"A Little Insight"

This article is Lu Canwei's 53rd original piece.

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Persistence is a very difficult thing; maintaining high productivity every day is indeed quite challenging. Today, let's talk about some insights from the past few months.

I remember when I went to Thailand before, I specifically went to watch local Muay Thai matches. Muay Thai fighters can kick their opponents to the point of severe injury, and some even suffer broken arms and legs; the scenes are exceptionally bloody. Why does Muay Thai have such destructive power?

Everyone should have experienced this feeling: after a large amount of exercise, muscles can feel sore. This sensation occurs because some muscle cells are torn during the workout. The human body has a self-healing ability; the muscle system will heal and grow back thicker and stronger than the original muscle fibers, which is known as muscle supercompensation.

During training, Muay Thai fighters often suffer minor fractures, and after healing, their bones become harder. That's why you see their destructive power is so strong. It is said that Tyson was once injured and had a bone broken by someone practicing Muay Thai while in prison.

What I mentioned above reflects my feelings over the past six months: your understanding is constantly shattered and rebuilt, then shattered again, and starts to rebuild.

What is a product?

I remember when I was working in technology, I always felt that I had to provide the most perfect implementation. So, when we were implementing, we always pursued various perfect codes, such as striving for simplicity, ensuring each business implementation was relatively independent, having a common business platform, and always imagining that if many people used it simultaneously, I should have a fallback plan, and so on.

Until later, after we failed many products, I began to reflect on what is important to us. I remember that year when "Lean Startup" was popular; many people were talking about MVP and learning startups. I read many entrepreneurial stories, like how Airbnb used three air mattresses to validate their model and then became a unicorn that disrupted the hotel industry. Dropbox initially gained a large number of users with a cool video before launching their product. At that time, I was inspired and started my own venture.

Then I went through startup competitions, roadshows, seed rounds, and then nothing happened. At that time, I thought we needed to create an MVP, so we made a prototype and a cool-looking video like Dropbox, but nothing came of it. We created our business plan based on the business canvas and tried various industry methodologies, but still, nothing happened.

Later, I experienced various startups, some became unicorns, some had their moments of glory, and many couldn't even create a ripple.

Basically, everyone hopes to provide the best product to users, using various methodologies and conducting user interviews, but they fade away in the whirlpool of various problems. We created many apps and web pages that contained various extreme user experiences, but these companies all failed, including those with user bases in the millions.

So, what is a product? What is a good product?

This question once troubled me until I had the opportunity to chat with Mr. Luo, who has 20 years of experience in the beauty industry and develops SaaS software. He said SaaS is too heavy; providing services to merchants is what adds value. For merchants, a product is good only if it can make them money.

It turns out that services are also products.

Underlying Logic

After entering the wealth generation phase, I encountered various breakthroughs.

I learned that many people make money through affiliate marketing, many through communities, and many through various means of earning. For their users, they are also a product.

Since they are a product, they must be solving a user need.

For example, what need does affiliate marketing solve? What need does knowledge payment solve? What about others?

Essentially, they solve the need for information acquisition. Originally, I needed to find the product I wanted from a sea of goods; now someone helps me find it. The knowledge I had to read thousands of books to acquire is now packaged into courses for me to learn, and so on.

As you encounter more and more things, you will find that you are no longer just seeing the surface ripples; you might be seeing the underlying corals.

Every action has its underlying logic. For example, when you see large companies promoting products, they are constantly burning money to seize the market, and in the end, they harvest you like chives. So why do large companies burn money, and why do they merge after burning?

If you understand this, you can grasp a very basic market logic: the winner takes all.

Why did Mi Talk shut down after ten years while WeChat has over a billion users? Essentially, QQ has already become the winner in the winner-takes-all scenario; no matter what, WeChat will not fail. If you have read "The Tencent Story," you will understand that QQ almost lost its winning position due to the 3Q War. Back then, 360's "QQ Bodyguard" crazily captured user relationship data, and at one point, it was on par with QQ.

Or to give a more relatable example, if there are two fruit shops downstairs from your home, and one starts burning money on promotions, the other might go out of business due to inability to pay rent after a while. How do you know how long to burn money? Suppose both shops earn 5,000 a month, and the rent is 3,000; as long as one shop captures the consumer spending of over 7,000 a month, the other shop cannot break even and may eventually go out of business.

So, that 7,000 is the key point to quickly capture to achieve winner-takes-all.

Therefore, when you see Orange Heart Preferred frantically spending money to acquire effective users, you can understand it.

Risk Awareness

When I was young, I heard my family talk about how they once burned down the whole house. Later, firefighters saved them, and when facing a high-temperature gas tank, the firefighters skillfully cooled it down while everyone else was terrified.

This is because the risk awareness of both sides was not aligned; the high-temperature gas tank might not even be considered a risk in the eyes of the firefighters.

To give another example, a friend of mine played in the cryptocurrency market a few years ago and ended up with millions in debt, nearly losing his family. Recently, the market has been booming, and his assets have skyrocketed. Many operations that seem high-risk to me might not be considered risky for him. Of course, I am not suggesting that everyone should play in the cryptocurrency market.

We can either be too conservative or too aggressive. Many newcomers to the market love to keep adding positions and bottom-fishing, only to end up losing a wave of money.

We all talk about awareness, but we don't discuss risk awareness. You can tell me a bunch of motivational principles that seem practical, but you are still vacationing in your comfort zone. There’s nothing wrong with that if your dream is to vacation in your comfort zone.

If not, then go get beaten up by risks first, and then review how to tame it, young one.

Recommendations:

Things always go wrong; try using a checklist.

Plans are never finished? How should we formulate our plans?

How to build trust and avoid betrayal in relationships; this book might give you the answer.

How to understand why you can't earn money beyond your awareness.

I hope you don't always think about getting rich quickly; slowly becoming wealthy is what we can achieve.

Persisting in daily updates, is it just a self-satisfying carnival?

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