Start a business right after graduation and achieve nothing in a year. (startup story 1)

I’m Jasper Han. It began in June of 2015. I just returned from Fudan University’s graduation ceremony two days ago. I gathered all of my personal things at school and left with a suitcase. As a 22-year-old young man who has recently graduated from university, I am full of faith in myself and know that I will be able to carve out a successful future. Despite my low academic performance, I believe that entrepreneurship and school exams are two entirely separate subjects, and I am confident that I will succeed.

Adrian Hwang, a college buddy of mine, is my business partner. In education, he excelled. He will get decent grades without doing his homework even though he doesn’t go to class too much. At university, we majored in mathematics. He’s already an expert programmer who can finish a javascript compiler on his own. He’s a renegade and a dependable person.
We shared a 50-square-foot apartment with just one bed in the heart of Shanghai. We had to purchase an IKEA bed. We don’t have any money, but we do have two laptop computers. I think our future will be prosperous as long as we work hard.

Everything began to deteriorate after three months. First and foremost, we lacked a simple corporate strategy. We had some suggestions, but we easily dismissed them because they seemed like the market was too small and there were no obvious customers. The most critical aspect was that they did not solve any problems. For eg, we once imagined a handheld device with a built-in sensor that could detect hand movement. This small device looks cool, but it doesn’t fix any real problems. It’s more akin to a toy than a commercial product. This type of handheld device can detect large-scale arm swings, and one of the applications is controlling the slide during a speech. Why not keep a little remote control in your hand instead? The remote control has a greater level of precision. If a technology does not increase efficiency, any product that forcibly uses it is far away from market demand.

Time and time again, we reject our own thoughts. I was delusional to believe that I might come up with a novel concept that no one else has considered and that would instantly create a worldwide phenomenon. Adrian will be in charge of infrastructure, and I will be in charge of marketing and any business-related issues in this two-person team. I understand that I must start from the beginning and learn all there is to know about business and entrepreneurship. If I don’t understand the fundamentals of starting a company, the chances of us failing remain strong.

I began reading a variety of business and entrepreneurship books, including “Zero to One,” “The Lean Startup,” “Positioning,” and others. I realize that successful products often have a clear target market, help customers solve specific problems, and customers are willing to pay for the product. What you need to do is to get your product to the market as quickly as possible. Get more consumer reviews, no matter how bad it is, and then improve the product fast. However, there is no guidance in the book on which business to join. We ought to do some self-reflection. What do we excel at? We quickly came to the conclusion that, in comparison to smart hardware, we are more familiar with software and computer technologies. Software is eating the world. In addition, the software has a higher gross profit margin than hardware, and the cloud computing market is rapidly exploding. We made the decision to start searching for opportunities in the areas of tech, cloud, and computers.

November 2015 has arrived, and we are on the lookout for a promising business opportunity. On Wednesday, we had breakfast, as usual, Adrian turned on the computer and started browsing some information, and I began reading some books. “Jasper, come and take a look at this project,” Adrian said. I put down the book in my hand and looked at the web page on his computer. This is an open-source machine learning framework called TensorFlow, released by Google. “This is a machine learning framework.” Adrian’s eyes shone with a ray of hope. After listening to Adrian’s introduction, I realized that this machine learning technology, also known as AI technology, might be a good place to start.

The next article will be published on Friday at a weekly interval on my medium
'https://medium.com/kiwicode/kiwicode-startup-story-1-start-a-business-right-after-graduation-and-achieve-nothing-in-a-year-a120e8e43602'.