-"Entrepreneur"
The premise of breaking the rules is to fully understand the rules and discover their limitations, so as to seize the opportunity to open up a new track.
One: What rules are broken based on customers?
Chris Stang, who broke the rule of "following the general trend of the industry". Chris founded a food and beverage guide on 20 14, which is a bit like the public comment used in our country. At that time, the common practice of this kind of content entrepreneurship was to attract a group of fans by using mainstream social media such as Facebook, and then "drain" them by regularly putting content to them. But Chris didn't do it. Instead, he chose to send text messages.
How to send? Chris's team encourages users to send text messages to a special number and ask their own questions, such as "I live in the East Side and want to take my wife to eat Italian food. Is there a good restaurant nearby? " The exclusive customer service will reply to the SMS soon to give a recommendation.
Don't think that texting is out of date in the era of mobile Internet. Many people really think that sending a text message can get the answer, which is much more convenient than searching a lot of information on the Internet. Moreover, through the questions raised by users, the company can better understand the pain points of users' needs and can deliver content more accurately.
By sending short messages, infatuation started quickly, and its service has now expanded to 35 cities in the United States, and it has also acquired competitor Zagat. So why not use Facebook first? Chris explained that relying on Facebook traffic is actually very dangerous. Once the algorithm changes, the traffic will be affected immediately. More importantly, through the number of clicks, you can't know what the real needs of users are, which is a huge loss for a service company.
Charlotte Zhao, a Korean-American, broke the rule of "using the existing customer base to promote new products quickly". In America, Charlotte Zhao is a beauty star. She founded Glam, a well-known beauty e-commerce website in Stéphanie Sokolinsk, and introduced Korean skin care products to the United States, with an annual profit of more than 1 billion dollars. However, when Charlotte founded a new skin care brand, Then I Met You, on 20 18, she made a decision not to sell this new product on the Stéphanie Sokolinsk Glam website, that is, she didn't use the existing huge customer base to promote the new product!
It seems incredible to outsiders, but Charlotte Zhao's reason is: Then I met you developed in the United States, not a Korean brand, nor sold on Glam, so as not to confuse consumers. She would rather let the new brand be self-reliant and gather a group of consumers who really agree with the brand connotation. So, Charlotte adopted another marketing strategy. Before the release of the new product, she found some well-known beauty bloggers to build momentum and quickly attracted tens of thousands of fans on Instagram. The product came out, and guess what? It sold out immediately.
Brian Kelley, the rule he broke was "Don't let users know your real profit model". Why? Avoid unnecessary trouble. For example, if you are making an official WeChat account to share high-quality goods, it is likely that users will feel uncomfortable when they find that every order under the link you provide will be refunded by the merchants. Brian was stumped by this question when he started his business. What he does is a blog that teaches others how to use credit card points effectively, and has a group of loyal readers. However, his only income is to get kickbacks from credit card companies. Do you want to risk letting users know about this way of making money?
Brian's final choice is: tell the user.
He explained every link in the article. Sure enough, some users will complain, but most people don't care. Today, Brian's company has developed rapidly, with 8.8 million readers. Some large credit card companies even take the initiative to talk about cooperation when issuing new cards. In retrospect, Brian summed up the experience: trust your users, and users will trust you.
Two: What rules did you break based on yourself?
1.Andrew ustad, who broke the rule of "launching the least feasible product first". In Silicon Valley, this is a general rule. The so-called "minimum feasible product" is a prototype product with only the most core functions. According to this rule, it is best for an enterprise to make a lowest feasible product to market first, and then adjust and improve it through customer feedback. The benefits of doing this are obvious-you can try and make mistakes faster and reduce the risk of failure.
However, Andrew broke this rule. His entrepreneurial project is an enterprise-oriented office software. Do you know how long they developed in the early stage? Three years. Is to create a perfect product and then push it to the market. And the result? Software is very popular. Last year, the company's revenue reached $20 million, and it also received $654.38 billion in Series C financing.
Why not launch the least feasible product first? Andrew's explanation is that office software has its particularity, after all, it is commercial, and the cost will be high in case of error.
2. Matt Higgins, who founded a venture capital company called RSE Ventures, broke the rule of "listening to the voice of doubt". He has a famous saying: some wonderful ideas may be crazy in the eyes of others at first, so we should create space for these crazy ideas to take root. So he made a rule: a new idea must collect at least 10 supporting voices before it can be questioned.
One day, a man named Nicholas walked into Matt's office and showed him a PPT with a new idea about drone competition. This was whimsical at that time, because at that time, drones were just toys that people flew in the park. No one thought of using it to compare speed, but Matt saw business opportunities in it. According to the previous rules, Matt cleverly avoided the opposition and finally invested in this project. In just three years, the UAV racing league has developed into a global sports event, which is broadcast to 75 countries around the world through ESPN sports channel. At the beginning, the protection of this "crazy idea" made Matt's investment get a huge return.