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Some Perspectives

About Entrepreneurship

Is the Idea Feasible?

  1. How large is the market demand?
    1. Define your target audience.
    2. Identify their needs and desires.
    3. Define your value proposition.
    4. Create an MVP product.
    5. Test with users.
    6. Iterate quickly until you find product-market fit (PMF).
  2. How many others are doing it?
  3. Why are you the one to do it?

Value can come in many disguises—money, time savings, enjoyment, and more.

Building a Product or a Project?

For early-stage entrepreneurs, it often involves building a product while taking on projects. Taking on projects is for survival, while building a product paves the way for rapid future growth.

When you are unsure about the direction of your product, you can think about which needs have universality and can potentially become products during the project process. Lastly, remember that choosing a specific product direction is a tactical matter; you must understand the overall trends in your chosen industry and technology field at a strategic level. Choice is more important than effort.

Products

  • Meet a certain level of standardization, universality, and replicability.
  • Typically require significant upfront investment.
  • Have the potential for explosive growth.
  • Face intense competition, with only a few players surviving in most sectors.
  • Tend to be favored by the capital market due to their potential for high growth and returns.

Projects

  • "Feast or famine" – revenue can be inconsistent.
  • Quick cash flow, with minimal upfront investment.
  • Generally have slow growth.
  • Accommodate many small companies.
  • Are not the capital market's first choice.

About Investment and Finance

Growth Avenues

  1. Don't aim for the best, aim for exclusivity, such as patents.
  2. Scale up, like retail giants and internet companies.
  3. Go to challenging business environments and capture a significant share of smaller markets.
  4. Secure government support and collaboration.
  5. Own property, such as real estate or intellectual property.
  6. Make money through legal means.
  7. Benefit from network effects, like telecom companies.

Investment

  1. Buy when others are panicking, sell when others are optimistic.
  2. Be deeply passionate about investment and have a strong competitive spirit.
  3. Learn from failures.
  4. Trust your intuition about risk without relying on machines.
  5. Maintain unwavering confidence, even in the face of criticism.
  6. Use both sides of your brain – one for calculations, the other for assessing company management and trends.
  7. Stick to your investment strategy in both upswings and downturns.

About Writing

Methods

Axioms and Examples

After abstracting the essence of things into an axiom, don't forget to provide examples. Just like principles in physics or mathematics, axioms are usually difficult to directly apply. What's more useful are the theorems derived from axioms and more specific rules.

While personal experiences are often deeply impactful for oneself, for readers, you need to support your points with specific cases or explanations to make the axiom more convincing.

User Psychology

Examine the utilization of user psychology in creating viral content.

1. Emotional Appeal

Research shows that articles evoking low-energy emotions like sadness are rarely shared, while those inducing high-energy emotions like awe, anger, and anxiety receive more shares. Anger is the most contagious emotion, but it should be directed at the topic, not the author or publisher. Stirring readers' anger usually requires the capacity to handle controversial subjects. Controversial blog posts receive, on average, twice as many comments as non-controversial ones.

Awe is a safer emotion, particularly for brands seeking to avoid anger. Awe surpasses surprise, which is why people favor explosive events and legendary heroic movies.

2. Long-Form Content

Long-form articles are shared more frequently, with the length's relevance to sharing rates being higher than other variables. Ward, the leading researcher, believes there's a causal relationship here. "If I truly care about a topic, I don't want to share shallow surface-level articles with my friends or readers."

Another study suggests that despite receiving more shares, long-form articles often have fewer comments, likely because people don't read them from start to finish.

3. Genuine Emotion

Emotion-filled posts are more likely to go viral, as readers seek emotional experiences while reading. Walter Kirn, a writer, says that excellent personal essays and memoirs should begin with the author's most shameful content, as it contains conflict and emotion. Sharing this content shows readers that you are a genuine, flawed, and real person.

When writing advertisements, people might not be willing to start with shame, but sharing real emotions can help readers lower their guard.

4. Practical Information

Surprising, attractive, and practical content receives more shares. This finding may be the most straightforward among all the research.

Ward believes that the primary motivation for internet reading is people seeking answers to certain questions, such as, "How should I invest in my personal retirement account?" or "What is the best way to clean hardwood floors?" Answers to these questions naturally gain popularity.

5. Fame

Authors known to readers have a significant impact on whether an article can be shared. Fame accumulates cyclically, and initial recognition can lead to even greater recognition, especially on the internet.

6. Homepage / Headlines

Posts featured on the homepage are more likely to be widely shared. In an age of scarce attention, where people are bombarded with an abundance of information daily, placing content in the most prominent position ensures that readers will see it. Content hidden in the corners is difficult to notice.

7. Humor, Satire, and Emotion

Content that goes viral is often humorous. Additionally, 60% of viral ads are produced by small companies.

Humor, satire, and irreverence may not solve all problems, but they are essential prerequisites for viral advertising.

8. Viral Spread

If you want your content to go viral, every content producer should carefully answer the following questions before publishing:

  • Does the article provide a detailed introduction to the topic? Is it of sufficient length?
  • Can this content evoke high-energy emotions such as anger, awe, or anxiety?
  • Does the article convey emotions in its tone?
  • Is this content particularly practical? Is it interesting? Or does it elicit surprise and delight?
  • Does the author have fame or credibility?
  • Is this content genuinely interesting?
  • If your answers are affirmative, congratulations, you have an article that can go viral.

About Personal Development

Making and Selling

Renowned Silicon Valley venture capitalist Naval once shared a golden piece of advice on Twitter, which received over ten thousand likes.

He said: "Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable."

His point is that a successful company must possess both outstanding manufacturing capabilities and exceptional sales abilities. A successful company should know not only how to create excellent products but also how to sell them.

This is why companies have both a CEO and a CTO. Typically, the CEO is responsible for sales (including fundraising) and management, while the CTO is responsible for manufacturing. If either of these roles is not performed well, the company cannot succeed.

Naval goes on to say that the most powerful individuals in the world are those who can both create and sell. Such individuals can create an industry. For example, Elon Musk is such a person; he understands technology, can have engineers build what he envisions, and knows how to sell, making the world crazy about Tesla cars. Steve Jobs was also such a person, understanding what customers wanted and what Apple could create, almost single-handedly making Apple the world's most valuable company.

If we view our lives as projects, success in life is similar; we must have genuine skills and know how to promote ourselves.

Naval believes that, in general, makers find it easier to learn sales than salespeople find it to learn making. For example, programmers learning operations is easier than operations personnel learning programming. So, the idea is that in college, it's best to major in courses related to making (such as computer science) and minor in courses related to sales (such as economics). This combination is more reasonable.

About Survival

Survival is an immediate strategy game, and everyone is a player in this game. Financial freedom makes you a winner.

Specifically, there are two types of games: the wealth game and the status game. Players in the wealth game seek more wealth, while players in the status game aim for higher status.

In ancient times, the higher your status, the more wealth you had. Holding high positions equated to gaining great wealth, so everyone played the status game. In modern society, the wealth game and the status game have gradually become disconnected. You can amass great wealth without holding high positions, so more people have joined the wealth game.

These two games have fundamental differences. The status game is always zero-sum; if there's a winner, there must be a loser. For instance, if I become the department head, you can't become one. Therefore, the status game is perilous, and one must be on constant guard against other players' schemes. The wealth game is not zero-sum; if I build a beautiful house, it doesn't prevent you from building one as well. If I make money, it doesn't harm others; it may even improve their lives. For example, when Steve Jobs founded Apple, it provided better electronic products for others to use.

Entrepreneurship is a wealth game, and politics is a status game. Due to these reasons, I believe that participating in entrepreneurship is worthwhile, while politics is not worth engaging in. Some entrepreneurial projects are also zero-sum, such as ticket scalping, flash sales, game cheating, etc., and they are not worth participating in either.

—— Ruanyifeng's "Tech Lover's Weekly: Issue 66"

References and Acknowledgments

This post is translated using ChatGPT, please feedback if any omissions.