For this article, no book ads. Share the situation of Internet application entrepreneurship that I have encountered from being a technology entrepreneur to an investor.
Just to share, from university to now, I have participated in the Internet application entrepreneurship, divided into two categories: lack of money, lack of people.
Although there is a strong causal relationship between the above two types, the causal relationship is not strong in the case of entrepreneurship with angel capital, that is, with a certain range of capital.
In fact, there is a third type, lack of ideas, I have encountered this type, this type of money should be put into financial management, not entrepreneurship. I won’t talk about it here.
The lack of money
The first one
When I was a sophomore in college, I started a business, which was a social application for campus students and an application for campus car booking. After the failure of this business, I posted the functional structure of the whole social application and some ways to develop it on my blog. Six years later, it is still the most read one among all my blog posts. Also because this article has brought me some other opportunities. Independently develop a social APP architecture to share
We were both students at that time, and we worked on social applications first. I was responsible for the development of Android and the service side in the team, while no one was responsible for IOS. The later application was developed android, but it was not put on the shelves yet. I’ve been looking for IOS development partners and angel investors since then. What’s missing here are angel investors and IOS developers.
In the path of finding IOS development partners, we made two attempts, one was to find development students of the school, the other was to find outsourcing with money, both of these two attempts were not ideal, the former is due to some reasons, the progress has been very slow, until the failure has not been worked out, I don’t remember the specific reason. The latter was not effective, and the long-distance work ended in discord. I still owed him the outsourcing fee at that time. Later, two years after I graduated and worked, I gave him the rest of the development fee.
In terms of angel investors, due to the lack of ways, the approach at that time was relatively direct. We went directly to the local venture capital organizations in our universities to make door-to-door demonstrations and explanations. I remember at the beginning to find a named what win group, in the meeting to talk about the time clear investment intention, and then did not invest, the reason I did not ask.
In the trial phase of this social application, we also made a car booking application. At that time, a certain official account was very popular, and many small applications entered from the official account. Our car-booking app specializes in routes to neighboring cities near universities, such as from Zhuhai to Shenzhen, called BB bus. The development of it is relatively simple, simple webpage, so from development to online to our school operation, it did not take long. The money for the launch was $20,000 from the family of the team founder.
When BB bus to existing old chartered organization competition, and the school was adopted in the form of lower fares to run, the users effect is very good, but the burning money effect is more obvious, finally on the basis of have a certain amount of data, is also due to find other investors, running for about a month or so. I remember the first time when the train started, I was still sitting on a stone chair at the gate of the school bus with a notebook to watch the operation of the background service, in case anything went wrong, I would deal with it immediately.
Since we are about to graduate and have no energy and financial ability to continue, the above two start-up projects will be suspended until the latter is closed.
Now several of us are also engaged in the work of the Internet, the entrepreneur in wechat as product manager, marketing is still engaged in marketing, front-end development to QQ music, design is still design.
The second
After graduation, I came to Shenzhen to work on Android development. In 2018, a junior student I knew in school contacted me after graduation, saying that he had an idea for a social application and wanted to start his own business, so he found me because he needed someone to develop it.
At the beginning, we had further communication in Shenzhen because we wanted to know more about the situation. We found that he also thought about the whole product by himself. Besides, he also had a design partner with him. Moreover, they had made many modifications to the whole product repeatedly and integrated a lot of data analysis, such as target customer surveys and competitive product reports. They were quite professional in this aspect. A few years later, when I was working for some Internet companies, I worked with people who had a few years of experience and didn’t feel as professional as they did at the beginning.
Given the limitations of my development level and working time, the social application model they showed me at the beginning could not be realized by one person. For that reason, I made it clear to them that they needed to hire people for the job. But students always students, we are not rich second generation, family will not because you such a they may not understand the thing to give money you do it, it is better to honestly go to class.
Later, we met many venture capitalists in some software industrial parks in Shenzhen. All I heard was, “You guys are fresh out of school, you haven’t done anything yet, you only have one idea.”
The subsequent entrepreneurial attempt was aborted directly. Compared with the first attempt in my student life, I failed to develop a product this time. Just ideas. In my junior and senior years, I had more time to do the development of such entrepreneurial applications, excluding only a few classes a week. After I left the society, I had to work to make money. Regardless of the UI design and other aspects of the situation, sometimes even if the development is not difficult, some of the physical work of the application can not be done in a short time. As it happens, app-based startups often require demos in a short period of time.
Looking back on it now, I personally think it’s a shame, because NOW I’m 100% invested in his idea. Until now, I’ve never seen a social app of that type targeted at young people. The day before yesterday, WHEN WX tried to contact him again, I found that big brother had deleted me.
The rest of the
After that, I met a lot of people talking about entrepreneurship. Most of them just have an idea, and then nothing else, so here we pass.
Conclusion under
This part of the start-up, in a range of conditions, for example, 100,000 yuan, they have a common characteristic is lack of money, 100,000 yuan of principal is not, which leads to the shortage of people. They had ideas, there was no shortage of good ideas, and there were cases where they made a finished product.
The lack of people
At the beginning of 2020, A senior, who is nine years older than me, named A, read my article on the blog, which is the one mentioned above. He got in touch with me and emailed me about his idea for a social app. We met at Nanshan Gaoxin Park in Shenzhen, where I have lived for more than 3 years.
Now, you might be thinking, why do people start social apps? In fact, it is not difficult to understand this. People are the biggest producers of demand, and communication is the fundamental source of flow. Of course, there have been a few non-social app startup ideas over the years, but I haven’t talked about them yet.
Unlike previous projects, this time the sponsors are no longer students or recent graduates. I realized that this could be a different beginning. After in-depth discussion, I found that A’s idea is that there are no competing products at present, which is novel, and there are also demand scenarios. I have thought about such A function myself, and the function has no threshold in terms of technical implementation.
Straight to the point, I told A that it would be difficult to succeed in starting A business with social applications. Now that social applications are saturated, it will cost A lot of money just in the promotion stage. It’s not that hard to build, it’s even more flexible, I’ve got friends to build it together, and it’s not that expensive. Compared with the embarrassing situation a few years ago, AT that time, I also had a certain amount of capital and contacts. For application entrepreneurship, if the technical threshold is not high, it is very difficult to realize the application.
Later, A directly stated that she would carry X million yuan as the founding capital to start the project. I also made it clear that I was no longer developing, that if I did, I would not be involved in writing code, that I had my own business to do, and that WHAT I could do was provide networking, technical support, or some funding. I ended up joining the team with the minimum founding share.
After repeated discussions and modifications, the final version of this product was finalized in the middle of 2021, and the development stage began. As everyone was involved in part-time work, the application was finally developed at the end of the same year, and tested and put on the shelves of major application markets. Next came the promotion, which required more funds. After we worked out the promotion plan, we began to meet many investors frequently, as many as 14 investors.
The most interesting thing happened last week, we met the 14th investor, COO of a department of TX. He directly teased us about the general functions of the whole application, the focus is not obvious, the interface design is the same as the application of several years ago, there is no innovation, the design of several years ago to others, and so on. After listening to this, I felt quite touched, because SOME of the problems he mentioned, such as the application interface design, I had also proposed at the beginning, and later optimized, but I was really not satisfied with 9 points.
At the end of the day, we had an internal discussion about suspending the promotion and changing the app design. Because the first version of the product and design is part-time, so we can not continue to do, we need more professional product managers and designers to show our ideas. To this day, we are still searching.
The project is ongoing and has lasted longer than I have ever been involved in. From the idea to the implementation to ready to promote, it can be said that it has gone a long way, the fundamental reason is that there is money to support the early continuation. At the moment there is a shortage.
About The Investor
The friend I met last week was the one who gave the most useful advice of the 14 people who claimed to be investors. Very confident and made a point that I really agree with, which is:
Stay away from people who ask you for data when they meet. These are fake investors. You don’t need to go to them when you have data.
Angel investing, in the beginning, some people invest in people, some people invest in ideas, some people invest in teams. The only thing it can’t be is data. Data is an important indicator to support type A ~ E investment, because all products have A certain user volume, rather than just at the beginning.
conclusion
Starting a business is hard. What often happens is the following:
- No one makes products with ideas;
- Made a product, no money to develop other end, on-line difficulty;
- Products can be online, no money to promote;
- Product online, due to application reasons, the effect is extremely poor;
- No money to keep burning;
- .
It’s hard, but everyone who wants to change something should have a startup idea.
Finally, angel investment is needed. People with good ideas and teams can contact me to communicate.