Gu Ao and Ma Feng chatted with Ma Feng for three pots of coffee, and finally realized how many detours Ma Feng had taken and how many difficulties he suffered in the past two years.

It turned out that Ma Feng's experience in two years after he was arranged to go to the foreign trade sector in 1982 was similar to his experience in the relevant business departments in 1994. In the United States, he has seen the efficient business model that transcended the times, and then opened his eyes and wanted to return to China to do something big.

"To give the simplest thing, I have seen too many such examples in foreign trade and economics. For example, because the information is not transparent in China, a car factory can build it yourself or find suppliers, but a universal joint cannot be built, and I don't know if there are other companies in China that are specializing in this.

Then, you may have to arrange a deputy factory director, a supply and marketing department chief, many technicians and salesmen to travel around the country to find goods. The travel expenses may cost tens of thousands of yuan in the end, but it only solved a small problem of "finding special supplier information". How inefficient is this? How wasteful is it?

On the other hand, small factories that are capable of processing such parts may not receive a few such demands a year and have no money to advertise. They will gradually develop the idea of ​​"this thing is not worth doing specifically" and will not persist over time. And if we, like Americans, have suppliers, yellow pages, not to mention the country, at least one of them, how much trouble can we save?

The Yellow Pages unit seems to be asking you for consultation and contacting your company. You may charge you a few hundred yuan in consultation fees, or you may purchase precision parts with a small amount, and directly add them to the single purchase price. Some factories seem to think that the consultation fee is too expensive and cannot be abandoned, but it is always at least dozens of times cheaper than if you are traveling on a business trip.

I also know that I am not good at math or science, but I am just a person who teaches English. If you let me start a high-tech business by myself, I will have no chance in my life. We can't learn from Brother Gu, I will be the only one who will be the only one who will be the only one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who will be the one who

Those who invest well are also those who truly create value from scratch, create demand and match demand to increase employment. Some orders, those who do not have speculation and sell, may be gone, and those who resell are the endogenous driving force of this kind of business. As a result, my brain heats up and I fight down."

These words were Ma Feng’s remarks about his original intention.

It is very consistent with the reflections generated by a business or foreign trade manager after seeing the high commercial efficiency of the United States.

However, in this life, he stood at a high place and went out to see the world systematically, 12 years earlier than the original history. Therefore, the experience he returned from the inspection also went from "Internet-based e-commerce" to an advanced American model in the 1980s such as "traditional supplier yellow pages, credit system, and niche joint customization".

But the core idea is the same, that is, Ma Feng wants to improve business efficiency and do something that "speculation can create new demand, new business and new employment."

If Ma Feng said what he said before, it is difficult for later readers to understand because they do not understand the business atmosphere and background at that time, they can completely compare it with similar examples from the Tmall overseas shopping era in later generations.

For example, in later generations, there were some self-report videos of Tmall platform organizers on Douyin. In one video, the person in charge of the platform said proudly: An Italian customer wanted to start a party and needed some rare decorations that shocked the customers. Then he found that in China, Wu Yue had a small toy supplier, who could build inflatable dinosaurs that were several stories high. He thought it was cool, so he bought it, and finally sent a cross-border praise.

The transaction itself is very simple, but this video is so mean by many people who are hostile to e-commerce on Douyin: Isn’t it just a middleman? What’s there to brag about? Is it something you have developed or produced by your family? Virtual economic dog!

The person who says such words is obviously ignorant.

Those who use their brains will know that Tmall is the person in charge of the platform. The reason why they emphasize this case is to illustrate that some orders may not exist at all in the non-e-commerce era. People with potential needs cannot imagine that someone in the world can satisfy them; people with potential creativity and manufacturing power cannot imagine that someone in the world will need such a niche thing. So there was neither production nor order from the beginning.

These requirements are new technologies and platforms with more efficient and more concentrated resource scheduling, created out of thin air. The business model is the primary productivity of this part of demand, not technology and production capacity.

This is the power of the "long-tail effect" discussed by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, later generations.

The concentration of the Internet and information can promote business opportunities that were originally not worthy of being satisfied because of too little supply and demand.

Just like if a small town has only a population of 100,000 and the average cosplay enthusiast is only one thousandth of the population, then the total demand for cosplay in this town is only 100 people. They can't hold a comic exhibition at all, and their needs can only be ignored directly.

But if you are in a city with a population of 10 million or even more, such as Qiantang or Hujiang, even if there are only one thousandth of the cosplay enthusiasts in the population, there will be 10,000 enthusiasts in this city. At this time, you can open a comic exhibition to sell tickets and have the opportunity to make a profit. People with the ability, technology and art will come to do this business. In this way, new demands and new supply will be met and profitable.

If there is a two-dimensional comic station like Niconico, even a small African black uncle country with only three cosplay enthusiasts can be satisfied.

This is also why the more international and concentrated metropolises, all kinds of niche and avant-garde needs can be commercialized.

Whether it is the Internet, TV shopping, supplier yellow pages, each generation of new business information exchange platforms and transaction platforms, their most just value is to "the niche needs that were not worthy of being met in the previous era because of insufficient concentration of resources and demand."

The advantages of "fighting price wars and relying on online without rent" and other advantages over grabbing offline businesses that can be done are just by-products. However, because by-products are targeted at popular demand, the scale and turnover will be larger after they are made, but this is not the original intention of every new business model that emerged back then.

In this life, Ma Feng became a successful person ahead of schedule. When he went into business in 1984, he had already had a net worth of millions.

At that time, at that time, I felt that millionaires could spend all their money in their lifetime.

Moreover, Ma Feng has also enjoyed the various benefits brought by the country's first resumption of the college entrance examination. He is still very grateful to the country in his bones and has a very positive outlook on his three views.

In this case, if a person who spends money in his entire life and who has no time to quit his job, he must really want to do something big that changes the world, not just for money.

He also knows the boundaries of his ability and can only use his talents in the sales field in his life.

In the mid-1980s, in the emerging private economy, it was indeed a job that was easy to make money by doing sales, but the Chinese people's contempt for sales jobs was far from turning around.

The word "speculation" has at least ten or eight years of vitality among the public, especially in remote inland provinces and outside the gates. Everyone admits that they are rich in sales, but they are ashamed of doing sales.

At this time, Ma Feng discovered a model abroad that "it turns out that doing sales is not only speculation, but also can really create productivity. Without this new sales channel and technology, some businesses will not exist at all." How could Ma Feng not be excited?

Even if he pursued the reputation of history after spending enough money, he plunged into it.

As a result, in two years, I got a stuttering payment and basically didn't make any money. I also fully recognized the gap between China and the United States' commercial infrastructure.

"I have started to think about creating a supplier yellow pages. TV advertising is too expensive. I specially publish a yellow page commercial magazine to publish various special niche custom-made supply and demand information. I will charge a little processing fee, and I can't guarantee that I can match it, but at least it is a hundred times cheaper than advertising and finding suppliers all over the world.

Then once we find a supplier that can match, we will charge some transaction fees, custom-made samples and help ensure delivery to our door. As a result, we can't solve the problem with logistics alone, and the safety on the road is completely unsafe. It took me more than half a year to figure out this out, and then I realized that I can't do national matchmaking with Americans. We can only match the Jiangyue Shanghai bags first, and we can't control it if we are far away..."

"Later I found that the popularity of fax machines was too low, and the communication between small orders and special custom drawings was not sufficient, which was another big pit. Gradually, I found that there were too many uncertain factors in the matchmaking of physical business, so I took a step back, just providing business opportunities, guaranteeing that the information provided by both parties to our platform will not be fake, and I ignored the others and let them communicate by themselves."

"From the future, I found that we only do Yellow Pages, which is reliable in consulting services, but there are too few customers, insufficient demand and insufficient credit. I changed my thinking: We are not just providing consulting services for the production process for enterprises, but we directly match technical needs.

The non-standard nature of physical goods is too strong, and this pit cannot be filled in for ten years. However, what many domestic companies currently lack is technical guidance standards and solutions. There are many technical knowledge in niche industries, which foreign countries actually have, but domestic translation and formal publishing channels are too slow, and some needs need to be published, but publishers do not do small businesses.

Anyway, I got a yellow page number, and I thought about taking a few more steps in the publishing industry: can we collect the demands of customers who need technical materials that have been published in foreign countries and are already translated from foreign countries, and then let them piece together the orders? For example, a mechanical foreign journal magazine, in a certain issue, if 100 domestic companies are found on the yellow pages, we will find a way to translate a version and sell it genuinely.

However, the demand is too small, so we charge a little more expensive. A technical material may cost hundreds or thousands of yuan, but this is at least much cheaper than if they find a translation and translate it alone. It can be considered as doing something for the industry and accumulating merits.

However, it was difficult to do this at the beginning. When collecting demand, the customer called and wrote to me and said that there were a lot of foreign books. As a result, I tried to publish a few books, but when it came time to pay, they thought it was expensive. This made me dare not count the needs of the private boss's call.

Later I thought of a trick. Didn’t the Bank of China issue the Great Wall Card last year? I asked the private bosses who had no credibility and didn’t know where to come out. I asked them to provide credit card information for me to verify and guarantee... It was cumbersome and I was still designing to plug the leak. This time I came to Beijing, my main purpose was to get a regular publishing house license.

You also know that I used to give me yellow pages to the supplier and temporary statistics on the technical materials and books that customers need to publish. Every time I specialize in the special matter, I will be too annoying to run a separate book number. If I can make it bigger, I will still be able to build a publishing house myself.

I have learned my lesson, and physical enterprises cannot be too involved. Let’s do the Yellow Pages model in the field of business and technology consultation first. At least this kind of thing does not involve too much of your own network, and it is enough to have the media. As for delivering books, at most, the extra payment for mailing mailing is enough, and the book will not be broken even if it is sent."

Ma Feng complained, complaining about his whimsical paths over the past two years, gradually retreating and advancing.

Gu Ao vaguely felt that his "niche industrial product demand matching platform" had a tendency to deteriorate from pure publishing consultations.

It won’t end up becoming a model that only sells business information magazines and does Dangdang.com/Amazon?

Indeed, if we had to do this kind of business in an era where infrastructure was incomplete and there was no Internet, we had to use traditional media such as TV shopping/yellow pages, and we could only be a businessman who sells knowledge.

This thing does not require logistics, and the communication cost is also low. As long as the communication is open to negotiations on whether the demand is big or big, there are not so many non-standard twists and turns.

Historically, Amazon could only sell books and consulting information in the United States at the beginning, which is not unreasonable.

"Then have you got your publishing house?" Gu Ao couldn't help asking after hearing all Ma Feng's complaints.

If you want to get the indicators of a publishing house, the favor is quite good, and before 1992, you probably won’t give you the opportunity to get the pure private capital from a publishing house.

At best, every time you get a few book numbers, it will be very valuable.

Nowadays, the book number indicators on hand in the publishing house every year are real money and planned resources. They just get a license from the bank and do nothing, and they can get a lot of money by relying on the license qualifications and licensing rights.

"It's almost done. After all, I've been working hard in the foreign trade sector for two years. Some friends are currently specializing in international trade and business information in China, and there are not many professional publishers who introduce technology books, so there are always opportunities.

However, the initial agreement is to find a unit to affiliate, and collective stocks still have to account for a few percent. But it doesn’t matter, I don’t expect to make much money by selling books. This is just a tool for me to realize my business ideal. Qiantang locally cannot get the indicators. The goal I have initially identified is to solve it in Hujiang."
Chapter completed!