Entrepreneurship has always been the ambition of many young people. This article shares Lu Songsong's bitter and unknown past at the beginning of his entrepreneurship. Compared with the experience of the big men, the difficulties we encounter today are so insignificant. Come on, young people.
I started my business after 16 years in Beijing. It has been three years since then, but my relationship with entrepreneurship started earlier. I remember that it was the winter of the beginning of 2015. I had a hot pot in my college dorm room, played tricks, scolded many entrepreneurs at that time to my roommates, and then wrote an article on my blog, Tell me why I won't start a business in the future.
In the following three years, I basically violated every description in my "reasons for not starting a business". At first, I felt guilty when I hit myself in the face, but later I was calm: after all, people can't step into the same river twice.
In my senior year, I developed a competitive product tracking tool. This tool made me a lot of hot pot money in my senior year, and also let me meet the first partner. When he asked me to come to Beijing, I almost refused without hesitation, because I felt that "going to Beijing to start a business after graduation" sounded like quitting to open a coffee shop. To be honest, In fact, these two things are not hypocritical and worthy of respect, but I was thin skinned at that time and always felt so embarrassed.
Fortunately, although I missed many things because of my thin skin, I finally mustered the courage to fight for some of the most important things.
In the summer of 16 years, I came to Beijing with large bags and small bags, the naivety and many fantasies peculiar to my new year, and a cat called Tea. Three years later, the cat gained ten kilograms. It seems that nothing else is left now.
The first stop in Beijing is Beijing Pixel. This community is called Huilong Temple in the east of Beijing. It is divided into two districts, north and south. There are 22 buildings, with 40000 people living in total. Each building of Beijing Pixel is huge. The first floor is full of merchants. Almost every building has convenience stores, small restaurants, barber shops, etc. You can stay in any building for a month without going out of the community or even relying on takeout.
From September 2016 to March 2017, two colleagues and I spent half a year in the community relying on Shaxian snacks and braised chicken rice to work hard for the first serious product in our lives.
My plan is simple: optimize the product made in my senior year thoroughly, and then increase the price from 49 yuan a month to 6000 yuan a month. Then I only need to find 100 customers, and I can earn 7.2 million yuan a year.
The plan went wrong later. One of the main problems is that we can't find 100 customers. In fact, we can't find one customer.
In addition to this main problem, I think the others are very good. Although the living room as an office soon became a disorderly place from the above picture, we filled the refrigerator with Coca Cola and Oriental leaves, and built an Xbox. We don't talk about dreams, nor do we have any rules of order. We are simply driven by the power of "wanting to create something".
Sometimes we will play a few survival games before sunset, sometimes we will write code late at night, and sometimes I will cook. However, the cooking skill is not good, and it is often a pot of chowder, stewing potatoes, pork, noodles, cabbage, tofu, chicken breast in the pot, but enough to make everyone sweat.
From my current point of view, the situation at that time was very dangerous. It was more like a family rather than a real thing. I also called myself an entrepreneur at that time, but compared with entrepreneurs in the real sense, the difference was just like the cadres of the Student Union and the cadres of the Standing Committee of the Provincial Party Committee.
Our product was launched shortly after the Spring Festival in 2017, and then I began to travel around, not only looking for customers, but also looking for investment institutions. These two things finally turned into one thing: continuous harvest of rejected experience. So far, I have experienced both summer and winter in Beijing.
At the end of the spring of 2017, I had almost spent all my money. One afternoon, I sat in a chair and thought about what I had spent hundreds of thousands on: we have a team of three people, a cluster system of data collection and analysis that we are proud of, and a front-end presentation model. It can't be said that the money has been completely wasted, but it is just relying on such things, It's really hard to make money.
I have to say that my luck is really good. When I was about to end my first venture with a little reluctance but not much pain, my friend introduced me to an investment institution and found that venture capital is very thoughtful and wants to use comprehensive data to optimize investment decisions.
Although we can't sell and our products are simple, we have accumulated a lot of experience in data capture, data cleaning, data structuring, etc., and we still have a lot of data on hand, perhaps because we think our technology is good, perhaps because I look honest, perhaps because I did good things from small to large in return. In short, We got the first real investment in a small amount, but it helped us continue
