Happy entrepreneurs in the maternal and infant industry

Happy entrepreneurs in the maternal and infant industry

Tao Jianhui, founder of Happy Mommy

My name is Tao Jianhui, and I would like to share my entrepreneurial experience. I love to mess around and have studied and worked in the United States for many years. Since 1997, he has worked for Motorola, 3 and other companies in Chicago, USA, and is a top international wireless data expert. In 2008, he returned to Beijing from Chicago and founded Hexin (similar to WeChat), which was later acquired by MediaTek, a world-renowned mobile phone chip manufacturer. In early 2013, Happy Mommy was founded.

Since we are talking about our brand, we have to talk about the entire Chinese maternal and infant market. The maternal and infant market is quite huge. For example, the biggest demand is for milk powder, diapers, strollers, clothes, and toys. The entire China market exceeds 2 trillion yuan. The market is very large. From pregnancy preparation and pregnancy to before the child is 6 years old, this market is huge. It can solve the problems of eating, drinking and diarrhea, as well as health problems. As a start-up company, it is impossible for us to enter the milk powder and diaper market. Therefore, we, Happy Mommy, use smart hardware to enter the maternal and infant market. Because what benefits does smart hardware bring to the maternal and infant market?

I have analyzed on many occasions that this maternal and infant hardware brings a lot of convenience to the maternal and infant population.

First, it makes mothers and babies feel safer. Like, for example, how to make them feel safer. We launch a health product - fetal heart rate monitor. If you use it, you can hear your baby's heartbeat, and you will make her safer. Including our safety scale, which makes you feel at ease, and also includes many popular thermometers on the market, which also makes her feel safe.

The second smart product can make it more convenient for mothers and infants. For example, with our Happy Mommy safety scale, as long as you stand on it, it will immediately tell you whether your weight gain is reasonable, and she will immediately give you a lot of assumptions. Without our smart scale, after weighing yourself, you can go online and check a book to see if your weight is normal. If it is not normal, you have to go online to Baidu

to find the corresponding solution, and our smart scale Scale, she can solve everything for you, which of course makes your life more convenient.

The third one is that our smart maternal and infant products can make maternal and infant people happier. Why? Because the process of pregnancy itself is a happy process, many people like to share it on Weibo and WeChat every day as soon as they are pregnant, especially after giving birth to a baby. It is very important that our products can help mothers to enjoy and share their happiness. That is to say, our Happy Mommy Fetal Heart Monitor can share the recorded happiness through Weibo and WeChat, so that his friends can hear the voice of sharing, and of course they will be very happy and happy. This is happiness sharing.

There is a certain market for products such as maternal and infant smart hardware, which can make the maternal and infant population more at ease, more convenient, and happier.

This market looks good, but its user cycle is short. The maternal and infant industry is like cutting leeks, they grow and then are cut off again. Users can never be retained, and they will definitely leave you. This is a common problem in the maternal and infant industry. There is no one company that can solve it well or one company that can’t solve it well. So how to solve this problem? The only thing we think of is that we extend its use period appropriately, just like our safety scale, which can be used from pregnancy preparation to pregnancy to post-pregnancy, which is only 2 years. In an industry, how to break through the threshold of the user cycle, the most important thing is to improve the brand and quality, because the mother and baby people are most concerned about safety. She doesn't care whether your functions are powerful enough or not to meet his requirements. The first thing she considered was whether the product was safe. Therefore, this product must ensure a high degree of safety. If your product makes pregnant women feel that your product is not safe enough, no matter how powerful or complete your product is, no one will want it. To ensure this safety, quality is very important. Therefore, you have to ensure your quality from all aspects.

Just like our Happy Mommy products, everything from packaging and design to grinding tool processing and customer service is very good. If there is no foundation in these aspects, the pregnant woman will not feel that your company is good, and she will not feel at ease, so it will be difficult to sell it.

Having talked about quality, let’s talk about brand now. Brand and peace of mind are linked. Mothers and babies do not have many financial problems. They are more concerned about safety and are willing to buy branded products. For example, milk powder. Unless she really has no money, she will definitely buy well-known milk powder and well-known diapers. Therefore, maternal and infant smart products must be branded. If you cannot build a brand, you will be overtaken and destroyed anytime and anywhere.

In the era of mobile Internet, after building a product, one of the most important things to consider is how to make good use of the Internet as a tool.

We have a case where the Happy Mommy smart maternal and infant safety scale exceeded 1 million on the first day of crowdfunding on JD.com. So how did we do it, and with such a niche product? One of the biggest keys is that we have made a lot of preparations on the first day. We have prepared for a whole month for the crowdfunding. More than that, our communication on WeChat on the first day, just from WeChat The unique visits to JD Crowdfunding exceeded 20 million, and a considerable amount of visits were also brought to JD Crowdfunding on Weibo. This is the first reason and the main reason.

The second one is that it is actually very difficult for JD crowdfunding to reach 1 million by relying solely on individuals. In fact, we have reached agreements with many channel providers before we started. We hope that They place the order on the first day, which is our biggest trick. That is to say, I convinced many people to support us before the crowdfunding started, especially channel vendors. Therefore, I am confident that I will be able to break through on the first day.

Therefore, you must not expect that your product will break through 100,000, break through one million, or break through several million as soon as it is launched on JD. No. If you can't drive a considerable amount of traffic to JD.com's crowdfunding page, your chances of success in crowdfunding are almost non-existent.

Sharing many years of experience in starting a business

I think starting a business varies from person to person, but don’t start a business for the sake of starting a business. I personally like to start a business. I started my own business around 2008, when I was less than 40 years old. Now I am 47 years old, which is really not a young age. But I really like the process of starting a business. Entrepreneurship can turn your idea into a specific product and a specific service. I come from a technical and product background. Whenever I turn an idea into a product, I am always very satisfied and very happy. I am even happier when I see so many customers liking my products, and I don’t even care how much money I make. This sense of satisfaction and happiness is difficult to obtain through part-time work.

I often share with you that the most important thing when starting a business is to do things that you are interested in, and to be good at sitting on the sidelines. Because starting a business is a very arduous process and an ascetic job. If you just want to get rich, don't start a business. Because it is really not easy to start a business. If you encounter various problems, you will not only lose your money, but also the investors' money, and your brother's youth will be ruined. The only thing that will keep you going is your interest, if you are passionate about what you do. You are interested in doing it even if you don’t make money, and you are interested in doing it even if you are losing money, then you can give it a try.

Like myself, I am interested in free SMS and MMS software. When I was working on Hexin, I wanted to challenge the operators. Later, when I became a Happy Mommy, it was because I liked to share the joy of gaining new life with pregnant mothers or mothers who had just given birth. My team is also quite young. As a person in my forties, I feel quite comfortable and happy hanging out with a group of people in their twenties and thirties every day.

As for starting a business, should it be early?

I personally think that it varies from person to person, and it does not necessarily mean that the earlier you start a business, the better, because starting a business requires accumulation, accumulation in all aspects. Accumulation of age, accumulation of funds, and accumulation of experience.

In the Internet era, pure Internet entrepreneurship has advantages for young people, such as dating software and chat software, which have nothing to do with traditional entrepreneurship. Things like Facebook and Momo are purely Internet-based. It’s good for young people to do this, and there’s no baggage involved in doing it. And the experience accumulated by older people has no effect on these. At this time, young people can do it.

However, for many things that involve some traditional aspects, including hardware, including many products in a certain industry of ours, I don’t think it is appropriate for young people to do it. Because it requires a lot of industry accumulation, just like hardware production. If you don’t have more than five years of production management, if you produce a hardware product, it will be full of loopholes, high cost, and low efficiency. My conclusion is that whether you should start a business as early as possible depends on the specific industry and specific products, and everyone is different and should be treated in a specific way.

Is it better to start a business in a field that you are familiar with or to cross-border?

I personally think it is the best crossover, but it is not 100 crossovers. When you move into a new industry, it is best if the things you do across the industry are related to the things you have done before. Your previous experience can be used, not all, but only half.

All innovation comes from cross-border, almost. I personally like to cross boundaries. I am a graduate student, and I studied physics of heaven and earth. However, when I started working, I never did physics of heaven and earth. I went directly to communications, and later to mobile Internet. I started working on communication software from the Internet, and then integrated hardware and software, and it was a completely different field.

But I think I have gained a lot because I entered a certain Internet industry. In the maternal and infant industry, I brought a lot of experience in the mobile Internet. When I was in the mobile Internet before, my products were generally So-so, but when I moved to the maternal and infant industry, when I was in the health industry, everyone thought my products were very good. Including some marketing methods, it is commonplace in the mobile Internet industry, but not in the maternal and infant industry. She is not good at these methods, but it is quite good if you bring your mobile Internet experience to this industry. But I don’t put too much emphasis on experiences that are completely unrelated to your previous experience, because you really don’t have any experience.

What is the most important thing about a startup?

I think from the experience of starting three companies, there are three important factors

The first is the team. The building of this team is very important, that is, recruiting people. Start-up companies especially need talents. Compared with large companies, what start-up companies need most is talents. It just happens that you can't recruit her because you can't offer too high a salary and you don't have a great reputation. People don't trust you. If you have the same treatment, generally everyone will choose a big company, and she won't go to your small company. . So you have to use special tactics to recruit people. You may spend half of your time recruiting people.

The second is funding. My suggestion is not to spend your own money at the beginning, but to contact investment angel institutions for funds at the beginning. Only after you have a certain amount of funds can you recruit certain talents and capable people to join. Not only does this money solve the problem of talent, but it also allows you to obtain resources. Once invested, they will help support you, recruit people, market, etc. Therefore, I think startups must seek financing.

The third is that the product must be made well and of high quality. A startup company cannot be a cheap product, nor can it be something that proves the concept of your company. It must be done to the extreme. For example, the smart safety scale made by Happy Mommy has never made other products before, and it was not until the Spring Festival this year that it started making other products. Therefore, the product must be good. The prerequisite for a good product is that you have to be focused and perfect. You just focus on one direction and make the product perfect. This way investors and consumers will identify with you.

The fourth question is: Do good products need marketing? The aroma of wine is not afraid of the depth of the alley. If your product is good, it can be spread through users or word of mouth. But, in fact, if you want to promote the development of your company, you must take the initiative to market, rather than spread word of mouth. Because society is developing too fast, there are many people copying you.

Just like our safety scale, there are more than 20 copies of it. If you don't publicize it, the company that copied you may make you famous, which is not worth the gain. On the other hand, if you don’t spread the word and rely entirely on word-of-mouth among users, your initial speed will be very slow. And now the speed of the Internet is so fast, so in addition to spreading word-of-mouth among users, you must increase your investment in the market.

Market investment does not necessarily mean how much money is spent. I think we live in an era where entrepreneurship is good. Not only is the support of national policies, but also very important is the change in the way of marketing, which is self-media. There are self-media such as WeChat and Weibo. Make full use of these self-media to promote your products and your concepts.

Finally, what I want to say is persistence. After choosing the right direction, you must stick to it. It is impossible for an enterprise to quickly build its own moat. Only by continuously spending time in this field can it be possible to do something well and thoroughly.

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