This time I will talk about three stories. The first story is that I encountered the dilemma of "product failure, business collapse, and the company almost closed" when I was very young. The story begins 30 years ago. WPS was very popular in the DOS era, and it was installed on almost every computer in China, and Jinshan was in full swing. At the same time, Microsoft entered the Chinese market with Windows and Office. We have to develop new office software as soon as possible so that we can have a chance to compete with Microsoft Office head-on.
Newborn calves are not afraid of tigers, and we didn’t think about it. We started working directly and gave the project a majestic name called “Pangu”. We hope that “Pangu” will break new ground on the Windows platform and push the glory of WPS to a new heights. We worked for three full years, and in April 1995, "Pangu" was finally released.
life and death
But no one expected that the sales volume was extremely bleak, less than one-tenth of the expectation. My mentality collapsed directly, and the mood of my colleagues also fell directly from the cloud to the bottom. There was no way, I tried my best to give everyone blood, and encouraged everyone to continue to struggle. In this way, we persisted until the end of 1995 and the beginning of 1996, and "Pangu" still had no improvement. The bigger trouble is that WPS can no longer be sold, and the income has dropped sharply. The company is at a critical moment of life and death.
I was 26 years old that year, and I was the general manager of Beijing Jinshan. It was the first time I faced such a predicament, and I was a little helpless. How can such a famous brand as Jinshan and such a good product as "Pangu" fail to sell? I couldn't figure it out, so I made up my mind to go to the front line to figure out the problem. I decided to go to the station store to sell the goods myself.
Every time a customer enters the store, I greet them directly like seeing a relative, warmly receive them, and explain them carefully. Sometimes, with a client, I can talk on and on for half an hour. Over and over again, I talked for eight hours a day, my mouth was dry, and I was so tired that I was dizzy.
How is the performance after such a hard day? None of the sets sold.
"It must be bad luck," I cheered myself up. The next day, after standing still for the same eight hours, I still didn't sell a set, so I was a little confused. On the third day, there was still no harvest.
On the fourth day, I simply stopped selling. What are you doing? After following the best sales in the store for a whole day, I really learned a lot. For example, as soon as I see a client, I can talk endlessly, but he doesn't talk much, so I listen to the client's thoughts first, and then follow the client's words. I understand technology, and I always hope to explain the technology clearly, but it is easy to explain the problem complicated, but he always holds the product or promotional leaflet, and the customer will understand in a few words.
On the fifth day, I practiced while pondering, and gradually found the feeling of communicating with customers, and my self-confidence began to recover. On the seventh day, I actually became the sales champion in the store, which is unbelievable!
During these seven days of selling goods on the website, I learned: As an engineer, you must make products that users need, rather than making products that just look tall. As long as you can make products that users want, sales are not a problem. With such an epiphany, it is easy to make products again. Later, we successively released more than ten successful software such as Kingsoft PowerWord and Kingsoft Internet Security. In this way, Jinshan found a way to survive!
But I myself fell into a new confusion and began the darkest period of my life.
lost
At that time, I was immersed in the failure of "Pangu" and was very depressed. At the end of April, I handed in my resignation letter directly. Qiu Bojun (the founder of Kingsoft) repeatedly asked me to stay, and finally decided to let me rest for half a year. Faced with such adversity in life, I would like to ask everyone a question: How do you decompress? At that time, my method was to often go to bars with a few friends.
Soon, I found something more interesting, that is BBS. On the BBS, you can freely communicate with distant friends, which was a very miraculous thing at the time. In this way, I found a new sustenance.
At that time, the requirements for posting on the forum were quite high. We all use dial-up Internet access, which is very expensive. If you always post water, you will definitely be scolded. At that time I had enough time to carefully prepare each post. And I have a particularly strong advantage, that is, typing is super fast, and sometimes I can write a hundred posts a day.
If I write more posts, I become a moderator. The moderator is not a big official, and there are many things. First of all, I have to post by myself, and then I have to invite a large group of friends to play, and I am also responsible for creating an atmosphere. In order to be a good moderator, I often start surfing the Internet at 7 o'clock in the morning and stay busy until the early hours of the morning, which seems to be more tiring than going to work. However, it was very fulfilling.
In the past six months, I played very purely without any purpose, and had a lot of fun. Years later, I realized the true value of this experience.
When I founded Xiaomi in 2010, the first step was to make the forum well. We went so well that we became the most popular forum for mobile enthusiasts in less than a year. How did you do it? In fact, it’s nothing, just relying on the tricks I learned when I played BBS as a moderator.
During the six months of being immersed in the forum, I gradually recovered. In November 1996, I finished my half-year vacation and officially returned to Jinshan.
The main reason is that I still can't let go of the glory and dream of national software. We are determined to fight a "protracted war" with Microsoft: while fighting Microsoft on the frontal battlefield of office software, we will make various application software and games, earn money to support our family, and support our war with war.
miss the internet
While I was immersed in reorganizing Jinshan, the outside world had turned upside down: across the ocean, Netscape went public in 1995, and Yahoo went public in 1996... The first wave of the Internet has been booming. Soon, the country also started. In 1997, Netease was founded, and in 1998, Tencent was founded. The first wave of China's Internet surged.
And I was busy making software, and unknowingly, I passed this wave. It wasn't until October 1998 that I really realized that this wave was unstoppable. I convinced the board that we could hit fast with an acquisition. There is only one acquisition that I have seriously talked about, and that is NetEase. At that time, NetEase had been established for more than a year, and the company had about five or six people. I offered a price of 10 million yuan, but Ding Lei quickly rejected it. Just two months later, NetEase raised US$10 million, and its valuation reached more than US$60 million.
If the acquisition fails, we can only do it ourselves. After trying for almost a year, I have a certain understanding of Internet business. At that time, I thought I had fully understood, "The Internet is a tool that all companies will use in the future, and e-commerce is the most promising."
In May 2000, Joyo.com was officially launched, selling books and audio-visual products online.
This time, I was full of confidence, determined to win, and strongly advocated doing it with my own money. At this time, the global Internet bubble burst and entered the cold winter of the capital market. This situation did not shake our determination. The first investment of about 20 million yuan came from Jinshan shareholders.
The essence of e-commerce is still retail. I have used all the experience of the store in those years. At the same time, we have also worked hard on management. The core of e-commerce is operation, and every detail needs to be done carefully. We started from scratch, and within two or three years, we became the largest B2C e-commerce company at that time.
Joyo's business is very smooth, there is only one difficulty: not enough money. E-commerce platforms burn too much money. After the global Internet bubble burst, the capital market was depressed and financing was very difficult. We talked to at least 30 companies, and none of them were willing to invest money. Later, there was really no other way, so they raised $1 million from a friend, and Jinshan shareholders had to add another $1 million to barely complete the financing. But in just one year, it burned out again.
Joyo's entrepreneurial journey is the process of us desperately looking for money, which is quite tormented.
In September 2004, we couldn't go on any longer, so we could only reluctantly sell Joyo.com to Amazon, which became Amazon China.
Many people have asked me, do you regret selling Joyo.com? I gritted my teeth and said, no regrets. Selling Joyo.com was a serious blow to me, and my heart was extremely painful.
During that painful torment, I repeatedly asked myself, where did we lose? It seems to be very bad luck. First of all, as soon as we came up, we lost at the starting line and missed the best timing. Then, we have insufficient financing ability, no funds and no confidence to persist until the moment of victory.
Entrepreneurship does require luck and a precise grasp of the general trend. This is also the reason why I especially emphasized the "air outlet" later. It took more than half a year for me to slowly recover and finally figured out something. "The Internet is not only a technological revolution, but also a conceptual revolution; in the future, the Internet will be integrated into all walks of life."
Always believe that good things are about to happen.
Today I would like to share with you three stories of my life's trough. In the face of these setbacks and failures, I have also been confused, shaken, and even given up. Without these setbacks, without the accumulation of these setbacks, I would not be where I am today. No one likes setbacks and failures, but everyone will inevitably experience them, and even many people are experiencing them now.
Since these pains are hard to avoid, what we can do is to face them directly, to keep moving forward in the pain, and let the pain shape us better. This is the meaning of pain and the gift of setbacks. And all the setbacks, failures, and even those seemingly meaningless things that kill time will become your most precious wealth. Life is long, but let us keep the faith: always believe that good things are about to happen.
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