Detours are also the only way

According to the popular words, I used to be a “study scum”. I didn’t graduate from a domestic architecture school, and then went to Germany for a five-year book and didn’t get a diploma. However, I believe that life is continuous learning, and experience itself is the greatest asset.

My business experience should start when I was studying in Germany. I worked in a music website after school. It was around 2000. The Internet has just started. The company's business model is relatively simple. It sells records through the Internet, but it has achieved annual sales of 400 million euros. The company bought an old train station in the small town and renovated it into an office. The people working inside are very cool and fashionable. Many times I don't think it is a company that sells records, but it is considered a creative company. . The culture and atmosphere of this company still affects me until now, so now I am doing a Watch. I have always told my current employees that we are not a smart watch company, but a fashion-selling company.

When I was still in Germany, I was engaged in import and export trade with a classmate. I mainly exported many cheap things from China to Germany. At that time, I mainly met online scammers in a computer trade in 2002. The euro money was hit and the result was not found. This incident has dealt a big blow to me. It means that all my money for work-study in Germany has been scattered, but I will have more business from now on.

After returning to China in the Spring Festival that year, I met SARS after the end of the year. I didn't want to go back to Germany. I went to Shanghai to continue my business. My first project in China borrowed the German Internet record company to sell music using P2P.

I uploaded some good free music from abroad, especially the night music, to the server, and then offered paid downloads. The name of the website is RaveChina. Because of its characteristics, we have achieved the first place in the country by word of mouth marketing. This project basically started at zero cost, but earned millions for me. Later, our imitators were more and more, and the control of copyright was becoming more and more strict. In 2005, I turned the company off.

For a while, I was a little tired of the Internet. In 2006, I simply went to the DM chain magazine with a few friends. My idea is to put magazines in cafes, tea houses and star-rated hotels that have just emerged in some third-tier cities for free, and then make money by advertising and soft papers. In terms of content, half is universal content, and half is localized content. In this way, the channels are fixed, the content cost is low, the printing cost is controllable, and the economically prosperous areas that are not developed in the advertising industry are selected.

At that time, I decided that this was a good business. I immediately laid out 10 cities in the Yangtze River Delta, such as Suzhou, Changzhou, Wuxi, etc., and set up an office in a city, and then began recruiting to buy advertisements.

Such crazy expansion quickly brought bad results. The magazine only had four issues, the cash flow was broken, and the company’s account was nearly 10 million. I could only stop the loss quickly and shut down the company.

The biggest lesson that this entrepreneur has given me is that I must be steady and steady, and I can’t make great achievements. At the same time, I must look at the trend and know when to insist and when to give up.

So when I got a group purchase in 2008, I learned the lesson. This is a project started from internal entrepreneurship. At that time, the concept of foreign group buying had already gotten up. There was a guy inside who wanted to try it. I gave him 1 million yuan to go to Wuxi to buy a website. I didn’t expect him to spend 300,000. Yuan began to make a profit. Later, we began to expand cautiously and entered five cities in two years. The cash flow of this project is very good. The basic cost per month is 300,000 yuan and the profit can be 400,000 yuan.

At that time, group purchases have already heated up in the country. The so-called "Thousand Regiments" has already begun. The industry giants handle, glutinous rice, Wowo, etc. have already melted hundreds of millions of yuan. I have seen the game change, or financing. Quickly grow bigger, or be acquired by the giant. Later, we chose the latter, because as a group buying website in the third-tier cities, it is not so easy to get the capital. At the beginning of 2019, the websites of our five cities were packaged and sold to a top three group buying website for 3 million.

After retreating from the group purchase project, I started looking for new projects as a continuous entrepreneur. At this time, I clearly realized that it is more important to grasp the trend than to find the advantage. At that time, the hottest thing was the mobile Internet, and since 2008 I have been working with some bosses to make angel investments.

At this time, I met a partner who is very important to me, which is the company's current CTO. He is a hard-working person. Originally, we were only a cooperative relationship. My technical team helped him to make a mobile phone ROM. Later, we talked more and more speculatively, and we are ready to cooperate and do something in the field of intelligent hardware.

Choosing a smart watch is a bit of a coincidence. At that time, we received an order from a Dutch company to make a watch phone, and Apple just released the message to do iWatch. Both my partner and I are keenly aware of the huge demand in this market, and we must grab the product in front of Apple.

The process is naturally very difficult. The first batch of samples had a very low yield, and we were delayed for 4 months for a piece of glass. In April 2019, I almost wanted to give up. But after so many years of entrepreneurial experience, I realized that giving up easily is equal to giving up. In August, the product finally got its eyebrows. In October, the entire team stopped all software outsourcing business and began to invest in the development process of Watch. In August 2019, we finally got the first product. At this time, the smart hardware field is already very hot, and entrepreneurs and big capital are squeezing inside.

Looking back on entrepreneurship for so many years, I think every road is a kind of comprehension, and it is an irreplaceable experience in growth.