In an Internet environment that has lost its dividend, two ways to find a “breakthrough point”

Based on my observations and thoughts in recent times, in the Internet business environment that has lost its dividends, there are two more effective ways of thinking, or paths, that may be very valuable. On a smaller scale, it can help you continuously achieve personal value-added and improvement. On a larger scale, it may even create a good or even "great" business opportunity for you in the current business era that has lost the "demographic dividend" and " traffic dividend".

The two methods have different thinking directions and paths. From a business perspective, the barriers to success are also different. Let’s talk about them one by one.

The first method, let's call it the S-type method (don't ask where this name comes from).

To be more specific, its thinking direction is this: if there is a problem in your current work or industrial chain that has a solution but is extremely costly , can you use new technologies or simpler and more crude means to greatly reduce its cost, thereby improving its efficiency, allowing it to be quickly popularized and developed, and continuously optimized, consolidated and iterated during the development process?

For example, in our office since the second half of last year, someone came and placed something like this:

This thing is a self-service snack vending shelf. Simply put, you can buy all kinds of snacks directly through it. The way to pay is to scan the QR code on WeChat to complete the payment, and then someone will come to replenish the stock regularly.

Its benefits are obvious: it meets the snack consumption needs of office white-collar workers, so that they don't have to go downstairs to convenience stores such as 7-11 when they want to buy some snacks to relax, and they don't even need a cashier to pay. Also, a snack shelf was put directly into the office. When a group of foodies see a pile of snacks in front of them every day, do you think they would be willing to buy more?

Has there been anything like this before? Yes, for example, the vending machines that we are all familiar with. I have the impression that Ubox has always been making this. But the problem with vending machines is that they cost too much. A vending machine must cost at least several thousand or tens of thousands of yuan, right? Therefore, if you assume that the average cost of each unit is RMB 10,000, and you want to deploy it in 1,000 companies, the hard cost investment will be at least RMB 10 million. Assuming that each vending machine sells goods worth 100 yuan per day and has a gross profit of 25%, it will take you 400 days to recover the basic cost, not to mention other costs such as maintenance and loss.

Such high costs mean that it is difficult to be rolled out and popularized quickly, and also make its financial return model look far less "sexy."

So what about the self-service vending racks we saw above?

You can see that this thing is super simple. Let's assume that its cost is 600 yuan. If it doesn't sell as well as a vending machine, for example, it can only sell 50 yuan worth of goods a day, and the gross profit is still 25%, that is, it can earn 12.5 yuan a day, then how long will it take us to recover the cost?

The answer is: 48 days, almost one and a half months.

Moreover, a product that costs 600 yuan means that you only need to spend tens of thousands of yuan to start and continue with the project.

Of course, you may ask: What if things are stolen from such open self-service shelves?

This problem is bound to be unpreventable, just like there is nothing we can do if someone takes a shared bike home, so it is actually still a matter of loss rate. But to a certain extent, I guess there are some ways to reduce the loss rate, such as strengthening the textual reminders on the shelves, installing a camera (even if this camera is just for show), etc.

Let's assume that the loss rate is around 10%. For a self-service shelf like this, basically at worst the payback period can still be around 2.5 months.

Although both are "self-service vending", the key difference between vending machines and self-service vending shelves is that one costs 10,000 yuan, while the other may only cost a few hundred yuan.

In fact, looking back, the breakthrough point when this wave of shared bicycles started was that they began to find a way to replace the extremely costly "bicycle storage stations".

From a business perspective, the key to success under this path lies in two points:

• Can you find a solution in an existing industry chain that is “lower cost, simpler, but also easier to expand and replicate”?
• Since the cost is low and the solution is simple, once the solution is seen by others, it is easy for others to quickly copy and follow up. In other words, you have no barriers in the solution itself. Therefore, the biggest barrier at this time may only be your team's execution ability. That is: Can you quickly capture the market through offline marketing , capital operations and other means, run fast enough, and quickly cultivate user habits and user dependence?

Now let's talk about another method, which we call the T-type method (again, don't ask where this name comes from).

The thinking mode of path B is this: if there is a problem in the current work or industrial chain that everyone thinks is difficult to solve, are you willing to spend a long time (if it is at work, it may be several months, if it is in business, it may be at least 1-2 years) to work hard on it and try to solve it. Therefore, assuming that this problem can really be solved by you, you have a whole new opportunity.

Therefore, the thinking mode under this path may often be to find the key problem first, and then think hard about how to solve it.

For example, a few days ago when I was communicating with Zhao Shuai, the first product manager of Microsoft XiaoIce, and Huang Zhao, the VP of Turing Robotics, they mentioned one thing - normally, the existing chatbots are very easy to kill the conversation when interacting with people. It is easy to fall into a dead loop after a few sentences, and the conversation cannot continue.

So, “sky” is easy to be talked about to death, how to solve this problem?

They all discovered that if the robot could constantly throw new topics to people during the human-computer interaction process, the conversation would suddenly become "interesting" and could continue indefinitely.

In other words, whether the robot can continuously bring up "new topics" during a human-computer interaction dialogue may become a "breaking point" for this business.

So, in the context that everyone seemed to think this problem was difficult to solve, they relied on continuous attempts in this direction to increase the number of items of chat interaction between users and chatbots by dozens of times. And assuming that your intelligent robot begins to be able to solve the problem of "chatting with users for a long time", this matter itself will bring a lot of added value and opportunities to itself, and can also bring a lot of new business value and possibilities to the product and the company.

To give another example, in all " online education " and even this wave of " knowledge payment " products, users' learning completion rate, opening rate, and viewing rate have always been a huge concern, especially for online course products. For a long time, the average course completion rate has been hovering below 3%.

We all know a common sense: the biggest driving force for users to choose to make repeat purchases comes from their recognition of the value of a certain product or service.

The greatest value that learning products provide to users is definitely that they inspire them, allow them to learn certain knowledge, master certain abilities, or have some new topics to talk about, etc. Logically, only when users truly obtain and recognize these values ​​will they be more willing to make repeat purchases (of course, some learning products may never have considered users' repeat purchases, nor do they require users to make repeat purchases, so these products are not within the scope of our discussion).

So the question is, if users are not even willing to open the product and haven’t completed basic learning, how can they get the value and be willing to make repeat purchases?

So, assuming that we can solve the problem of "learning completion rate", perhaps we will get an opportunity that belongs to us in the field of "learning". This is our basic thinking logic.

So, this explains why we at Sanjieke were willing to spend more than two years working hard on the "course completion rate". Also, now you may have a clearer understanding of the meaning of the data mentioned just two days ago, "We can already achieve a course completion rate of 60% with a user base of thousands."

In other words, the logic of the so-called "T method" is also the logic being adopted in the three classes.

As for how we achieved the "60% course completion rate", the logic is still similar. We need to find some key problems that "users cannot finish reading", such as lack of interaction, lack of sense of accomplishment, lack of fun, lack of a clear learning experience path, etc., and then continue to make various attempts to solve them one by one .

It would be too complicated to elaborate on more specific solutions. Perhaps we can wait until the time is right and find an opportunity to talk about them in detail.

The key to success under this path is more of a "technical capability", or in other words, the effectiveness of your solution - assuming that a complex problem that has plagued the entire industry for so long can be solved by you through technical means or a set of equally complex logic, this thing itself is already a barrier that can help you move forward for a long time.

Finally, whether it is path A or path B, the first step to a successful start is actually to "find the right problem", that is, to find the problem that "although there is a solution, the cost is extremely high" or "almost plagues the entire field, and everyone finds it difficult to solve."

So, at the end of this article today, let’s do a little interaction——

• In your current industry or job, can you find some problems that meet the two criteria we mentioned above: "costly to solve" or "troubles almost everyone and very difficult to solve"?
• And if you can find out, if you adopt the two thinking directions of path A and path B mentioned above, can you have some solutions of your own?

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

This article was compiled and published by the author @黄有灿(Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map