When I just left Tencent, I thought I was very powerful. Maybe some companies gave offers at that time, so I had some illusions. However, driven by my classmates, I still chose to start a business. At that time, the smart hardware track was very popular. Several email list of our partners finally decided to make a smart eye mask to help people improve sleep.
Piece together, three partners + four part-time teams came out.
At that time, the common practice in the functional hardware product industry was to crowdfund on JD.com, organize offline fan meetings, online press conferences, invite some celebrities in the industry, find some media, do some countdowns, etc., which seemed to be quite lively. . We are the same way, but until the end, when I left, the product hadn't come out.
In fact, we have done a good job in some areas. For example, we have successfully settled in as an entrepreneurial team under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. With the support of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, we have participated in the High-tech Fair twice, we have appeared on CCTV1, and we also act as Maker representatives. After meeting with Chairman Hu, we found the foundry company, Mengfali Company, to do the OEM for us. But the painful lesson is that we are too tender, we do something far beyond our ability, put LED lights in an eye patch, and put chips, lithium batteries, and let people wear them to sleep. As for the comfort and safety of the eye mask, the requirements of this process are too high for us, and there is not even a similar case at home and abroad. So in the end, our product was not successfully delivered.
The funny thing is, we finally cleared the stock and put some ordinary eye masks without chips in them for sale online, and even thousands of them were sold. Later, we thought that if we knew we were not smart, we designed an ordinary blindfold and applied for a patent, and we could all support ourselves.
One of my biggest gains in the year of starting a business is from the China High-tech Fair. I stood at the counter for two days and explained our products to passersby. I found that operations are essentially sales, sales are face-to-face, and operations are online sales. If you can't make a user interested in your product in 1 minute offline, how can you pass a page online and let the user make a decision in 10 seconds.