Huang Youcan: I have been working in operations for 8 years - from a layman to COO!

Fortunately, I was really confused at that time. I didn’t understand what the Internet was, nor could I explain clearly what “operation” was. I didn’t even know why I was interviewed.

What is inevitable is that although I cannot clearly explain what "operation" is, I have actually done a lot of things closely related to operations, and I already have some innate "genes" for operations.

Looking back now, there are at least a few things that are crucial before I entered the Internet industry:

1. I have been in communities, played in QQ groups, and hung out in chat rooms. I spend a lot of time online. And I have gradually honed a skill during my long experience of surfing the Internet - no matter which unfamiliar online environment I am in, whether it is a QQ group, forum, chat room, or online game guild, as long as I am willing, I can make myself a major character with a strong presence in this environment, or even a central figure, within 2 days. So, I have a pretty good sense of the Internet and online presence. These two points, in retrospect, are essential qualities for an excellent operator.
   
2. I once managed an interest-based QQ group of 500 people, and through my own organization, I kept the group active for two years, and everyone had a lot of fun in it. To the extent that, when people from this group came to Beijing later, they all asked to meet Lao Huang by name. Therefore, I also have strong organizational and mobilization capabilities online, and can already maintain and manage an online organization relatively well. Most importantly, I also enjoy the feeling of having fun with a group of people online.
   
3. I love writing. Although there have been some interruptions in the middle, I have always maintained the habit of writing, which makes me sensitive to content and occasionally I can write something inspiring. Although I didn’t think it was a big deal at the time, looking back, I realized that my sensitivity and persistence towards “content” has actually run through my entire operations career.

So, although it seems that I did not have any actual Internet work experience before 2008, I was not completely without experience, and I really enjoyed my presence in the Internet world.

On the other hand, if you are a newcomer who wants to switch to the Internet industry, you might as well ask yourself first: How much do you like it, and what relevant accumulation and reserves do you have?

Also, you may need to answer clearly, why exactly do you want to work in this Internet industry? Is it because you heard from others that this industry pays a lot? Or is it because you really like or even love certain things in the Internet world? Under this question, I think you'd better give yourself a clear answer.

As an aside, from my own experience and the friends I have come into contact with, most of the people around me who have done well in the Internet industry, whether it is product or operation, are those who have an innate love for the Internet, and they can often easily find a feeling of being like a fish in water in the online world.

In the three years before I changed my career, I worked as a salesperson for a Japanese company in the instrument industry. My clients were mainly scientific research institutions, university laboratories, environmental protection bureaus and other types of units.

During these three years of sales experience, I have honed a new skill: I have begun to be able to gain the other party’s trust through what I say and do when facing a strange customer, commonly known as “getting people on board.” (But I am not one of those salespeople who will do anything to achieve their goals.)

The opportunity for me to enter the Internet was directly related to this skill.

The first Internet company I worked for was a website called About.com. Although this company was unknown in China, it was once ranked among the top 15 most visited websites in the United States. Its business model is to discover and invite experts in various fields of life (for example, toy collectors, food lovers, people who love traveling, etc.) to write columns, and pay them remuneration + share the profits with them.

At that time, its Chinese website, Abang.com, had just been established not long ago, and it was exactly the time when it needed to expand these columnists in large numbers.

Because of my ability to "deal with people", coupled with a decent online presence and familiarity with the Internet world (something I only found out after I joined the company), I became an operations officer of the company - responsible for developing various columnists and managing this group of people and maintaining user relationships.

So, this is a very important revelation: if you want to change careers or enter the industry to become an operations person, you need to have at least one skill that can bring concrete output - whether it is event execution, copywriting or "getting people done". If you are just a newcomer, almost no one will hire you just because you say how much you love the Internet, or talk big about concepts such as " user operation " and "content operation" that you actually have only a vague understanding of.

After joining this company, for a period of time, my main job was to make various phone calls and find people to chat online (including QQ groups, forums, blogs, Weibo, etc.). Then I would introduce myself to them and tell them which website I was from, what I did, that I wanted them to write a column, what kind of rewards I could provide them, etc., until I could finally sign the contract with them.

From this perspective, it sounds like what I do isn't that different from sales.

However, the real difference is: now I may not only have to consider signing the contract, I also need to consider how to manage this group of influencers in the future and maximize their enthusiasm so that they are willing to continuously and stably produce high-quality content. For example, we need to maintain good personal relationships with them, set up some benchmark role models and invite them to share with other talents, actively expand various benefits that can be given to talents (such as appearing on TV shows) and in turn require them to meet XX conditions in order to receive the benefits... and so on.

So, although I was still troubled by questions like "what is operation" and "is operation just doing miscellaneous work", subconsciously, I seemed to have a little feeling: if functions such as sales and promotion are more focused on the output of a single point, then "operation" may be more focused not on a single point, but on the connection and combination of a series of single points.

Another deep feeling is that acquiring a solid new skill in a new industry may require you to meet two conditions:

1. You already have a specific, relevant skill and are fairly familiar with it.
   
2. You need to put yourself in a real practical environment where you need to use the new skill and do a lot of practical exercises. Only this process can allow you to transform the previous "related skill" into a new skill.
   

For example, the relevant skill I had before was sales, but it was precisely because I had a new practice environment where I could practice and practice a lot that I gradually mastered the new skill of "core user expansion and operation".

For example, although I liked content before and had some feeling about it, and could often write some pretty good articles myself, when I really started to apply this skill to specific work scenarios within Internet companies, such as writing copy for newly launched products, or writing some operating rules and user guides, the feelings and focus would be very different. It was only after I invested a lot of time in practicing that I gradually made "copywriting" and "writing and formulating operational documents" some new skills of mine.

Therefore, after entering an industry, the first important thing is to establish several core skills for yourself in this industry as soon as possible. They can become the cornerstone of your growth and development in this industry, and even the basis for your future survival in the industry.

For the first two years of my operations career, the cornerstone was "expansion, operation and maintenance of core users." It has opened up all the possibilities for my future operations career.

In addition, a small turning point in my operations career occurred around the end of 2009, when I, as the project leader, was responsible for the entire process from planning to implementation of a large-scale offline event (with hundreds of participants).

This is the first time in my operations career that I have been independently responsible for the promotion and implementation of a complex project involving the participation of many departments. And the biggest challenge is that I need to mobilize dozens of people from more than 5 departments to work with me to complete the entire process from preparation to implementation of the event. In fact, each of them has his or her own job outside of this event, and many of them have higher job titles than me.

In the end, the event, which lasted more than a month, was a great success.

In the process of promoting this project, I have gained several key results:

1. I gained great self-confidence and a strong sense of "you must be responsible for your output." Both of these have always accompanied me as I grew in my career. Starting from this project, I began to have the confidence that as long as I approve of and take on a task, no matter whether the person I am facing is a big star or a boss who is several levels higher than me, I will definitely find a way to produce some good output.
   
2. In addition to working alone, I have gained more practical experience and understanding of how to organize and mobilize a team to work together towards a common goal. In other words, "team organization and management" and "promotion and management of complex projects" have become my two new skills.
   
3. During the entire project, I was able to access a lot of work content and information that I had not been able to access in my previous job. For example, I have to discuss media communication strategies with the PR department. During this process, I was able to gain a more detailed understanding of the specific work of PR, which actually became another driving force for my learning and growth.

The third point among the above points is particularly important.

My feeling when I think back on it later is: For an operations practitioner, I think that when you already have one or two core skills that are enough to make a living, in order to drive your own growth, the best way is probably to participate in or be responsible for the implementation of some complex projects. It is precisely in the process of advancing these projects that you can slowly come into contact with and learn a lot of valuable information, which can slowly help you find the feeling of "connecting the dots".

Take me as an example. The first core operational skill I mastered was "core user expansion and operation", and other than that I still knew nothing about the Internet. However, it was during the process of independently taking charge of several complex projects in the following years that I gradually came into contact with and learned how to do promotion, how to negotiate business cooperation with other brands and companies, how to design and implement event communication, what product architecture is, R&D working methods and processes, how to do brand PR based on content... and so on.

Everyone knows that an excellent operator needs to understand and master a lot of trivial information and skills, but if you don’t have the opportunity to participate in and be responsible for independent projects to discuss and exchange ideas with your more professional colleagues and partners, you will hardly find any chance to understand all these things bit by bit.

So, if you are already an operator with your own skills but don’t know how to grow better, I think the best advice I can give you is: do everything possible to strive for or create this "opportunity to be responsible for some projects independently" for yourself within the company.

In addition, the experience of being in charge of the project alone this time also made me identify more strongly with the saying that operations are often achieved by doing a series of things well to create an outcome that ultimately makes everyone smile and shine.

From 2008 to around 2011, it was thanks to these things that I went from being an operations person who had just entered the industry and was confused about the future, to an operations person with my own skills, good execution and driving force, and gradually began to be exposed to more branches of operations work.

It was in this context that in 2012, I reached a bigger key turning point in my operations career - in this year, I fully participated in a startup for the first time.

Taking this as an opportunity, I started a period of rapid growth that lasted for 4 years and continues to this day. It is no exaggeration to say that my growth and changes in the past few years can be described as geometric and explosive. In the words of a friend, over the past few years, every time he saw me, he would feel that some different changes had taken place in me. It felt like I was growing up at a very fast speed. For example,

So, my friends are always curious: What on earth happened to me?

I think I can give some answers from three aspects.

The first point I want to share is the most important one.

“A person’s progress and improvement are often driven by the environment. If you are placed in a suitable environment or event at the right time, you will naturally gain tremendous improvement and improvement.”

This logic is like running a marathon. If you run alone or run with a group of long-term training running enthusiasts, the performance and results you get will most likely be very different. If you are in a highly competitive group and are surrounded by experts with various abilities, you will naturally be more easily influenced and driven by them, thus achieving better results.

For me, this was exactly the case during the four years from 2012 to 2016. Objectively speaking, my rapid growth in the past four years is undoubtedly more due to the environment that can constantly drive and inspire me to continue to change and grow, rather than my own hard work and awesomeness.

For example, when I started my first business, the Ninth Classroom, in 2012, I was in an environment with huge pressure, scarce resources, and often no one wanted to pay attention to me. This actually stimulated a lot of my inner potential. For example, we were forced to rack our brains to figure out how to produce some good results without spending money simply because we didn't dare to spend money and had no resources. In the end, we actually relied on some creative ideas and planning that didn't cost much money to attract nearly 10,000 users in the early days.

For example, when we really needed to consider making money and worried about it, I had to run back and forth and do my best to make it, and in the end I really found a slightly tortuous path to create hundreds of thousands of income. Before doing Lesson 9, I never thought that I could do all of this.

I have a brother who once said something that I still remember vividly:

"If a person wants to grow quickly, there are only two ways: one is to bear pressure, and the other is to take risks and try to solve problems and produce results under high risk or high pressure. There is no other way."

Let me talk about something off topic. To be honest, for me, the experience in Class 9 was extremely painful and left me with many regrets. But it is also a core turning point in my own transformation. Because of this experience, I have many possibilities in the future. For this I thank it from the bottom of my heart.

Based on the above logic, I would like to share with you some of my major experiences and significant growth in the past few years. It may help you see my growth trajectory more clearly.

• From 2012 to the end of 2013, I served as COO of Classroom No. 9

During this period, because I had to take care of everything in a startup team, I started to get in touch with and understand promotion and marketing , and began to be able to complete some promotion projects at a cost of less than 0.2 cents per user.

Because of working with my partner, the copywriting master Xiao Ma Song, in the Ninth Classroom, and being influenced by him, my copywriting and writing skills have been elevated to a higher level and are basically close to the current level.

I have experienced the entire process of building a product from 0 to 1 in the Ninth Classroom. We started from scratch and built this website to have 50,000 paying users and annual sales of over 4 million. This experience is extremely valuable.

For the first time in Classroom 9, I took the lead in promoting the implementation of a commercial project. In the end, this project alone brought the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

Because of starting a business and taking on the title of COO, I had to start looking beyond the “execution” level and was forced to start considering more strategic and tactical issues, and even industry, sector, and business issues—even though I really knew nothing about these things at the time.

Because of the outputs I made in Lesson 9 and my title of COO, I started to gain some fame in the small circle, and also started to get to know more experts from all walks of life. By communicating and hanging out with them, my thinking, vision and other aspects have been improved to more than one level.

• In 2014, I worked as COO Assistant at Sina Weimi

During this period, I entered the system of a large company and began to feel the decision-making process and working mechanism within a large company, and the differences between them and ordinary small and medium-sized companies.

Because of my role, I need to participate in a large number of meetings with mid- and senior-level managers in the company. I began to understand how some mature executives and professional managers of large companies work and make decisions.

Because I have to assist my boss in managing the three teams of product, operation and UED at the same time, I began to have deeper thoughts and feelings about the product itself, the relationship between product and operation, including how the operation team should carry out its work when there are multiple product lines at the same time.

At the same time, I also experienced the implementation of some major projects, and realized what it feels like to be able to quickly handle hundreds of thousands of users by relying on the docking of some projects and resources within a large company with no shortage of resources or traffic.

• From the second half of 2014 to the beginning of 2015, several entrepreneurial teams

During this time, I participated in the construction and planning of the operation systems of several products as a consultant, including social products, tools , and online learning systems. As a result, I have a deeper understanding of the operational focus and operation system construction of different products, especially when I found that some methods that I was familiar with and had tried and tested before were difficult to work when applied to another product.

• In early 2015, he launched three classes and joined Zhou Botong as a partner to be responsible for operations.

Since the beginning of 2015, I have started to give regular operational courses through three classes. Lectures have become the best way for me to constantly sort out and summarize my own experiences. From then until now, I have given at least two lectures every month. Through communication with more people and feedback from students in three classes, the entire course content has been constantly iterating and adjusting. This process has become a process for me to constantly think about and improve my own methodology.

At the same time, during the more than half a year of working time at Zhou Botong Recruitment, because I had to confront competitors head-on, I was responsible for the execution of multiple activities, each of which received online exposure ranging from hundreds of thousands to nearly 10 million. Almost every one of these activities requires acquiring some high-potential resources and detonating them through online communication (for example, getting a big shot in the industry to participate in the event, etc.). Through the experience of being in charge of these activities, I have a more practical understanding of how to come up with some “get something for nothing” type of operations.

• At the end of 2015, we devoted ourselves to three classes full-time, starting another entrepreneurial experience

Compared with the previous state of confusion when we plunged into entrepreneurship with only enthusiasm in 9 hours, this time the goal and direction are clearer, and our partners are more mature. This time, my biggest gains are two: one is how to operate and plan the growth of a new product more clearly; the other is how to build and manage an excellent team from scratch.

It is no exaggeration to say that the current team atmosphere of Sanjieke is the best team I have ever experienced in my career. Everyone is excellent and enthusiastic. Everyone is usually very busy and often works overtime, but everyone enjoys it. We often feel that our work status is often more like "finding something really interesting to do" state. I enjoy this state and am proud to be able to participate in creating such a team.

The second point I want to share is about the relationship with “masters”.

Another important driving force for my growth in the past few years is that I have met a large group of experts in various fields. As the saying goes: Being around smart people makes you smarter. This feeling is also very obvious in me. Over the past few years, I have been constantly learning from all kinds of experts around me, from thinking logic to decision-making methods, from specific means to industry structure, from business strategies to work habits. I have to say that the help and influence given to me by these masters from all walks of life around me are enormous.

However, it seems that everyone knows that you can achieve tremendous growth by getting to know and learning from masters, and almost everyone wants to do it. The real difficulty lies in "how to get to know the experts" and "how to make the experts willing to accept your advice and communicate with you".

A: How should operations be done?

B: We are a community for college students who love games . We currently have 100,000 users. In order to further increase the activity of the community, we would like to create a user incentive system. We have already considered the three aspects of ABC in this incentive system. I wonder if there are any omissions on this basis?

Please think about this: as a time-constrained expert, which of the two questions above would you prefer to answer?

I guess the answer is self-evident.

Therefore, masters always like to play with those who are able to provide them with certain value, and always prefer a "value exchange" conversation rather than a "single value giving" conversation.

If you want to meet experts, first try to turn your communication and interaction with them into a kind of "value exchange".

For example, my acquaintance and friendship with Chen Xiangdong, former vice president of New Oriental, Ji Shisan, CEO of Guokr.com, Tuo Buhua, CEO of Luoji Siwei, and Zhang Liang, the author of "Starting Operations from Scratch", basically all originated from my thoughts on online education, operations and learning. I took the initiative to share some of my thoughts with them and sought discussions on some specific issues. This led to many subsequent collisions and exchanges, and even the opportunity for us to become friends.

Another point I can share is that in terms of personal growth, in addition to relying on the environment, I always try to find space to connect various things that are valuable to me and build a virtuous circle for myself.

For example:

• I will put myself in a challenging environment (such as starting a business), which will bring me many problems to be solved.

• When I face questions that I am confused about or unsure about, I will try my best to find experts with relevant experience to discuss and consult with.

• When I get some new ideas or new inspirations from asking for advice, I will write them down and try to translate them into my own understanding and language;

• I will eventually put the inspiration I get into practice, test it through practice, and continue to adjust and optimize the solution;

• When there are achievements and outputs in practice, I often write down the inspiration and gains I got from the whole process. I will share these articles with many friends, and also with the experts I have consulted. On the one hand, I often get a lot of new inspirations during the writing process, which eventually allows me to integrate many things; on the other hand, this process often allows me to get to know more experts and establish deeper relationships with those experts I have consulted before;

• When my practice progresses to a certain level and has produced some results, new problems often arise, bringing me into a new cycle.

You will eventually find that when you can build such a cycle in yourself, "growth" becomes a natural thing for you and you don't have to do it deliberately.

Something is magical when it becomes natural and can continue to create benefits. And if you create this magic, you will feel great.

Here I would like to talk about something off topic - this matter is actually consistent with the logic of operations.

We have said before that so-called operation is the process of combining and linking many trivial and scattered links and events through a series of threading actions, and ultimately making them a benign ecology that can operate sustainably.

When the ecological cycle has not yet taken shape, you need to make every effort to break down the key points in the ecology one by one and try to connect them. And once the ecosystem is built, you only need to maintain the balance of this ecosystem and enjoy it.

This is why we sometimes say that operations are fun.

The most important thing for an excellent operator to do well is to operate "itself". A key point behind this is that you must constantly find some solid and firm stepping stones of your own, and move towards higher places little by little.

For me, if I were to review my growth and transformation in my 8-year career, the key logic behind it might be this:

• When you are not yet strong enough to gain a foothold in an industry or field, you should first find a fulcrum on which to gain a foothold.
• When you have achieved a preliminary foothold, you should find ways to surpass 80% of people in one thing, so that this thing will become the foundation of your survival in the future.
• When you have firmly established yourself in a field or a position, you need to actively participate in various projects or put yourself into a more challenging environment, so that the environment can drive your growth and allow you to slowly see the overall picture of "operation" and understand the operational logic of each link.
• When you are already familiar with the field you are responsible for and can start to be responsible for operational indicators independently and become a senior operation manager or operation director, you may face two options: one is to understand the operation logic of many different types of products horizontally; the other is to go deeper vertically, such as being in the same industry or field, being responsible for larger user size, business lines and more complex products - on these two paths, I chose one.

• If you have experienced all the above, what you need to improve more may be something that is separated from the front line of execution, such as understanding of the industry and business, such as your team management capabilities, etc. On the one hand, these things may require you to have a corresponding environment to practice and think about, and on the other hand, you should also create opportunities for yourself to reach more experts and communicate with them for advice.
• What’s left depends on chance and luck.

Above, it is almost the main experience of my 8-year career and some of my own thoughts. There are many things that a person will experience in his career and many things that will have an impact on himself. I have tried my best to present the things that I think are the most important. They may be trivial, but they should be quite sincere.

I also believe that the experience of a person who has experienced it is like a mirror. When you examine yourself based on these experiences, it may be easier to see many things clearly.

If you are an operator, in the first few years of your career, no one will tell you where the direction is. You can only do a lot of trivial execution work by yourself. When you don’t know how to learn and grow, operation may be boring for you.

However, if you, as an operator, have the skill of establishing a living and can gradually be removed from all aspects of operations, and when you gradually connect them to form a whole, operations will become a magical and interesting thing.

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