updated every few months, otherwise the running speed will be greatly reduced and the user experience will be affected.

Why is this? The reason is actually very simple. For Bill Gates, all bugs in Windows are not bugs. He himself is a developer. For some small bugs, he can solve them by himself. Even if he doesn't have the time, he can just make a phone call and have Microsoft's senior software engineers come to his door to help him solve problems. Ordinary Windows users like me don't have this treatment. If I encounter a bug, all I can do is complain. Unless the system crashes, no one can call professionals to come to your door to help you solve a few minor operational problems. After all, the current labor costs and door-to-door fees are really not cheap.

"Yangchun Baixue" does sound nice, but "lower people" can't understand it. Your "uniqueness" may appear to others as "unnecessary". The company needs to make a profit, but "lower people" don't buy it. Where does the profit come from? What is honey to me is arsenic to him, this is what they say.

Experience the product from the user's perspective

I have emphasized many times on various occasions: experience is a very important link for entrepreneurs.

When you are developing products, please take off your halo first. Never look at your product from the perspective of the founder, but treat yourself as an ordinary consumer. If you cannot think from the user's perspective, you will naturally make a mistake - thinking that users will seriously learn and use every product you make. This is a taboo for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs must have the ability to quickly switch to the perspective of "novice users" and learn to experience it themselves first, and then let your employees and their families experience it too.

P&G has set up a large supermarket covering an area of ??several thousand square meters at its headquarters to simulate the daily operating conditions of a general supermarket. In this supermarket, P&G employees only do one thing, which is to keep placing P&G products in various ways, horizontally, vertically, this way, that way. What they think about every day is how to put them more reasonably. , can better attract customers’ attention and make them pay. Not only do they do their own research, they also randomly invite some people to go shopping from time to time, and then secretly observe the purchasing methods of these people to see whether changes in the placement of goods will affect the customer's purchasing experience.

This is the opportunity for business. Opportunities for business come from observation and experience, and from constantly looking for the best solutions. When making any product, whether it is an Internet product, a formaldehyde removal product, or a product for stretching, you must thoroughly implement the three sources of inspiration I mentioned - looking for complaints, insights and experiences. Only in this way can you create a product that truly solves the problem and find a real way out for low-risk entrepreneurship.