Two years ago, on April 6, several of us quietly founded Xiaomi in the Silver Valley Building on the North Fourth Ring Road company After drinking a bowl of millet porridge together, we began a difficult entrepreneurial journey. In just two years, Xiaomi ranked among the top five mobile phone brands in Baidu and the top five in Taobao's sales list. In the first year, it is estimated that it can sell at least 5 million mobile phones, and Michat has more than 13 million users.
How did a startup company create so many miracles in just two years? Many people are curious to ask me why?
Thinking after selling Excellence: Internet is a concept
I took the lead in founding Excellence in 2000 and sold it to Amazon in 2004. After selling Excellence, I have been thinking about what the Internet is all about? What was a great pressure I was facing? Jinshan has only 20% to 30% growth, while Excellence can achieve 100% growth. I was thinking, it seems that this is wrong. Only 20% to 30% of what I spent 80% of my time grew up. What's the problem? How can we grow faster? What kind of thing is the Internet?
It took me more than half a year to think about the Internet. What is this doorway? In fact, it's very simple: the Internet is a concept! In fact, the Internet is not technology, but an idea. The Internet is a methodology. You can grasp the essence of the Internet with this methodology.
In order to make it easier for everyone to understand the Internet, I will sum it up into seven words, "focus, perfection, reputation, and speed", known as the "seven word formula". Where is the power of this "seven character formula"? As long as we follow this method, we will get twice the result with half the effort.
After Jinshan went public in 2007, I resigned as CEO. After several years of angel investment, I used my methodology to help set up more than 20 companies. Two years ago, I decided to use this methodology to establish Xiaomi. As I imagined, I really get twice the result with half the effort.
Focus: less is more, and the main road is simple
All of us are talking about Apple and Jobs. In fact, the first inspiration from Apple and Jobs is focus.
Apple is already the most expensive company on the planet, with a market value of more than $600 billion. The iPhone and iPad alone contribute 75% of the revenue. Apple's total revenue in the latest quarter was $39.186 billion, $22.69 billion (58%) from iPhone and $6.590 billion (17%) from iPad, IPhone and iPad account for 75% of Apple's revenue! The iPhone has gained 73% of the profits in the global smartphone market, which means that all other smartphone manufacturers, Samsung, Motorola When HTC and others add up, the profit is only one third of that of the iPhone. In the first quarter, the share of iPad in the global tablet market expanded to 68%.
Apple has only released 5 mobile phones so far, and only 5 mobile phones in the past 5 years. In fact, it is very easy for mobile phone companies to produce a mobile phone. Our fake factory in Shenzhen can produce 100 models a day. What's the difficulty in producing one model? Do you know how difficult it is to produce one? You need to have inexplicable confidence to produce a model. You believe that this mobile phone I make is the best in the world. If you are not confident, you can create 100 models. If you are confident, you can create one model, which is easier said than done.
To what extent did Jobs focus? He even made a mobile phone with only one color at the beginning. After several colors, he felt that he was not focused enough.
Therefore, when I made my own mobile phone, I highly agreed with the principle of "simplicity". The simpler things are, the harder it is to do them. We have only made one mobile phone with only one name, "Xiaomi Mobile Phone".
I also want to tell you a story about Apple. In 1997, when Apple was close to bankruptcy, it invited Jobs back. Once back at Apple, Jobs conveyed the idea that deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. Jobs held a meeting with dozens of product teams, and the product evaluation results showed that Apple's product line was very fragmented. Most of the countless products are rubbish in Jobs' eyes. There are N versions of the Macintosh alone, and each version has a lot of confusing numbers, ranging from 1400 to 9600.
"What should I let my friends buy?" Jobs asked a simple question, but could not get a simple answer. He began to slash different models and products, and soon cut 70%.
A few weeks later, Jobs still couldn't stand those products. Mr. Qiao got mad at a product strategy meeting. He drew a horizontal line and a vertical line on the whiteboard, drew a square four grid diagram, wrote "consumer" and "professional" on the top of the two columns, and wrote "desktop" and "portable" on the two lines of titles, "Our job is to make four great products, one in each grid". After persuading the Board of Directors, Apple highly concentrated on the development of Power Macintosh G3 Powerbook G3, iMac and iBook.
At that time, Apple was less than 90 days away from bankruptcy. With only one killer "focus", Mr. Qiao brought Apple back to life from a loss of $1.04 billion in 1997 to a profit of $309 million in 1998.
At that time, Jobs also cut off the "Newton" project, a famous handwriting device at that time. Jobs said, "God has given us ten pens, so we don't need to invent one more.".
Later stories should be familiar to everyone. After stopping Newton, Apple liberated a group of excellent engineers to develop new mobile devices, and finally made iPhones and iPads.
This is what I have been telling you all the time. Can you do less? Can you just do one thing? Less is more, focus is powerful, focus can achieve the best.
Extreme: reach the limit of your ability
The ultimate is to do the best you can, and to achieve the height that others cannot reach.
Instagram, which is very popular recently, has just been acquired by Facebook with 1 billion dollars. You know, Instagram is just a picture sharing application made by a small company with 13 people. It took only two years to develop 50 million users and sell for 1 billion dollars. Instagram is not the first photo sharing app on ios, or even the second or tenth one. What makes Instagram worth $1 billion? To put it bluntly, What makes Instagram truly different is that it maximizes ease of use. More than a dozen filter effects, one click sharing, and social elements make it easy and convenient for users to share pictures on their mobile phones.
Speaking of Blizzard, every game fan knows that this company has only produced a few games since it was founded more than 20 years ago, but all of them are boutiques. For example, World of Warcraft has been reworked several times. Diablo 2 was released in 1999. It has been more than ten years since Diablo 3 was released. This is also a great company!
When we talk about perfection, it is actually easy to say, but difficult to do.
For example, how many of us use PC laptops? How many people use Apple laptops? I can never understand why PC notebook chargers are so big and ugly, but also so difficult to use? Why hasn't a company changed the PC charger to be as beautiful as Apple charger? It used to be fashionable for us to take our laptops to work every day, but also to install an ugly and difficult to use charger, which was really painful.
The ultimate is to do things that others cannot see and do very well. We Xiaomi made mobile phones for the first time. Why did we start with dual core 1.5G processors, namely Qualcomm, Sharp, Samsung For LG components, do you still need to find Yinghuada and Foxconn OEM? Only in this way can you achieve the heights that others cannot reach. Xiaomi mobile phones have been sold for more than half a year, and there are few mobile phones with the same configuration in the market.
At least for the first time, Xiaomi has built the world's first dual core 1.5G high-end WCDMA smartphone, which is our pursuit of perfection.
Public praise: exceeding user expectations
The third thing is word of mouth. I often ask you a question: Have you ever been to Haidilao? Is Haidilao really better than a five-star restaurant? It's a mess when I go there, is it really good?
Many people say that word of mouth is good, and word of mouth is cheap. I want to tell you that it's not true. The essence of word of mouth is to exceed users' expectations. Because Haidilao is open in a very ordinary place, when we walked in, his service exceeded all our expectations, and we felt good. When we go to five-star restaurants, we have high expectations. How can we surpass them.
I went to the Dubai Yacht Hotel once, which is said to be the best in the world. However, I feel extremely disappointed. Why is it so rustic. In fact, it's good, but my expectations are too high.
There is also Zappos, a shoe selling website in the United States. Amazon spent 847 million dollars to buy it in 2009. Why is Zappos so valuable? In fact, it's so simple that you can't imagine, that is to make users exclaim "WOW!" through services. How does Zappos do it? It is to achieve good reputation by adjusting user expectations. They promised that the shoes would be delivered four days after they bought them. In fact, they arrived almost every other day. It also introduced the method of delayed payment after sales, so customers can not pay within 90 days after purchasing goods. Users are even allowed to buy one pair of shoes, but they can try three pairs of shoes, and then send back the unsuitable ones - this is free.
Therefore, the core of public praise is to exceed expectations. When I understood this, I stressed that we must keep secrets and keep a low profile when starting Xiaomi. I said that the expectation of Lei Jun's work was high. We were made by Zhang San and Wang Wu, even without a name. When our first product came out, we just posted several posts in several forums, which were spread word of mouth through "rice noodles", and even spread to the whole world. It was translated to more than 20 countries, At the end of the year before last, an American blog station nominated us as the annual product, and that commendation and support made me ashamed. Why? Because they don't have expectations, they think this product is good. If they have high expectations, they can't say this product is good.
Some time ago, we also launched a thanksgiving feedback activity, specifically making thanksgiving cards for the first 300000 Xiaomi mobile phone users, and unconditionally giving them 100 yuan cash coupons each. The user felt very good. He thought that after I bought the mobile phone for eight months, Xiaomi would still have 100 yuan shopping The welfare of coupons exceeded their psychological expectations.
Of course, many people say that I work so hard. Why does my product still have no reputation? It's very simple. Your product is not perfect. Do you really work hard? If you really do it, I believe you can do it well.
The world's martial arts are fast and unbreakable
The fourth is fast. I firmly believe that "the world's martial arts can only be fast without breaking", especially in today's Internet.
I remember when I first started thinking about the Internet, I actually planned to spend 4 years to achieve today's scale. But it's really too slow. I'm anxious every day. Can we be faster? The Internet really regards speed as very important, so how to speed up while ensuring security is the most critical issue for all Internet enterprises.
Many people should be using Facebook. Have you ever played FarmVille or Texas Poker on Facebook? These two very popular games are owned by Zynga, a social gaming company.
Zynga is a very fast company, Zynga regards the game product as an Internet product for rapid operation, updates the game several times a week, releases more games as far as possible, and makes quick trial and error. In June 2007, it was founded by Mark Pincus and other six people. It only took one and a half years, and the number of monthly active users exceeded 200 million. In December 2011, the listed market value exceeded 6 billion dollars.
Do you know how long it took Facebook to reach 200 million monthly active users? Founded in 2004, It took Facebook five years to complete this figure.
Sometimes, fast is a kind of power. When you are fast, you can cover up a lot of problems. When an enterprise develops rapidly, the risk is usually minimal. When you slow down, all problems will be exposed.
Therefore, we MIUI insist on weekly iteration, because weekly iteration is a great impulse to yourself. If you want to produce a new version, you should push yourself to introduce new features very quickly.
Internet thought: get twice the result with half the effort
This is the result of thinking about the Internet over the years. I use the "seven character formula" to do millet.
First, we try our best to make our business as simple as possible. When we do it, we try our best to figure out how to make the product better. Then we think about how to exceed users' expectations every day. Finally, we stress that we must act quickly. We should adhere to weekly iteration in the Internet industry, because weekly iteration is a great impulse to yourself. If you want to produce a new version, you should push yourself to introduce new features very quickly. Our business service level in China is still very low, as long as we move a little snacks, we can impress consumers.
There are countless imperfections in Xiaomi, and we still need to work hard to improve. All of us Xiaomi people should arm ourselves with Internet ideas, so that you can get twice the result with half the effort, and you can do better than users imagine!
