Share the most difficult part of the programmer's entrepreneurial journey

It has been many years since I started my business relying on the plug-in framework in 2010. Looking at the photos of our programmers when we first started our business, I couldn’t help but feel inspired. Let me share with you the most difficult period of our entrepreneurial history.

1 Our changes

Initially, we started operating in this office, with a house of less than 30 square meters supported by the government. The company operates with 4 regular employees. These precious photos were taken on 2010year3month25. Unfortunately, the following veterans were not present at the time.

Looking at these photos, I feel like this is a completely inspirational film. I really don’t know where I got the courage to set up a company in a place like this and the courage to convince customers to cooperate with us. There is only one word, "stupid". Those who don't know are not guilty. We are super confident and narcissistic.

The picture below is a corner of our current office. Although it is still small, it at least feels like "home".

2 Start a business. At that time, I had so many dreams and never felt that they were "unachievable". The only real problem I encountered was that "the money was getting less and less day by day, but we still had no customers." What happened later was that we spent a lot of money on borrowing money and loans. The energy may be greater than the time it takes to find customers. However, at that time, we relied on our very good technology and never thought that we would encounter embarrassing problems. When the company was founded, we thought we could make money by relying on the following aspects: (

1)Selling plug-in frameworks to developers, the price at that time was 6

starting (you know, Now it’s completely free), there are millions of developers in China, it’s great to have such a good framework for one person; (2)Selling cloud computing platformSaaSEngine

platform to everyone Company, this platform is a PaaS platform, which consists of SaaS applications, cloud application development SDK and cloud application runtime. The price starts from 25, and several units are sold a year. It’s definitely no problem; (3)I think I have very good skills, so it’s not bad to engage in technical training. I just engaged in middleware training. One student received 5000

yuan About; (4) You can also outsource, we are best at making software, so what are we afraid of?

These dreams were directly shattered in the following 2 years. The sales performance of the framework with a price of 610,000 yuan and above is

0; the sales performance of the SaaSEngine with a price of 25with a price of 25 and above 10,000 yuan is 0; the middleware training revenue is 0; Even outsourcing is fucking 0! How embarrassing~~~Except for the plug-in framework, almost no one cares about it. At that time, the two most frequently mentioned questions about the plug-in framework were, "1 Your product is good, but too expensive! 2

Do you have any mature cases for your product?". The first problem directly leads to no customers, so the second problem has nothing to do with it. Finally, in the most difficult moment of the company, we made a difficult decision to abandon SaaSEngine, made the plug-in framework free of charge, and started operating a plug-in warehouse platform. This decision caused us to start a turnaround, and then 4 Within a month, a customer purchased the plug-in warehouse platform. At this stage, we have deeply realized the following points: (1

)It is very difficult to sell technical frameworks. Even if developers want to use it, it is impossible to pay for it. ;

(2)The technology is still far away from the market, don’t be too narcissistic;

(3)If you want to make other people’s money, you must first benefit others , help others make money, don’t always think about “if ＊＊, we will be rich!”;

(4)Even the simplest thing like outsourcing is not that simple. Good things are not easy to be borne by you. As soon as Party A arrives at such an office, he sees The way you dress, you know what to do, but those of us who work in technology are still foolishly dreaming. Regarding this point, I would like to add some experience. Outsourcing is reciprocal. For example, it is impossible to hand over a website like 12306 to a company with only 4 like me at that time, unless I talk to the leader. People are relatives. Any cooperation requires a certain foundation. Everyone wants insurance and saves/makes money at the same time. If they cannot have both, more people will choose insurance. How can our "face" give others a sense of security?

(5)Disdain for other people’s suggestions. In fact, several experienced investors asked me to give up building technology platforms. What they said to me was, “Many platforms in China companies, all ended up outsourcing." I disdain this view and think that "these companies are not as good as us, we are special";

(6)The market needs The most important thing is not perfect technology, but technology that can help others make money. If you believe that your technology is perfect, then it will often be a tragedy. When you look at those who use "broken things" with little technical content to earn Not to mention how disappointed we were when we were in a mess;

However, even after we made so many stupid mistakes, we actually got a few opportunities that fell from the sky. I think we did two things right at that time : (1) We are very honest; (2) We strive to make a good product, and we think this product is perfect.

3 Share this stupid move). There happened to be a customer who needed plug-ins. However, our talks broke down and we refused to cooperate with HP. Note that it was not

HP that rejected us. They gave us 50million to buy the source code. We thought we needed 100million. Thinking about it now makes us feel depressed. How could we be so stupid at the time! Another opportunity was that a customer (now a good friend) wanted to acquire us. Acquisition? Tell me, how much are we worth? So, I was thinking so hard, no matter what, I had to get 100USD, yes, it must be US dollars! I heard that a lot of investments in Beijing now are followed by Dollar, not RMB. So, we did a

PE valuation and quoted 750 million to the customer. The customer saw that our technical team was pretty good and was sincere in wanting to acquire it, so they talked to me about it. They were considering an acquisition of 200million, but 750million was too high. Later, we worked very hard to make a concession, and the concession was 300million. After a few months, we finally reached a purchase price of 2.6 million million, but the opportunity was missed and no agreement was reached in the end. I don't know what's right or wrong about this matter, but given our company's situation at the time, we really agreed to give it a try at this price. Take a closer look at this office, haha~~ Under such circumstances, why do we miss such a good opportunity so easily? Two words, ignorance! 4 We don’t know what’s not feasible, we don’t know how difficult it will be later. We don’t know fear, we don’t know fear, everything is ignorant. Even if we completely fail in something, our performance is ignorant and we never realize what mistakes we have made. Because of ignorance, we can maintain our passion and dreams!

5

If you are also making a framework out of ignorance, will you persist like us?

"Not taking risks is the biggest risk", do what you can, think what you can think, no matter how many things you do, just do it if you feel good, follow your heart, no one can guide you!

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The above has introduced the most difficult part of sharing the process of starting a programmer's business, including various aspects. I hope it will be helpful to friends who are interested in PHP tutorials.