Which Is The Most Important Thing To Start A Business?

For entrepreneurs, there are two things that others can not do, that is to find people and products.

Yesterday, QQ's Ma Huateng came to chat with us about the importance of the founders' attention to the success of products. Even though QQ has been so successful and its market capitalization is nearly ten billion US dollars, he still spends a lot of time on products.

It sounds simple and natural to me, but now many of the founders are unable to do so.

An entrepreneur must manage too much, products, markets, sales, finance, technology, finding people, frying people, public relations...

Everything needs to worry about, but you can't do everything personally.

For a start-up enterprise, I think the most important resource is the time and energy of the founders. How to allocate these two resources is the most important problem.

So, for entrepreneurs, what things can be allowed to decentralization, and which ones do we need to do with our own hands?

I think there are two things that others can't do, that is to find people and products.

It's too critical to find a good person.

I have written many articles about how companies should recruit people, whether they should find "turtles" or "woodlouse", and how they can not find satisfactory people.

I just want to add one sentence: what kind of person to decide determines what kind of culture the company will have, so entrepreneurs must find their own people.

Finding a good person allows him to do many things on the market, sales, finance, technology, public relations and so on, and find a good person to assure him of one department of the company.

He's better than the boss. That's great!

The second thing we must pay attention to is products, and products are the soul of a company.

We look at the world's leading products, AMAZON, APPLE and NINTENDO. Their CEO or founders are all nuts, who focus on products and never give up their power.

As far as my own experience is, I have a lot of power in the product when I do eBay.

In 2002, eBay's product should be able to score 75 points, which is directly related to the founder's daily intervention.

When the platform moved to eBay in 2003, the products became worse and worse.

It often takes nine weeks for a website to change a word, and a team that needs nine months in the headquarters to change a function needs to be hit by a change in the company's cultural atmosphere.

Good product is not an easy task. It needs to understand the needs of many departments: understand the target users and their needs from the market, balance the different opinions of the sales department and the marketing department, and decide what the technical department should do and what can not be done.

Market: what kind of people are our existing customers?

What are their needs?

Who are our potential users?

What are their needs?

In many cases, people (especially managers) pay too much attention to existing customers and neglect potential customers.

People will also focus too much on the needs expressed by users (Market Research), ignoring the needs of users who do not know how to express them.

Sales: what products are sold and easy to sell?

Some companies have the same target market and sales users; some companies, users (mainly products users) and customers (pay people) are different, or even the opposite, how to meet and balance different needs?

Technology: which products are easier to do and which are harder to do?

How to balance and trade-off between time and function?

The technology department will often say that the functions of the market department can not be achieved, or if it is to achieve such a function, it will take a long time.

Sometimes the technology department has a good idea to make a dizzy new function, but the marketing department does not want it.

Who should we trust?

Customer service: how should we pay attention to users' feedback and problems?

What are 1% of the unimportant users, what are the requirements of our core users, or the potential core users' problems? (solving this problem, he becomes the core user)?

In short, products are the most important thing for a company except candidates. An entrepreneur should take the company's long-term development as the goal, weigh the interests and prejudices of various departments (even inertia or inertia), and make decisions with their own intuition.