Year-end summary | Xiaohongshu has been in business for 10 months, and I recorded 7 experiences in 2022 in a tacky way

2022 has passed. In this year, there are hard work and unremitting efforts. What have you gained? The following is the year-end summary of a Xiaohongshu entrepreneur. Let's take a look!

Hi, hello, I am Lanzhi~ 2022 has ended, and another year has passed in a daze. "I don't know which will come first, tomorrow or an accident" should be everyone’s most intuitive feeling in 2022.

I have seen too many shocking and outrageous events this year, so I often feel that I am really very lucky. The keywords for me in 2022 should be: breakthrough, gain, and luck.

On March 23, 2022, we officially started our business in Xiaohongshu marketing. A cog in a big company who was unwilling to work there, and a homeless person who had just resigned, hit it off and started a somewhat casual entrepreneurial journey. At that time, we said we would give ourselves three months to see if there was a chance to continue. So at that time, we didn’t think we were going to be great, we just wanted to try to see what we could do. Rather than saying that this was a purposeful startup, it was more like a self-exploration out of curiosity.

That night, we had dinner together, and the next morning, Mr. Jiang went to a large company where he had just joined to complete the resignation procedures, and went to rent a venue in the afternoon. The dramatic thing was that within two days of renting the venue, the Shanghai epidemic broke out and the city was closed for two months (equivalent to renting a lonely place), but at that time, for me who lived alone, I was really grateful for having a fulfilling and busy job that allowed me to get through the two months of panic.

Ten months have passed without me noticing. This year has been a fruitful one for me. I am grateful for the help and support of all my friends and the trust of our customers and friends, which has made our company fortunate to survive until now. We also know that there is still a lot of room for improvement in Xiaohongshu marketing, and we hope to continue to improve next year and create more practical value.

Below are 7 personal experiences I have summarized after 10 months of entrepreneurship.

1. Completion is more important than perfection

I think this sentence is very suitable for starting a business or a new business. If you have an idea, you must go out and try it first. If you wait until you are ready to do it, you will lose a lot of opportunities. I like Li Dan’s words, "Impossible, you will never be ready."

In our business, we need to run it through by ourselves before we can review and summarize it based on our own experience. This process is definitely not easy. It may make you doubt yourself and cost you a lot of manpower and material resources, but how can you move forward without trying? In the second half of this year, many of our businesses have gradually been formalized, and we have done sop based on experience. These are all things we can only move forward after we have stepped into the pits. In any field, if you want to step into it, you have to pay some tuition fees, and this is not shameful.

2. Selling time longer > Improving the value of time

During the period of agency operation, the most I took on in a month was probably about 8 agency operations. Although the income was okay, I felt physically and mentally exhausted at the same time. My time was filled with the agency operation business, and other businesses could not move forward.

This also makes me understand that renting out your time in exchange for money is not the best choice. One of the viewpoints in the Navarre Collection is to "productize" yourself and think: "What unique value can I provide?" "If I can provide some unique value, can I productize it?" Books, courses, newspaper boys, communities, etc. are products with zero marginal cost of replication, which is also the direction we need to work hard to develop in the future.

3. Avoid being overly positive

I used to think that starting a business was awesome, but the reality is that you are lucky to be able to survive. Don’t over-glorify entrepreneurship. It’s just a job. Don’t let entrepreneurship bring you overly positive emotions, otherwise it will lead to greater psychological pressure and self-doubt, and being too positive will make you lose the ability to enjoy "boredom".

This concept was also mentioned in the book "The Burnout Society" that I read recently. Modern work requires people to handle multiple tasks, switch back and forth between multiple information sources and work procedures, and cannot tolerate any boredom. Our attention will become broad and superficial, losing deep and focused attention.

Moderate fatigue can help our spirit enter a slow, careless relaxation. Moreover, after experiencing the changes of this year, I have deepened my feeling that nothing is worth mentioning in front of the health of myself and my family. I hope we can all cherish the present, look inward more, and pay attention to our physical and mental health.

4. Never rely on a single platform

As we all know, our business is related to the Xiaohongshu platform. It can be said that without the Xiaohongshu platform, we would not be who we are today, so we have to thank the Xiaohongshu platform.

But we can't always rely on the platform. For example, Xiaohongshu's business department stopped recruiting in the second half of this year, and one of our small business segments, "Enterprise Account Registration", will also be cut off at the end of this month. So why is it so profitable in the early stage? That's because we need your help to carry out so-called customer education. When customers can operate by themselves and have a certain degree of awareness, cutting off these businesses is just a way to increase revenue and reduce expenditure for the platform.

Don't be misled by the money you earn. It has little to do with self-worth. What we need is to constantly learn new skills and become a super individual.

5. Leave professional matters to professionals

Design, placement, shooting, editing and many other tasks require time and effort to do well. Don't be too confident in yourself. Many small jobs may seem simple, but believe me, it is not easy to do them well.

It is not recommended to learn this skill specifically for a single business, unless you don't have the money or you really have a lot of time, because it will increase a lot of trial and error costs, and most importantly, you may do it very badly. Therefore, it is recommended to prepare 2-3 capable partners to do it, and pay for it based on the single resource consumption. At the same time, you can take some time to learn it in case of emergency.

6. People only care about what you can do for them

"No one cares about what you can do, everyone only cares about what you can do for them." This is the same for self-media or many brands. When creating content or products, don't be self-satisfied and don't think you are so awesome. Customers will only pay for your products if they think they are valuable. This value can be emotional value, functional value or experience value.

This point is somewhat similar to the "magnifying business purpose" mentioned in the previous article of the official account. There is no need to hide the value you can bring to users. There are two things that I feel deeply about. The first is when the community was recruiting students. Before, there was only a poster at the end of the article. Later, I wrote a special article and sent it to the community, breaking the maximum number of people.

The second thing is the agent operation account. Recently we created an agent operation account. At first we were thinking whether we needed to post some operation materials to attract users. But essentially we just want to recruit agents for operation. Increasing fans is not our goal, so it is better to directly develop the agent operation related content, and the cost of communicating with users is also lower.

7. Develop the habit of taking notes

Everyone must be familiar with the concept of "recording". It can be said that this is something we have been taught since childhood, but persisting in it is another matter. German sociologist Luhmann published 58 books and hundreds of articles in his 30 years of research. He is known for his high productivity, and his material accumulation all comes from card notes.

This year, I also started recording some reading notes, thoughts that came to me on the road or at night, so that I can find them quickly when I need them, which greatly improves efficiency! If you also have friends who need to write content, copywriting, etc., it is recommended that you develop the habit of recording, which will have a multiplier effect.

The tool I use daily is Flomo. I can label each record, and filter by label next time I need to use it. Here are 5 note-taking principles I recorded in Flomo:

• A note records only one thing;
• Don’t think about sharing, remember it for yourself;
• Use concepts to classify, rather than books or authors, otherwise the links with other notes will be weak;
• Don’t copy, accumulate with your own words, any creation is the result of a lot of accumulation;
• Ideas are more valuable when they are recorded.

In short, entrepreneurship is a journey of discovering more secrets, and we’ll see you at the top!

Author: Lanzhi

Source: WeChat public account "Jiangheliaoyingxiao (ID: jiangheliaoyingxiao)"