Entrepreneurs And Other Winds Come To B2B And O2O Markets

This article is written to

And entrepreneurs in the O2O market.

Lei Jun said, "the wind is coming, even the pigs can fly to the sky."

We all believed it.

In fact, he said this just because he is a very modest person who is good at making fun of himself.

The expression of "wind and pig" is very popular and easy to understand. It used to be one of the motivating power for entrepreneurs to enter the market. However, the success of Xiaomi has made this self ridicule sentence an investment decision.

Because of it, the financing plan for entrepreneurs and the reasons for investors' investment have become superficial.

The analysis of industry trends is like a shroud of shrouded enterprise strategy analysis.

Whether the industry will have explosive growth in the future has become the premise of almost all venture capital raising, leaving other discussions pale.

Why should we not be fooled by the theory of "wind and pig"? The B2B and O2O brothers may be able to enlighten us.

They are the two hotspots in the Chinese Internet market.

It is not difficult to say that they are difficult. It is not a dim prospect. On the contrary, from the perspective of the whole industry, both have bright prospects and immeasurable future.

But today, these two markets have quite different situations. There are huge uncertainties in the process of enterprise operation and investment and financing.

My own B2B field is recognized as an industry that has not heard the word "wind". Although most people agree that the Internet is a huge market, most people also think that this is an industry that needs slow work and meticulous work. It is far from 35 years to get huge profits, let alone short-term explosive growth.

The two major predicaments faced by B2B entrepreneurs are complex and slow offline sales, poor marketing channels and high customer acquisition costs.

Both operators and investors are worried about the rapid diminishing marginal benefit in the process of sales expansion, which will soon hit the ceiling of development, slow and long.

Therefore, most of the Internet B2B service providers have chosen to cut in from the services of large enterprises. Although they solve the problem of early cash flow to some extent, it is usually difficult to get away from traditional services. Large enterprises always use their bargaining power to exploit the profits of service providers to zero.

Not to mention, there are still a lot of capacity traps and grey areas in the sales process of big customers.

Many of my software peers are still hard to extricate themselves in the quagmire of customized services.

Therefore, if an investor investigates common B2B projects, there are usually two discoveries: either turnover is OK, but customers are too concentrated, not optimistic about the future, or the business model is good, but the list is too small, the customers are scattered, and the income accumulation is too slow.

Finally, the usual conclusion is: maybe not yet.

Look at brother O2O again.

This field has a very different industry logic compared to B2B.

The problem of "wind" is no longer in existence, and it is strong enough. There is no doubt that investors will question the trend of the industry.

However, from the beginning of the famous thousand League war a few years ago, the local services, taxi, renting, ordering, takeaway, tutoring, movie and housekeeping are everywhere. Basically, O2O can be filled with ambitious competitors, and there are still large numbers of entrugs who are complacently melting angels and melting A wheels.

Entrepreneurs are now eager to prove that "not everyone can become a flying pig".

So the only way to compete with each other is to execute strategy and resources.

If you can't get the money, then the big wind will have nothing to do with yourself.

The project to get the A wheel is burning at any cost at the expense of more users in the next round of financing.

However, the operation of enterprises is not a game, and there is no guarantee that the funds invested can be directly proportional to the users obtained, no matter how strong the wind is outside.

In many areas of O2O, the Matthew effect of the market will soon appear, and the third of the market will almost certainly be eliminated. The deep involvement of BAT will only exacerbate this problem (taxi software market is a classic demonstration).

So, B2B and O2O, breezes and gale, different industry conditions, different enterprise troubles.

The growth trend of the industry is, of course, a necessary condition for the success of the entrepreneurial project. But I think the more critical question is to find out where the wind comes from and what the driving force of the trend is, not just sitting here to see if it will come.

I said Lei Jun's analogy is more objective.

Entrepreneurs should observe not "wind" but to further observe the change of "barometric pressure", that is, the source of wind.

Just as the market for cheap smart phones comes from the success of apple and the pressure difference created by Android, the wind of taxi software comes from the air pressure difference between the popularity of smart phones, the improvement of mobile Internet environment and the inefficient taxi industry.

In fact, in the market segments of China's economy, the air pressure difference is a widespread phenomenon. This gives people an intuitive feeling that there are many opportunities for entrepreneurship.

But the trouble for entrepreneurs is how to judge the timing of the wind.

Take our SaaS software market as an example, the difference between people's judgment is really far away. Some people are very optimistic and feel that they will soon become a universal thing. Some people are pessimistic to think that this is at least 5 years after 10 years.

Such a wide margin of judgement must have a completely different logic behind it.

In the environment where air pressure is clearly felt, the main reason for being shy is to fear that the cost of the education market is too high, or that the front waves are slapped on the beach by the waves.

However, if we look back at the first 15 years of China's Internet market, the real outbreak is accompanied by very specific enterprise cases.

The most classic cases are Taobao and Alipay.

If we went through 10 years ago, when Taobao was just founded for a year, the so-called industry trend faced by Ma was very similar to the B2B market today.

We all know that the future will be very good, but faced with very specific difficulties, cruel reality will hinder the future.

For the 2003 year old Taobao, the online payment environment and consumer trust are huge stones on the way.

Few people can be optimistic that Alibaba can solve this problem.

The next story should be remembered.

More than two years of hard negotiation and implementation with the hard banking system will eventually lead to more than 100 banks and credit card agencies accessing Alipay. Besides, Alipay secured pactions (payment delivery consignment) is a key move to establish consumer trust.

The other two stories in BAT are similar.

In the Tencent biography, Wu Xiaobo recalled that the membership system of penguin's becoming rich actually broke out in two very specific attempts. QQ group chat and QQ show show that the former greatly enhanced the use time of QQ users, while QQ showed that the demand for membership payment had been identified.

Many people in the industry think that China Mobile's dream net was the wind of penguin, but in fact, the success of the QQ show is exactly the important weight of Tencent's dependence on Monternet.

As for the QQ distribution system that was developed later, and the repurchase of increasingly electric business, it has already been the successful amplifier.

Let's talk about a recent case in O2O field, taxi software.

It is hard to imagine that this market segment is actually less than two years old.

Some people say that the outbreak of taxi software is definitely determined by the general trend of the industry, which is a typical conclusion after Zhu Geliang's shit.

In the cold winter days of 2012, how many people will believe that those outdoor workers who are sitting on the underground passage can achieve such a high market share in one or two years.

In fact, do you believe that the general trend is not important? The most important thing is that some people believe that if we want to take advantage of this uncertain trend, we must do the most difficult things.

Therefore, it may be right to look at the general trend of the industry for dispersed risk investors, but for entrepreneurs, it is not enough, or even the focus.

In fact, the failure of more than 90% projects is not because there is no general trend, but because it has not done the right thing; more than 90% of the project success at the moment it started, can not hear any wind, only doubts.

There is no market to whistle but no one to put in.

For investment and entrepreneurship, the focus of the problem is simply not on the general trend, not because it is not important, but because it is not enough.

Those who succeed in utilizing the trend must have made critical actions and achieved key results at the crucial moment.

Rather than arguing when an industry will break out, it's better to spend more time asking again, if you want to detonate the industry, what key inputs need to be done, would you like to do it?