To operators: Don’t always try to eat a fat man in one bite

In recent exchanges with some readers, I have discovered some trends:

1. There is a general sense of anxiety, and this anxiety is reflected in the hope that some early projects can be operated through a large and comprehensive framework without considering the cost of verification.
2. I feel a little confused, and feel that operational work is sometimes out of my grasp and touch. I have the will and ability but don’t know where to put them.
3. The difference between going from 0 to 1 and from 1 to 10,000 is not clear, and the operations of existing products and cold-start products cannot be distinguished well.

So, today let’s talk about Brother Liang’s views on these tendencies.

Speed ​​Anxiety

Twelve years ago, when I was 22 years old and just entered the society, I was a little anxious. What was I anxious about?

1. As someone who comes from a small place, I don’t really understand what a big city means. Is it as many “other people” say, that big cities are full of competition and challenges? Can I cope with it?
2. As a student who graduated from a third-rate college, I didn’t know what would be waiting for me in the end after leaving my hometown for love and choosing an emerging industry?

The result of this anxiety is that, as an ordinary person, I will desperately look for a breakthrough.

What is manifested is that the subjective initiative is very positive.

You can think about whether your current work status and the operating status of the company's products reflect this point?

Basically 90% of Internet companies are in this state. Perhaps a small half of them know why they are busy and anxious, but a large part of them are busy and anxious because of others. Therefore, they are anxious about the anxiety of others, and thus they become even more anxious in pursuing an increase in speed.

So, you will see that many companies like 996. To be honest, I have never found a company that can improve efficiency by extending employees' working hours.

On the contrary, I am very sure that although employees in many companies work 996, a lot of their time is wasted. For example, when they work overtime on Saturdays, they try to grab a few more red envelopes.

At this point, you will probably find that the so-called anxiety about speed is just superficial anxiety. Most people and companies are busy without clear purposes.

The core of this matter lies in the company's management's unclear definition of goals and the fragmentation of KPIs.

Products and operations are actually inseparable parts, but when management does not have clear quantitative goals, they become increasingly separated. Product becomes a role that only considers delivery, while operations becomes a role that blindly accepts products and puts them online for aimless operation.

This situation makes it impossible for products and operations to work together, resulting in conflicts in the determination of demand, doubts about the results of operations, and an inability to determine the value of the product.

The solution is simple.

Either the management outputs the goals and firmly binds the product and operation through the same KPI; or, the product and operation actively embrace each other, establish their own small goals, and get started first.

There is always something to do. Simply relying on overtime to solve problems will never solve them, but will instead create more problems.

Try at the lowest cost

Many people rush into a seemingly huge market and seemingly enormous demand without any testing, calling it "seizing the blue ocean." But when everyone thought it was a blue ocean and jumped in, it had already become a red ocean. What's more frightening is that these people didn't know whether the original field that seemed to have no competition was actually a dead sea.

For example, when group buying is popular, everyone rushes in, leading to a war between thousands of groups; for example, delivery guys may start a fight to grab territory; or when releasing bicycles, they may deliberately knock down competitors' bicycles.

This is a cycle that repeats itself at an irregular period. When many people see the huge market and huge demand, they think they can get a piece of the pie, but most people ignore the following issues:

1. The demand is there and the market is there. But why would others choose me instead of giving the money to others?
2. How can I prove that others will give me money?
3. How should the overall rhythm be grasped?

In all the seemingly hot fields, if every entrepreneur thinks about these three questions, then the market can actually be large enough, because at this time everyone will start to consider differentiation rather than direct competition. But if you don’t do this, sometimes it is difficult to say the result, because often even the process is ugly.

When you decide to operate in response to huge demand and markets, pay special attention to the pace and level of advancement.

The so-called rhythm and levels are actually very important things.

If you are making vacation products, don’t rush to “go online”. First, “deliver” the vacation products you designed or that others have assigned to you to design offline. Then, find out what advantages and disadvantages the routes have when users actually experience them, how users create content during the whole process, what the quality of the content is, and so on.

Then come back to optimize the route, find other people to experience it, and repeat the cycle.

When you have achieved a point where everyone who has taken this route thinks it is great and is even willing to go there again and again, you can then consider taking large-scale online actions.

The entry point is this classic route. At this point, at least the materials you can accumulate for cold start, route popularity, and even product awareness have begun to take shape.

From my personal point of view, it is difficult to understand why people start challenging the highest difficulty or pursuing product completeness without any verification. Firstly, it is not economical. Secondly, this is the way software companies play, not the way the Internet plays.

Without sufficient elasticity and flexibility, operating the Internet would be very difficult.

From 0 to 1 and from 1 to 10,000

If you have done a lot of things from 0 to 1, the process from 1 to 10,000 will not be very effective; if you have done a lot of things from 1 to 10,000, you will find that you actually can’t go from 0 to 1.

What is implied here is the misalignment of resources, the misalignment of cognition, and ultimately the misalignment of means.

When facing different groups of people and different products, although the final methodology may be the same, the specific details of the operation may be diametrically opposed. This is why I have repeatedly emphasized that operations require consideration of details and require sufficient flexibility and agility. It is actually impossible to become an excellent operator by sticking to the same set of methodologies.

For example, many people have asked me questions about channel promotion before, and I basically couldn’t answer them. The reason is very simple. I worked at Shanda for a long period of time in my work experience. Shanda at that time simply disdained external channels because Shanda’s internal channels were already numerous and good, with extremely accurate users and clear effect monitoring.

So I often complain that the process from 0 to 1 is different from the process from 1 to 10,000. Although many people have excellent work experience, that is often due to the background of large companies.

And we must first figure out for ourselves whether our success is given by the company, whether you have your own resources and traffic, or whether the company provides an excellent platform for you to display your abilities?

If it is the former, then maybe you are indeed a little awesome, but if it is the latter, then it is not really you who is awesome.

However, this point is often overlooked by many people, either intentionally or unintentionally.

First of all, please understand that it is not a bad thing if the platform is awesome but you are not awesome enough;

Secondly, you need to identify your strengths and weaknesses and make up for them as quickly as possible.

I have really met many entrepreneurs who often have impressive resumes, but encounter countless problems when starting a business. Not being able to get money is a superficial problem. The underlying problem is that the product's operating data is completely different from the initial imagination.

This comes back to the complexity of the operations themselves.

In "Sparrow Company Becomes Phoenix", the following data was once proposed:

Among all the startups in the United States, only about 0.1% of them have revenues of more than $250 million. Among these companies with revenues of $250 million, only one-third, or about 0.033% of the total, have revenues of $1 billion. Most businesses start out small and then stay where they are. Only a handful of them have the ability to soar from a humble company to become a phoenix.

If it is applied to China, I'm afraid it's similar, or even a bigger proportion.

So, you see, how can going from 0 to 1 be the same as going from 1 to 10,000? From a mathematical statistics point of view, the probability of making the leap is only 3 in 10,000.

What I want to say is, don’t think you are awesome because of your past. In fact, truly awesome people never know how awesome they are.

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The author of this article @张亮 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!