Xiamen: So comfortable, how to start a business?

Xiamen: How to start a business in such a comfortable place

Xiamen is known as the livable "heaven". It is so full of comfort and tranquility that many entrepreneurs leave here and come to Beijing. Start a business. What kind of entrepreneurs has Xiamen’s entrepreneurial environment spawned? Is it a paradise for people to make progress, or is it a negative effect that hinders progress?

In the eyes of most people, Xiamen is a livable place "Heaven": beautiful scenery, blue sky, and overflowing petty bourgeoisie sentiment. Every year during the Golden Week holidays, millions of people flock to this small island (132.5 square kilometers), which is only a quarter of the area of ??Chaoyang District in Beijing.

There are many Internet startup companies in Xiamen that we are familiar with. From being a gathering place for webmasters in the early days, to now there are many large-scale Internet companies such as Meitu, Meiyou, Feiyu Technology, Taqu, and 35 Internet. According to some statistics, 28 Xiamen companies have been valued at over 100 million yuan. "When 4399 first moved into the second phase of the software park in 2008, the place was empty, and now we can't even find a parking space," said Huang Tiancai, founder of Taqu.

However, Xiamen is too comfortable and quiet. There are also many entrepreneurs who have left Xiamen and come to Beijing to start their own businesses. In their view, Xiamen's structure and vision are insufficient, and it also lacks various factors such as talents to promote enterprise development. This is how local Xiamen entrepreneurs such as Mi Lu and Binlin left.

What kind of entrepreneurs has Xiamen’s environment given birth to? For them, is such a beautiful and gentle environment a paradise for people to make progress, or is it a negative effect that hinders their progress?

A low-key, pragmatic grassroots paradise

Although it is not as good as the first-tier cities in terms of capital and layout, the tradition of Fujian businessmen that "you will win if you love to work hard" has also been integrated into the blood of Xiamen entrepreneurs. Since the rise of grassroots webmasters in the PC era, this has been their important spiritual pillar and the creed that many people believe in.

Many people know about entrepreneurship in Xiamen, probably starting from Cai Wensheng. The flame of Internet entrepreneurship in Xiamen was also ignited from that time. At the founding ceremony of the Xiamen branch of the Dark Horse Club, Cai Wensheng recalled the scene when the Xiamen Internet entrepreneurial circle was formed: "In 2000, when I first arrived in Xiamen, I rented an 80-square-meter house. It was right next to the Electronic City in Xiamen, and the living room was our office. At that time, the most advantageous thing in Xiamen was the domain name business. Business China, the predecessor of 35 Internet, was already an enterprise at that time. There are very few Internet people in Xiamen, and I couldn’t find a few, but I still found them all. For example, A Fei (Feiyu Technology CEO Yao Jianjun) is from Quanzhou and came to Xiamen in 2001; Wu Xinhong (Meitu Technology). CEO) came to Xiamen in 2002; Kong Dejing, who changed his name to China, also came to Xiamen in 2002. At that time, I hung out with them every day and formed a good circle atmosphere."

Huang Tiancai, the founder of Taqu, chose to be in Xiamen. The reason for starting a business is simple: to survive. In 2011, he founded a group buying website in Xiamen. After the project failed, he considered starting a business in Beijing, but ultimately chose to stay in Xiamen. "We didn't have the conditions to go to Beijing. There was no money in our account at that time, and the little money we had to rent a house in Beijing was not enough for a year. Although we were a little bit miserable in Xiamen (living in a village in the city), we could at least survive." Today, the fun e-commerce company “Taqu” (originally cost-effective) founded by Huang Tiancai has applied to be listed on the New Third Board and received 85 million yuan in financing in August last year.

In Xiamen, a city full of petty bourgeoisie, low-key and pragmatic are the most obvious labels of these Xiamen entrepreneurs. Almost all early Internet entrepreneurs in Xiamen started from the grassroots: they themselves may not have high academic qualifications and understand the user needs of the grassroots crowd; most of them first aggregated traffic through personal websites and then transformed into Internet products.

For example, Cai Wensheng started out as a domain name business, and then founded the navigation website 265.com. After selling the website to Google, he became one of the most successful angel investors in China; A Fei founded Webmaster’s Home, and then transformed into a web page business. After traveling on the "Fairy Road", he co-founded Feiyu Technology with Xiaoyu (Chen Jianyu) who developed "Guard Carrot" and listed it in Hong Kong at the end of 2014; Wu Xinhong also started from the domain name business in his early days and did more than 30 After the product was launched, a series of products and businesses around image processing were gradually developed around Meitu Xiuxiu’s huge user base.

Most of these grassroots elites in Xiamen don’t like to talk about what model to promote at the beginning. Instead, they like to focus on starting from a demand point and then slowly extend their own set of business models. This is the view of Xiong Jun, the founder of SyncTweet. He is very familiar with the development history of Xiamen Internet companies: "Among the largest Internet companies in Xiamen, Meitu is now slowly extending from a tool to social networking and e-commerce. The same is true for Meiyou. Feibo*** was founded They are engaged in social marketing. They use various Weibo and WeChat public platforms with large number of fans to aggregate traffic to do business. Most of them have a characteristic, that is, they do not first talk about how big the model should be, but rather. Start with tools or a certain entry point and slowly extend outward."

Wang Dandan, who once worked in public relations at Meiyou, also agrees with this. "Companies here are usually relatively low-key and prefer to make big money. In the outside world, it is rare to see their intensive media publicity actions."

Xiamen has a rich background in Internet entrepreneurship and a relatively successful Internet industry. company. However, in a calm and low-key entrepreneurial environment, entrepreneurs here still feel the limitations of starting a business.

The hidden reefs of development in comfortable and gentle waters

Similar to Huang Tiancai, Liu Jinlong, the founder of “Lin”, also founded a group buying website in Xiamen. “We started doing it in April 2010. In August of that year, branch stations had been established in seven cities including Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Chongqing, Suzhou, and Xiamen, and sales were pretty good every month.”

But at that time, “100”. The "Team War" is in full swing, and if you want to survive, you must raise funds. "But we were in Xiamen at that time, and we didn't have much experience in capital operations, nor did we have this awareness. Only after we had this awareness did we discover that companies in Beijing had already received tens of millions in financing." Before the loss, In the face of the problem, Liu Jinlong had no choice but to sell the website to Wowo Tuan.

Therefore, in retrospect, Liu Jinlong believed that compared with Beijing, Xiamen’s financing environment was still lacking and the entrepreneurial atmosphere was not strong enough, so he went to Beijing to start a business in 2012. After arriving in Beijing, his feeling was, “In Xiamen, you cannot have access to so many investors, and you cannot communicate your business model with other entrepreneurs and investors on a regular basis. Therefore, in Xiamen , your sensitivity to financing and strategic thinking skills will be worse than those of entrepreneurs in Beijing."

Zheng Minglong, the founder of Milu, has similar views. "I feel like Xiamen is actually off the stage, while Beijing is on the stage. From the stage, you can overlook things and see things further away. Information is being exchanged more frequently, which can broaden your horizons." Therefore. In the end, the lawyer still chose to leave Xiamen. He believed that Beijing has a better entrepreneurial atmosphere and is more suitable for radiating his business scope across the country.

Xiamen, which had a large number of outstanding personal webmasters in 2000, was still mainly restricted by one problem when developing the Internet industry. This is also a common answer given by Xiamen entrepreneurs to i Dark Horse: lack of Excellent talents.

In Xiamen, the small number of colleges and universities is a big shortcoming. Xiamen currently only has a few universities such as Xiamen University, Jimei University, and Huaqiao University, and the talent output is obviously insufficient. Xiong Jun gave an example to i Dark Horse: "Take the Software College of Xiamen University as an example. From its establishment in 2002 to now, it has trained only more than 2,000 graduates in the past ten years. Some of them studied abroad, some went to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, and the rest There aren’t many rains anymore.

"

In order to find outstanding talents, Xiamen entrepreneurs with financial resources began to choose to radiate outwards, and at the same time, they also attracted people to Xiamen.

Meiyou founder Chen Fangyi told i Dark Horse, Meiyou has set up an e-commerce team of more than 70 people in Hangzhou to develop its e-commerce business; at the same time, Meiyou is also working hard to attract talents from BAT to work in Xiamen. “As long as they are talents and want to come to Xiamen, we will work hard to find them. Come to our company. People who like stability will still be willing to come to Xiamen, and this place is quite attractive to them. "

Xiong Jun has set his sights on Taiwan. In order to develop synchronously pushed Android applications, Xiong Jun has set up a 10-person R&D center in Taipei. In his view, recruiting people or setting up in Taiwan The office location is more convenient than in mainland China. “Xiamen is very close to Taiwan, much closer than Beijing. It only takes one and a half hours by plane. Moreover, Taipei and Xiamen both speak Hokkien and have similar customs and habits. Moreover, Taiwan has not had much salary increase in the past ten years. When recruiting people from the mainland, the annual salary increase may be 15-20% before everyone is satisfied, but Taiwan only requires an annual salary increase of about 5%, which is cheaper and more stable than recruiting people from Beijing. "

However, not all startups have the financial resources of Meiyou and Synchronous Push.

"This is not suitable for rapid expansion, and you don’t have the capital to be impatient."

Is a comfortable and leisure environment not conducive to entrepreneurship and innovation? Cai Wensheng has a different view on this. He believes that such a comfortable and leisure environment can actually improve entrepreneurs: "Back then ( After selling 265.com to Google) I really wanted to adjust because I worked very hard every day during the four years in Beijing. In Beijing, apart from starting a business and working, there is almost no personal life. I think that when you work every day, you must have your own space and time for yourself, so that you can reach a higher level. "

Xiong Jun has another metaphor. He believes that Xiamen is actually a bit like Seattle in the United States: "Seattle is north of Silicon Valley. There are relatively few talents in that place and it is more suitable to live. But Seattle Companies like Microsoft and Amazon have still emerged. Xiamen is not Silicon Valley, but Xiamen is more like Seattle. The people here are relatively down-to-earth and pragmatic, and are very suitable for calming down and polishing one thing to a better result. Moreover, these things are often suitable for relatively small and relatively biased markets at the beginning, and then grind to a larger one. . This is not suitable for companies that need to expand quickly, because here, you don’t have the impatient capital. Talent and other aspects are not enough. ”

However, Xiamen is far from reaching the level of Seattle. Here, Meitu is just a company with more than 600 people, and has not reached the huge scale of Microsoft and Amazon. It has played a significant role in the Xiamen area. The role of talent export and demonstration is still limited. The comfortable environment may just "filter" entrepreneurs, leaving behind entrepreneurs who pursue a balance between life and work.

Huang Tiancai also believes that Xiamen The development of the Internet really started to accelerate in the era of mobile Internet. Compared with cities like Guangzhou and Hangzhou, it still started relatively late and had insufficient foundation. "Although in 2007 and 2008, Xiamen had a lot of room for improvement. There was a webmaster conference, but at that time Xiamen's Internet industry was actually not yet established. At that time, we could only say that it was possible because these people had strong personal abilities and the personal webmasters were very well-known. ”

In addition, Xiamen’s industrial agglomeration effect has not yet formed. For example, Hangzhou, with the development of Alibaba, has produced a large number of e-commerce talents. Alibaba’s listing has also produced a number of people who are familiar with the Internet. local capital, resulting in a virtuous cycle and a clear city business card. As mentioned earlier, the largest Internet company in Xiamen is Meitu Technology founded by Wu Xinhong, but Meitu Technology does not have such a huge company scale. , its demonstration role is still limited.

Now, the Internet entrepreneurship atmosphere in Xiamen is also heating up.

Take the investment in the software park as an example. From the groundbreaking of the first phase of the software park in September 2005 to the location fixing of the fourth phase in October 2014, the total construction area of ??Xiamen's software park has exceeded 1.6364 million square meters, and the second phase is almost full. According to data released by the Xiamen Municipal Bureau of Statistics, as of December 2015, the information transmission, software and information technology service industries above designated size in Xiamen achieved operating income of 19.01 billion yuan, an increase of 29.0% over the same period last year.

Software parks are constantly being built, incubators, accelerators, and maker spaces are emerging, and capital attention is increasing. However, Xiamen’s Internet entrepreneurship trend will take some time to gradually accumulate. ;