What is the most important step to succeed in starting a business?

What is the most important thing for startup success? Some say it’s funding, others say it’s resources. But let me ask you: does Wang Sicong have enough money? Enough resources? If you still say they’re not enough, then getting you more won’t help, because if what you’re trying to do always exceeds what you currently have, then it will never be enough—what I mean is, is it enough to carry out some lightweight entrepreneurship and achieve success? Absolutely yes.

Wang Sicong isn’t dumb. And the same is true for Zou Shiming, who recently has been hotly discussed for losing 200 million. Where is the problem? Before they started their business—indeed even during the process—they didn’t carefully experience what truly great things look like. So who are the people most likely to succeed when starting a business? The answer is: “people who have worked long enough, high enough in position, in a company that is good enough.” Once these people have resources, entrepreneurship is almost impossible to fail. Why? It’s very simple: they know what “the correct way to do things” is.

Sometimes I go to small shops on the street and find that they make an extremely large number of mistakes—extremely obvious ones. You wonder, no wonder offline stores change so quickly; it’s because people with zero experience are the ones opening them. From the way items are displayed, to how customers are received, to the steps in producing the goods—everything is full of problems. But as a customer, I don’t have any obligation to remind them how to do it.

All entrepreneurs need to remember this: if you want to start a business, first you must follow behind a successful entrepreneur. You have to carefully observe how they do things. How do people from Chaoshan do it? Like: your cousin succeeded in this business, right? Go—go help your cousin with the business. No salary. If he does it poorly, just hit or scold him—be tough. After 3 years, the younger cousin starts a business on their own. There are many details in entrepreneurship. For big successful people, there is always a reason for their success. The detail control—how they take one pothole after another, how they modify one process after another—you don’t see those things, and then you can’t do it well. In other words, how well you can do depends on how high the standard you’ve seen is.

So what should ordinary entrepreneurs do if they don’t have this kind of opportunity? Some apply for jobs and learn by observing. If they don’t want to do that, then they should firmly lock onto the best person among their peers, keep improving themselves based on what that person does, and keep figuring out the purpose behind each step—not imagining how the thing “should” be done in your own head, then directly throwing money at it, like “50 million yuan for venue rent,” or “100-plus people,” and so on. In entrepreneurship, fixing every process, and fine-tuning control of each cost—none of that is something you can make up on your own.

This applies to entrepreneurs. What about ordinary people who just work a job? It’s the same: go see things, keep your eyes on the best person you can access in your industry and in your role. Study every detail and every step of how they work. Use their standards as your own standards. Many people do things badly and don’t even realize they’re bad because they themselves are working in a bad company with bad colleagues. Colleagues are only at 20 points, and they think that reaching 25 points is already amazing—good and bad are determined by comparison, and they have no awareness of the gap, so how would they ever change?

So sometimes it’s not that you grow slowly—it’s that you chose the wrong reference frame. What you can see around you doesn’t include good things. You’ve never eaten pork, you’ve never seen pigs run, so naturally you don’t know what the real standard for doing things well is. That’s why it ends up looking like you’re continuously worse without realizing it. The real difficulty is just hard to solve, not impossible to solve; not feeling that there’s a problem—that’s what’s most deadly. #PreIPOs第二期OpenAI认购