2 full years, my first SaaS startup is over

tips：This is a 10,000 word long article

From April 2020 to April 2022, my first business venture drew a sentence.
If there must be a judgment, I think it is an intermediate state between failure and success. From the perspective of a project, it must be a failure, and from the perspective of an entrepreneur's growth, it is a success.
The article uses the narrative method of timeline story, from "founding the company" to "on the verge of bankruptcy" to "rebirth" and finally "deciding to give up" the entire experience, the process integrates the psychological changes and experience summaries at key stages
(90% emotional expression, 10% experience summary)

I hope it inspires you, and at the same time, I also seriously put an end to this experience for myself.

Let's start, please come into this story of mine.

2014, summer

Can't remember the exact day, but this is when I started to become a product manager. In the era of mass entrepreneurship and innovation, becoming a product manager seems to be the easiest of all Internet jobs, and it is also called out. Two sentences in the history of the Internet, the first sentence is "everyone is a product manager", and the second sentence is "a product manager is the CEO's preschool", these two sentences have continued to be complained to this day, but, this second sentence I really believe the words, that is, since I officially became a product manager in 2014, I knew that I would start a business.

August 2019

Chengju is a consumer project closely related to the Airbnb that left China. This is the second time I have participated in someone else's business. In the third year of its establishment, in 2019, it was officially launched in August. It was acquired, yes it was acquired (a group company acquired us and another company at the same time), I led the system product merger of the three companies, this is a difficult but very nutritious process, in this process I absorb nutrients, While exploring the direction of entrepreneurship.

process of merging

The merger of the three companies was a difficult process, which lasted for half a year. The complexity of the matter itself was far beyond my expectations, but the complexity of "people" should be more than 10 times more complicated. Let everyone in the three companies eventually use you to lead The combined efficiency product of the company, and used well, can take care of the historical habits of thousands of operators in the three companies, and more importantly, the executive teams of the other two companies are all looking at you, understand? .

I have the idea of ​​giving up almost every weekend. Why don't I just leave this business and go away? It's cool, but I already have the idea of ​​​​starting a business. Since I want to start a business, is it impossible to acquire others in the future? ? Is it possible that the company will also be sold and acquired by others? The answer must be certain. So now, using someone else's company to obtain this experience at the lowest cost will definitely help me a lot in my future entrepreneurship. Thinking of this, I began to firmly take care of this matter and everyone involved!

April 2020

After the New Year's Eve in 2020, the epidemic in 2019 was more serious than we thought, but the society as a whole was still optimistic. Everyone thought that it would be the same as last time, and it would end in the summer.
In March, the product merger was completed and launched, the business side of the group was also fully integrated, PR was officially announced, and over 100 million yuan in financing was obtained.

On April 1st, "I've gained valuable experience, and I've taken it upon myself to pass the job, so I should go" I said to the CEO.

T always sits across from me. He, a serial entrepreneur, seems to have had insight into the mind of a young man like me, and we ended the 2-hour conversation happily.

After walking out of Guangying's building, how could I know that this would be the beginning of the first tormenting journey in my life.

Officially launched

I have participated in other people's startups twice. This is my first time. People always have high expectations for a long-awaited thing, and I am no exception. I have been looking forward to starting this startup for many years. , but I'm still a relatively rational person, trying to restrain myself from the transitional passions that are characteristic of everything the first time. (In fact, most first-time entrepreneurs have had a period of time driving things by moving themselves.)

If I want to evaluate myself, I am a person who jumps repeatedly in passion and calmness. Maybe the characteristics of Gemini are reflected in entrepreneurship. This time, my expectation for myself is: just take the first step, It is a relatively calm expectation to complete the transformation of the thinking mode from a product manager to an entrepreneur.

Maybe it is because of this calmness that the foreshadowing of doomed failure has been laid from the beginning. Later, I will talk about which moment made me decide to give up.

track selection

The biggest first pit for young entrepreneurs is to choose a track. Of course, I also fell into this pit.

City Lodging is a project in the lodging industry, which is a very traditional track, but from an investment point of view, the matching of personnel is very important. Your experience, understanding of the industry, accumulated industry resources, and capabilities, and You're doing things that overlap completely, and it's easy for such an entrepreneur to get early-stage investment.

When you have deeply cultivated in this industry and established a high level of cognition in the years before starting your business, you have a higher-dimensional view of the end of the industry at the cognitive level, and your judgment on industry trends is also very accurate. They are all important factors that determine whether you can take a company far enough. Without these factors, there is a high probability that there will be no capital to support your early stage.

Especially SaaS entrepreneurs, if they have the past accumulation that can support the cold start of your product, it will be very helpful in the early stage.

So, my first entrepreneurial project "Guest Cloud" was born. If the first important thing in starting a business is to choose a track, then for me, I didn't choose this link at all, because I want to put the past Products that have been wanted to do for a few years but have not been completed, continue to do it, and it is so simple to enter the pit.

Judgment of the industry

The entire lodging industry is very large, and the guest cloud chooses to start from the hotel industry. This industry has an advantage over SaaS, that is, it is extremely fragmented. If the standardization degree of an industry is high enough and the industry concentration is high, this time The industrial chain is basically formed, and the empowerment of SaaS and industrial Internet ideas is kidnapped by customers in such an industry. Your product will be very difficult to standardize, and it will become a KA business.

In addition to the characteristics of the industry, a very big change has taken place in the hotel industry, that is, the rise of regional new chain brands, which is very similar to the state of physical new retail, which is the consumption upgrade of end consumers forcing accommodation products. Changes have taken place, and the hotel itself has its own real estate attributes. The urban agglomeration driven by core cities is the trend of real estate. The phenomenon that extends to the hotel industry is that it is not difficult to find that some local areas have formed very good regional brands. , they will not go out of the region, and they do not plan to do business nationwide, but they have already generated a certain product premium locally

With the rise of new brand chains in the region, the new generation of consumer brands has a characteristic, which is true in any industry, and that is DTC.

From day one, they don't intend to rely 100% on channels.

Regional chain trend + new brand day one DTC are two industry characteristics, so the guest cloud was born.

Guest Cloud is a marketing SaaS for a new generation of chain accommodation brands. It is a transactional SaaS for vertical industries. It can help chain hotel brands build a DTC business model, from user access, to user private domain cultivation, to marketing automation. , we have built a complete set of business model infrastructure to help hotel brands face consumers directly.

Compared with the traditional similar old players in the industry, we believe that these new brands are more auxiliary logic, which is to use tools to assist them to achieve their goals efficiently, while other types of competing products are substitute logic, you don't do it, I Provide tools + operations to help you do it, and you give me money when you do it well. We asked ourselves countless times, and finally we made up our minds to stick to the SaaS model (in fact, it was also my obsession, wanting to create a very pure SaaS product, but this decision has basically sentenced us to death.)

☆☆Summary☆☆
Here I would like to give a piece of advice to students who are starting their own businesses for the first time:
Don't pay attention to the track, start with the area you are most familiar with, even if it is small
My feeling is that starting a business for the first time is more like a yardstick. You have to feel it, experience it, and make mistakes when the cost is the lowest, the mistakes of choosing partners, the mistakes of financing terms, the mistakes of not being able to find PMF, The fault of not leading the start-up team, the fault of making decisions... In short, calm down and experience entrepreneurship. Use this process to make your scale finer, from meters to centimeters, and then add more Millimeter, the finer the particle size, the more comprehensive your understanding of entrepreneurship will be, so that you can become a more mature entrepreneur as much as possible in this entrepreneurship, maybe you will choose the wrong track, maybe this matter is not your best. It doesn’t matter what you want to do, just like writing a propositional essay, try to make your first venture bring you a more comprehensive vision and cognition, maybe you will achieve a little, maybe everything will be zero, but this Neither matter. We have a next time, don't we.

find a partner

Before I officially resigned to start my business, about after the Spring Festival of 2020, I started talking to my friends about my entrepreneurial direction. I met an old colleague by pure coincidence. He told me that our co-worker in 2015 was his wife. Are similar things, suggest we chat.
So we chatted for 2 hours in a small street cafe near Lishuiqiao in Beijing.

And just like that, I have a part-time job! "partner"

☆☆Mentality☆☆
Almost everyone recommends not to find a part-time job. I don't think so. I think it's fine as long as someone is reliable. Now I tell you from my own experience that you must not!

My part-time partner is quite reliable, and the progress of the project has not fallen behind. However, due to family factors, children are waiting to spend money, and the elderly are also spending money. He really can't take more risks, but this is what he wants to do. We have worked together for a period of time in the past, and the foundation of trust is there. He has a strong sense of responsibility and has taken up the part he is responsible for. However, part-time job One of the biggest problems with partners is that they cannot empathize. The anxiety that always accompanies the founder cannot be felt by part-time partners. The uncertainty of his time is also an important factor that makes you uneasy.

Entrepreneurship is a long-distance race. You either decide to carry everything alone without any partnership expectations, or you have a founding team that can truly share anxiety and work pressure. The uncertain state of part-time partners will make founders The expectations of the other party become uncertain, and the unreasonable expectations of the partner will become a constant distress for you. If you really don’t have a choice, then you can negotiate a good price and cooperate well. You don’t need to find a partner immediately, and don’t have unreasonably high expectations.

But my part-time partner is not in a good condition. He will at least stand by your side and think together how to change the company little by little, from the direction and strategy to the details of products and the efficiency of personnel communication. , he will find problems and point them out, and practice to change them. In this regard, most full-time partners are actually similar to senior employees with equity. Many strong people can’t complete the change of mentality and professional role in their lifetime. (I have participated in two startups and have experienced some such unreliable partners)

In this regard, I am very happy to cooperate with this part-time partner. Although I know that we will eventually separate, we still walk a very unique path together.

In someone else's office, type the first line of code

During the period before I left, I basically got off work from the company at 8 pm every night, and then went to get off work at his company until about 1 or 2 am, every day. We lasted for about 3 months, and the product's 1.0 The version just came out so hard. I made the product, I made the UI myself, and he took care of all the technology stacks. I am 26 years old this year, but I have clearly felt the decline in my physical condition, and my brain is getting worse and worse.

This status continued until June 2020. Until we got a round of seed funding.

June 2020 Seed round completed

I am lucky. I have helped my seniors at critical moments several times along the way. It is the first time to start a business. I have never been in contact with VCs before, and I don’t know how to get financial support from them. Of course, there is not much of this. aspect resources. Maybe it's also because my background is not good enough and I didn't get into their range. Since I started a full-time business, I have invested the money I have saved from working in the past few years (because I lack professional knowledge, and I don't know how to make real payments), but the basic expenses are not counted. too much.

In a business school, the L in my group never appeared very often. In my impression, L only appeared 3 times. The one I remember most clearly is that I did a sharing assignment on behalf of our group and won the second place. When I received the award, a figure I had never seen before appeared. Later, after having dinner together after the offline event, I mentioned that I was ready to start a business. I don’t know that L always decided to invest in me from this moment.

I don't know why Mr. L supports my entrepreneurship. After all, the industry his company is engaged in has nothing to do with me, and he doesn't understand what I am doing at all. He only knows that SaaS is a trend. I am doing SaaS. According to Mr. L's words, I just want to support young people to make friends.

Although L is not in the technology industry, I still learned a lot of small details of running a business from him, especially in the link of rallying people's hearts, I can feel a kind of bandit from him, like a bandit leader haha, I I have had in-depth contact with their team. To be honest, I really like it. I have worked in an Internet company for nearly 10 years. It is the first time I feel such a different team culture, which is very attractive to me.

Mr. L never interferes with our operations. When talking about the direction of my Internet, I will listen carefully to your opinions and expressions. An invisible rich man who may be worth over 100 million (my guess) but is so humble can meet such a person. The relationship is much more valuable than his financial support for me. Although the business is different and the development direction is different, there is no deeper business intersection with Mr. L at the current stage, but I still look forward to the opportunity to work with Mr. L in the future. something.

In June, the funds were in place, and there were more than one million in the account. Then we moved into the wework, called my old colleagues back, and started recruiting new recruits.

We are very confident, we think we can make the best products in the industry (looking back today, I want to say to myself: "A good stage and an audience who know how to appreciate it are a good show, without one No", you'll understand why I say that later.)

The startup of the company is basically over here. It took less than 3 months.
During this time, the people, affairs and money of the first stage of the company have been completed.

Run through product MVP in July

Hainan → Jiangsu → Shandong → Shanxi, throughout July 2020, we traveled through several cities to visit potential customers, looking for early target cities and seed users on the way.

The MVP of the product is not a big problem for an old product manager. I have a very in-depth summary of this part. You can see a shared course in the starting point college (Internet industry course platform) before.
"The Landing and Practice of MVP in SaaS from a Business Perspective"

Iterate continuously

From the very first day of my business, I wanted to be a product-driven company. This is my vision as a product manager.

For a long time in the future, we will polish and create together with merchants.

At this stage, what exactly should the product do, has always been SOne of the topics discussed by aaS practitioners, I can often see related discussions in various SaaS CEO groups.

Some people say that they need to constantly chat with customers, some people say that the point of paying is the real demand, and some even provide very specific user interview methods. Of course, they are all right. These are also the basic skills of product managers.

One of my tricks during early SaaS product iterations was to forget about the product.

Because the essence of SaaS products is to abstract your unique business insights into products, and the essence of products is to create a transaction model, so the core should be very clear, that is, to see whether value delivery is established.

The process of building a SaaS product from 0 can actually be roughly equal to the process of designing a transaction chain from 0. If we realize this, we will find that we can actually make the product in less hurry, we can design the value delivery first, and the possibility of your delivery It is a cognition, it may be a service, not a SaaS product that has been developed (combine cognition and service into paid courses, paid articles, these are all products)

We did this in the early days. We output a set of systematic methods. The communication with customers is not to talk about product functions, but to talk about whether our method can be effective in key aspects of their business, and then help Customers go to implement this method, and in the process you will find out what should be turned into a product, and what is not the demand you imagined at all.

The most fearful thing about making a product is not to make a wrong demand, but to waste precious time in a demand that is neither right nor so wrong, and makes the product very bulky.

☆☆Summary☆☆
I am currently starting my second venture. This time, I did not start from the product, but helped customers with a lot of consulting services in the early stage. On the one hand, I accumulated early internal beta users. The needs have been honed very clearly

It is precisely because of this that our product iteration speed is very fast. It only took us 4 months from the first line of code to the first customer launch. The subsequent functions are the same, and once launched, they are widely used by customers. The core of adoption is accurate product requirements and no waste of development resources, because knowledge services have been running with customers for a period of time beforehand.

I hope SaaS entrepreneurs can also try my method, why your product is a "product".
Get rid of the inertia of thinking and find the essence, sometimes you will find that many actions are waste.

From September to October, all early seed merchants will be online

In a little more than a quarter, the product completed the early core version and was fully delivered on a closed value loop, and then the North Star indicator (the proportion of merchants' self-operated channel transactions) doubled every month, but we immediately had a problem, The value perception of merchants is not clear enough. If this problem cannot be solved, GTM will encounter great resistance.

Customer Success 1.0

In order to solve the resistance of GTM, I, the CEO, started customer success. At that time, I didn’t know what customer success was. I only knew that I needed to help customers understand the value of products, and then combined with our precipitation business methods, step by step to promote products and Their operations are integrated, and at this stage, I continue to deepen my own services. Weekly, monthly, and quarterly data reports, bit by bit, let customers see the unique value our business brings to them. But at this time, there is no customer success system, showing that I am constantly delivering the business value behind each product function and our unique understanding.

picture
Customer Service Performance Report

The correct North Star indicator is extremely important

There are certain transaction attributes in our project, because merchants need to run their own DTC business on the applet built based on our service, and the transaction volume of the merchant applet determines the effectiveness of our business. The indicator is identified as GMV.

But in fact, there is still a small problem in this way. There are large and small merchants. If a large merchant does a random operation, the GMV will be very high, and they will mistakenly think that the products and services meet the needs of the merchants. In fact, it is not. This is inaccurate. Later, we defined the indicator as "the proportion of self-operated channel transactions of merchants", thus ignoring the difference in the size of merchants. After the service of the guest cloud entered the merchants, we tracked the proportion of self-operated mini-programs in the first three months, so that regardless of the size of the merchants Whether it is a large merchant or a small merchant, it can fully reflect the effectiveness of our services.

In terms of the priority of product functions, we will put the needs that can increase the proportion of self-operated mini-programs of merchants to the front. In terms of customer success, we have designed more designs to help merchants achieve a reasonable proportion of self-operated channels in the first three months. than the customer consulting services.

☆☆Summary☆☆
To establish the North Star indicator as early as possible, many requirements can be done or not done in the product iteration. The correct North Star indicator is an important reference for aligning all the actions and priorities of the entire company.

Funding to start in November

Have you ever experienced the feeling of being rejected hundreds of times? This will make you get to know yourself more and more.

My FA said: "Funding is a kind of ability." As a first-time entrepreneur, I feel how correct her words are. Starting from November 2020, in the next half year, I will continue to train this an ability.

☆☆Share☆☆
Here we share how to choose a reliable FA. Before the official financing, I also met some FAs through friends, but I was moved by her in the end. Everyone has professional skills. There is really little difference between who is stronger and who is weaker. If you have the bright spots in your body, you can maintain enthusiasm for you and your project, otherwise you will easily lose your heart if you don’t have positive feedback if you promote to some institutions, so in addition to professional ability, the FA you are looking for must be that one Someone who appreciates you and digs out the highlights of you and your project. S held about 50 meetings with me. Of course, I was rejected more than 50 times in the end. I am very grateful to her.

The color of 2021 is depressive gray

In March after the Spring Festival, the epidemic began to rage again. Before the festival, M Institution had already said that they would invest in us, but after the Spring Festival, they lost their faith. Although I know that as long as the money is not in place, the financing will not be completed, but it is still true. This verbal promise has unrealistic expectations.

In half a year, 80 institutions went from wearing coats, to shirts, to short sleeves. From Sanyuan Bridge, to Liangma Bridge, to Guomao, I don’t know how many times I stayed up all night with the team, and got up at 8 o’clock the next day to prepare for the meeting, usually one in the morning and one in the afternoon, sometimes three a day, one in the morning. You are full of passion in the field, and the investors sitting across from you in the afternoon are fighting with their eyelids. The same words and expressions should be said at least twice a day for half a year.

From the beginning of being full of passion, to the end, you have to show your passion by performing. In the middle and late stages of financing, every time I walk out of the institutional building, the sky I see is not blue. My brain is starved of oxygen, and my eyes are gray. , dizzy get into the car, dizzy back to the company and immediately put into work

Lasting until May, FA and I decided to disappear first and run the business first.

☆☆Mentality☆☆
Psychological changes during this time:
I am a habitual introspective person. All problems will first be determined by whether I am not doing well enough. In the midst of constant negation, I am naturally constantly reflecting. The good side is that you will find your own problems and optimize them. But there are also On the contrary, the continuous denial begins to gradually think that you are not good enough, the whole person begins to become tense, and the work begins to deform, anxiety, and sleeplessness. A lot of self-denial becomes the whole of your daily brain activities, and at the same time, you are facing financial pressure. As long as you keep your eyes open, you are anxious. You can't fall asleep when you lie down at night. Every day at four or five in the morning, you finally fall asleep and wake up naturally at seven or eight. . . .

If you describe the feeling of this time, it is like you are in the middle of a completely closed house with no light. The room has only one exit. You have no idea how big the room is, and you don't know where to go. Go left. 100 meters, but you are afraid of the wrong direction and then 200 meters to the right, wandering and tangled, you are worried that you will starve to death here if you can't find the exit, but if you do nothing, you will die here, go? I don't know where to go, I can't touch the wall after walking for a long time, should I continue to walk here.

Book funds reached the red line in May

Self A: "What to do next, there are still three months of money left"
Self B: "Either give up"
Self C: "I'm not reconciled"
Self A: "Or else give it a try and find a way to make money yourself?"
Self B: "It's impossible, this product is not in the PLG model, it can't be so fast, three months is not enough to build a sales system"
Self C: "Fight, fight"
Self A: "Think about where the existing customers are?"
Self B: "In content channels and communities?"
Self A: "It's too slow to solve the problem at hand"
Self C: "Maybe in someone else's product"
Self B: "What product?"
Self C: "In a product that has a high degree of overlap with our users and has been educated"
Self A: "I see."

In June, the strategic cooperation between friends and businessmen was completed, and the product integration was completed.
The products of friends and merchants are very complementary to us. They solve the operation efficiency problem of the same type of merchants. We solve the incremental problem. The competition of friends and merchants is all-in-one, and our friends are very good in private domain marketing. Weak, even if it is very weak, there is no small GMV performance.

The premise of all strategic cooperation is sustainable and 1+1>2. The two are indispensable. Together, they can create greater value for customers, thereby bringing increment to both parties. Friends and merchants need our capabilities in this regard. To enhance their product competitiveness and form a closed loop, we need customers. It was basically decided by our two CEOs' efforts to eat an old Beijing copper pot.

Channel + content, monthly growth rate of 35%

In June, I put all my energy into two things, 1. Product integration plan with friends and merchants. 2. Build a content system.

Seed merchants have been running for a long time. We precipitated the content of the overall service in the process and began to output it in the circle. Content is definitely the most important marketing method for SaaS products. Although content will not bring new customers in the short term, it will It is the best tool for you to cultivate customers and promote conversion. At the same time, if you have a certain accumulation of customers, the output content will become the carrier of customer conversion, which has very good results in the acceleration of purchasing decisions and small circles. .

Friends and merchants began to promote us in full. Coupled with the precipitation of our content, the number of merchants continued to rise, and the GMV increased by 200% in the highest month. You must know that Guest Cloud is a very SLG-type product, which can rely on content and products to experience independently To achieve such data, we think it is pretty good. (Because our team is only single digit, except for technology, everything else is just me)

but!

June July August, three months of our poor revenue, it depends, we made a serious mistake in the pricing model.

Our competing products all use the merchant GMV commission model, and we choose pure subscription fee income, because I am too idealistic, I insist that the core of the SaaS model is based on subscription fees, regardless of subsequent value-added services, or more Product line management, the essence of SaaS is the subscription fee. If it is not the subscription fee income, then it is an agency operation company. This is something I absolutely reject from the bottom of my heart. Even if it goes bankrupt, I will not become a living agency logistic company.

Sometimes idealism is good, but the problem is that it violates the industry rules. We can look at the financial reports of Youzan and Weimeng. Most of Youzan’s revenue comes from subscription fees, while Weimeng is actually behind the big customerization. It is no longer purely subscription revenue, which means that on the domestic soil, the soil of commercial SaaS in vertical industries is not mature enough, and the degree of digitalization is too low, not to mention a traditional wine travel industry.

Background of domestic SaaS:
The United States took three generations to complete the digital foundation of the whole society. The rapid development of China has folded these three generations. We have to serve the three generations of the post-70s and post-80s and post-90s at the same time, and the post-70s and post-80s are still the backbone of the entire business society. Power (there is even a post-60s generation in the wine travel industry) is a big resistance to the SaaS model. The post-80s reluctantly accept it, and the post-90s embrace it, but in specific vertical industries, how many practitioners are born in the 90s?

Therefore, the guest cloud used the appearance and brand of the applet to present this point from the very beginning, and basically penetrated the accommodation brands mainly born in the 1990s. We have a lot of new brands in Sichuan and Chongqing that are well-known locally. They are very Paying attention to "face value" wants to create a new way of interacting with users, but how many such merchants are in the wine travel industry? How many other industries are there?

Therefore, our idealization basically limits the scale of our merchants. In a subdivision field, we cut a very subdivided customer type, which is difficult to imagine.

In contrast to our competition, they do not rely on subscription fees at all, and the products can be bought out for life. Basically, the products are free to use, and commissions are drawn from the transaction volume. How can the commission income be increased? It must be an agency operation, because The mainstream traditional brands in the market have a demand for generational operations and have a strong ability to pay, but they are not good at and have the energy to develop their own business in this area, so our young team, all born in the 1990s, is still too naive and ideal.

Although the growth rate has increased, most of them are free versions. There are so many paid conversions per week, and at this time, there is no money, no more!

In August, it seems that I haven't slept for a month

In fact, after our office expired in July, all staff worked from home, not because of the epidemic, but because of poverty, but the rhetoric to other students is that we try a more advanced distributed office (I don’t know if they believe in it). Do not believe)

I clearly remember August 27, 2021. Before this Friday, I had avoided the problem of funds for a long time. I had to make a decision this weekend, because this weekend is the first day of a new month. , I don't know where the new month's salary should come from.

On the evening of the 27th, I had a 3-hour phone call with my part-time partner. We decided to announce the dissolution on Monday, September 1st!

This night, I stayed awake all night, lying on the bed and looking at the ceiling, I could clearly hear the cough of the old man upstairs at 4:00 a.m., and heard the birds chirping clearly at 6:00 a.m. I adjusted my mind at 8:00 a.m. , started this weekend that I don't know how to describe.

On the 28th, I didn’t feel that it was a Saturday. I went to the coffee shop I used to go to. I didn’t turn on the computer but stayed in a daze. At 8 pm, the coffee shop turned into a bar. I ordered a glass of whiskey and went home. I don't know if I was asleep or awake that night.

On Sunday, August 29th, I heard the sound of eggs breaking

After two days of depression, I recovered on Sunday. Even if it was just me, I would definitely do it. After dinner at night, I went to Hema to buy some living necessities, and after walking out of Hema Standing under the new coordinates of Wangjing, Wangjing Eye (an installation art), I received a call.

"Hello, I'm a staff member of Qiji Creation Forum. Are you Zhang Haoran?"
"Yes, it's me"
"We would like to ask you, if we invest, would you accept to buy back half of the shares of the shareholders in the seed round"
"I can understand, have you decided to invest in me?"
"It is understandable, but only if our demands andWe can agree on a valuation"

The egg in his hand fell to the ground and shattered.

At the beginning, I just wanted to fill out a form seriously when applying for the Qiji Creation Forum. The Qiji Creation Forum’s form allows us to verify whether our ideas are complete and clear enough. (Although there were two interviews in the process, I never thought about being selected. After all, Dr. Lu Qi's style is still based on core technology)

I don’t know if it was God’s own arrangement, but it was deliberately arranged to give me the ups and downs of mentality in the past two days. At this moment, I can feel the awakening of energy from head to toe.

☆☆Mentality☆☆
After this time, in the subsequent entrepreneurial process, my mentality has always been very stable, I realized that many things are not for you to decide, and I felt what "now" is, and I can truly live in the moment. After this time I have found a sense of "relaxation". If my company goes out of business tomorrow, I can get a good night's sleep now. That's why I said at the beginning that the first-time entrepreneur should not pay too much attention to the track and so on, because These experiences and changes in mentality, the sooner you experience them, the more stable you will be in the future entrepreneurial process, because there is a very rare and not obvious ability in entrepreneurship, that is, "mental strength", and the experience of mental strength can only be experienced through "practice on things". Rare" can improve.
(Note: "Practice on things" and "hard to find" are concepts in Wang Yangming's psychology, which means that only in doing things can one hone one's mental strength, and only in suffering can one gain mental strength.)

Launch of GTM in October

We GTM adopted a more traditional method and started to build a sales team. Before starting large-scale sales, I ran about 40 orders myself, and accumulated a set of value points and speaking skills (I may be a small salesman who was delayed by the product manager. Genius haha), the rapid growth of customers has made our customer success pressure a little bit bigger. This time, we have seriously built a set of customer success system.

In the above customer success 1.0 stage, we need three months to increase the proportion of the merchant's own channels from 0 to 40%, which means that 40% of the customer's monthly GMV income comes from his own Official channels, this is very difficult in the hotel industry. Huazhu and Atour are so large, they have been meeting for so many years, and it is difficult to reach 80% (in fact, small and medium-sized hotels still need to retain a part of the OTA share, we It is not recommended that they raise their own channels too high. 40% is a safe value. There are few small and medium-sized brand stores, and too many self-owned orders will make them lose their OTA competitiveness, and new store expansion will encounter difficulties.)

Customer Success 2.0

picture

The picture above shows our customer success system, which has been shortened from 40% of our own channels in 3 months to 2.5 months, and then to 1 month. We also have dedicated customer success personnel. Under this system, the newly added customers are basically accepted. We promise to refund the full amount free of charge at any time within 180 days after payment. Among our more than 40 paying customers, only 1 Merchant refunded.

Problems continue to emerge

Remember what I mentioned above, we insist on the subscription model and do not take commissions? After GTM started for a period of time, we were more and more troubled by this problem, and a large number of customers began to ask us to provide agency operation services before signing orders , and in some cities that competitors have cultivated, payment in advance is not even accepted, even if we do calculations and tell them that a subscription fee may be more cost-effective than a rake. At this time, there was a problem with placing orders, but I still insisted on the subscription model, never taking commissions, and never operating on behalf of me.

I once introduced a product to a fairly large customer. The boss was born in the 70s. After my ppt introduction, I planned to show him the effect of the product and the customer’s applet (we are very confident in the output effect). I got impatient within 5 minutes and asked if I could hire someone to do it for them and be willing to pay more for us. He was quite good and willing to pay. Later, we realized that in many cases, to implement this set of business logic, we need to recruit a professional for this purpose, and there was no corresponding position in their past employee system.
That's why almost all of our competitions offer proxy operations. But my obsession with the SaaS subscription model made us miss a lot of such orders, and it also made me feel bad about the industry.

Another factor is product. I always want to drive the company's development through good products, but it doesn't seem to matter in this industry...

Going back to the sentence I said at the beginning, "A good stage and an audience who know how to appreciate it are a good show, and neither one is indispensable." This product of Guest Cloud is like a performance without an audience, self-appreciation , Self-motivated, waste of resources.

In 2022, transformation!

In the past period of time, the epidemic has repeatedly come and gone. After we landed the sales center in Xi'an, Xi'an closed the city. Later, after the epidemic in Chengdu, all our early core customers fell. Then, in Hainan, our initial transaction volume was cleared. Later Shanghai, I almost got stuck in Shanghai and couldn't come back.

In the Spring Festival of 2022, it seems that not many friends around this Spring Festival have returned to their hometowns, and they are all in Beijing. Before the Spring Festival, I was already watching various tracks. During the Spring Festival holiday, I completed the product demo prototype of the new direction, made high-fidelity interactions, communicated with some potential customers, and clarified the new business.

Every year after the Spring Festival, we hold a very long meeting with our teammates. The atmosphere is relatively relaxed and pleasant to summarize some past achievements and mistakes, and to synchronize the direction and goals of the new year with his family.

The biggest problem in business transformation is that it negates the value of the entire team for a long time in the past, which is almost a disaster for the team, but we are proud that none of us left, and everyone is looking forward to new products , to share my experience with you.

First of all, we cannot deny past failures. We can summarize what we have learned in the past, instead of expressing failures. On this basis, I have added a layer of value to our organization, and I have repositioned the company as Micro SaaS. Studio, this is not virtual, but what I want to do. A streamlined team can produce a lot of high-quality products for sub-scenarios or industries, take care of its own profits and losses, polish the products without being arrogant or impatient, and then announce it to everyone Our first new product, "Aha Moments," filled the expectations.

Aha Moment Product Success Platform
Every SaaS product should cleverly design user journey and onboarding (user onboarding) Aha moment to make your SaaS a better SaaS
the public
So we started a new journey.

postscript

The guest cloud project was later handed over to our strategic partner for operation with a cash equivalent to a free gift, and took a little bit of their shares.

The "Aha Moment" project started in April 2022, and now in September, the polishing of the early version has been completed, and it has luxurious early customers. This is a day one global project. This time, it is completely dependent on products. Speaking of itself, it adopts the business mode of PLG+MLG combination. And in the capital winter of 2022, we have received a new round of financial support.

Entrepreneurship is a practice, a practice that returns to the inner self. On this road, in addition to overcoming business difficulties one after another, the more important thing is to complete one's own cultivation. Know what you want, and know what suits you better. You can never put everything in one thing you don't love. It's the way things are, and so are people.

Sometimes you can only see your heart when you experience it with real body sensations.

People always mistakenly think that the "false self" created by thinking is not real. Why do you like something? The sense of mission you give yourself, are these real? This "false self" will make you think more and more that it is you, but when this false self is very different from reality, you will suffer, anxiety, and depression. In fact, we just need to forget about the fake me and go back to the matter itself. You don't need to worry about scale when the product is not ready, and you don't need to worry about not being able to raise money when there are three months left to survive. You only need to pay attention to the moment, lay off staff if you don’t have money, and focus on the product if the product is not done well. The same is true in life and entrepreneurship. Pay attention to the present, feel the psychological changes, ability changes, and cognitive changes in the process of starting a business. These are the nutrients needed for growth.

Take it easy, what if you fail, the big deal is to start all over again, at least we get the most valuable things in entrepreneurship.

• said above to myself