An interesting phenomenon is that people who search for the keyword "from 0 to 1" in search engines are mainly distributed in the first-tier cities in the picture. This also proves from the side that if you want to start a business, it is better to go to Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hangzhou. Chengdu, Wuhan, Nanjing, Chongqing and Suzhou are also very good choices.
Since the publication of the book, many bosses have emphasized the importance of "from 0 to 1". The speaker was unintentional, the listener was intentional, and he listened a lot. "From 0 to 1" has become the first creed of many small white entrepreneurs: if my product is not a brand-new thing, then it has no meaning of existence.
I have always believed that all views can only be the perspective of one person when thinking about problems at most, and can never be regarded as the creed when starting a business. Once you take one sentence and one logic as your creed, in the face of various difficulties, it is equivalent to putting a shackle on yourself and losing the ability to respond flexibly, which will lead to failure. If Han Xin takes "a man is a gentleman, you can kill him but not humiliate him" as his life creed, and does not tolerate "the humiliation of his legs", there will be no great achievements in the future.
Many entrepreneurs have the creed of "from 0 to 1", which will bring the shackles of "innovation" and make entrepreneurs fall into a strange circle of innovation for the sake of innovation, focusing only on "from 0 to 1" and ignoring "from 1 to n".
Any entrepreneur has only one purpose:
However, the development of the company is in stages, and the requirements for company managers, products and business models in different stages are very different. We can abstract the development of the company into three stages:
Entrepreneurs who only pay attention to "from 0 to 1" often think that as long as they do the first step, that is, the technology is innovative enough and the products are excellent enough, they can go smoothly until they go public. When they enter the development stage, they will also take the method of starting a business stage to act, which will lead to "capacity dislocation".
What is the most important ability at each stage?
Let's look at the first stage, from 0 to 1, from scratch. The most important thing at this stage is one word: fast. Also known as "quick trial and error". At this time, the founders and teams are required to be creative, work hard and try their best to find the foundation for the company's development. When the company's business model has passed the small-scale verification, the next step is to replicate and expand.
Replication and expansion is the second stage of the company's development. From 1 to N, the company's management mode will switch at this time, instead of rapid trial and error and iteration, it will pursue standardization and consistency. Because only by standardization can you achieve the consistency of products and services, and only by consistency can you finally copy and enlarge them. Big companies generally do very well in this respect, especially in details. For example, McDonald's French fries taste the same all over the world, because McDonald's has strict time control over French fries. How strict is it? Anything that has not been sold for more than three minutes must be dumped and cannot be sold to customers. You see, how much extra cost big companies have paid to make every "1" the same.
However, all replication and expansion are also limited. Speaking of ceilings, if we want to continue to grow, we must transform. This is a new stage, from n to N+ 1. At this stage, the behavior pattern of enterprises will change again, from running all the way to cross-border transformation. At this time, the founder's "restless" ability, as well as the efforts and creativity in the early stage of entrepreneurship are needed.
Many companies do well from "0 to 1", but once "from 1 to n", they often fail, because of the dislocation of their abilities. The required capacity from "1 to n" is as follows:
When you want to sell your products to more people, you have to reach out to these people and let them accept your products. This is the ability to radiate more users.
There is a premise to radiate more users-there are enough users for you to radiate.
Many times, the reason why a company can't do much is because its audience is too small, and naturally there are not so many users for you to contact. For example, it is difficult to do football training in China on the scale of basketball training. But if you change your mind and become a personal sports coach, your user base will expand a lot. At this time, you can use football as a selling point to cut into this subdivision, which has broad development space.
When you have a huge potential user base and want to expand the company's scale, the problem arises: where to find these users and how to make them accept your products? This involves channel construction ability, product adaptability and so on, so we won't start it, and we'll talk about it later.
"The ability of product standardization" can be said to be the top priority. There are thousands of English training institutions in China. Why is New Oriental the best? Or, where is the competitive advantage of New Oriental? The competitive advantage of New Oriental is that they have the best teacher training system. Through this system, he can ensure that teachers in New Oriental all over the country can make the content clear and clear around the main lecture notes. The courses you have heard are similar everywhere, and the teachers are near the average. This is to standardize the "teacher", a product that is difficult to standardize, which is very powerful. Because you have the ability of standardization, you can ensure that there is no difference in the products used by consumers, and consumers will think that your products are very stable. "Stability" is an important indicator of product quality.
Finally, the internal management ability. With the expansion of the company, the ability of employees varies greatly. It is very important to ensure that the ability differences between employees are not projected on the products.
It can be said that from "1 to n", as long as the founder has strong ability and tries to solve various problems, he can complete the initial work. But once you start leading a team, you need completely different abilities. This is a change from finishing the work by yourself to finishing the work by others. This change includes many aspects. Once you start leading the team, you can't always show off, just "you can't, get out of my way." In addition, your time allocation should also be changed: you must start to reduce the time spent on personal work and spend time on helping and encouraging subordinates; Design posts and assign tasks; Learn to let subordinates complete tasks and assess them regularly; But also to establish social relations and so on.
The so-called entrepreneurship is by no means as simple as it seems. Going to the end is not a good idea, but a process of self-cultivation and self-breakthrough. Anyone who succeeds in starting a business must have abilities, endowments, difficulties, transformation and commitment beyond ordinary people.
The main points of today's knowledge are as follows:
Thinking today:
In your impression, which companies do you think have "standardized" products that seem to be unable to be standardized?
Welcome to leave your thoughts.