Management consulting firm ghSMART studied 17,000 senior executives over 10 years and identified three types of "career launchpads" that help "accelerators" become CEOs faster:

1. Retreat to Advance. The most common approach is to move to a smaller department or organization, or to start your own business, taking on greater responsibilities, even building a business from scratch to maturity. Your position will rise along with the growth of the business.
2. Leap Forward. More than one-third of individuals said "yes" to opportunities that far exceeded their own expectations and abilities. Of course, becoming a CEO at a young age means they can succeed without relevant work experience.
3. Take on a Hot Potato. This may seem counterintuitive, but solving problems that others cannot is the most direct way to prove your value. This hot potato could be an underperforming business unit, a failed product, bankruptcy, etc. A chaotic situation means challenges and opportunities to get things right. Over 30% of accelerators rose to positions this way.

The path to becoming a CEO varies, and effectively utilizing these three career launchpads is especially important for professionals facing obstacles, such as women. Generally speaking, women take 30% longer than men to become CEOs.

How to define, design, and sell a product that people like to use? How to manage self and a team to deliver results effectively? Here are the answers from industry leaders and renowned professors.

Join us on Telegram or WeChat(id: onetptp) to discuss and upgrade your PM skills.

• Product Management
  • Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products? - Habits make you do things like no brainers. Businesses that know how to cultivate customer habits have a significant competitive advantage over others. The Hook Model teaches us how to form a user habit in four steps: trigger, action, variable reward and investment.
  • Telemetry Product Management Framework - A key role of product management is to make sure product development efforts are focused. The telemetry spreadsheet helps you visualize the roadmap, balance resource allocation, and hence keeps the project on track.
  • The Hierarchy of Engagement - To maximize the chances of building an enduring non-transactional customer company, we should build enduring engagement in three levels - growing engaged users, retaining users, and self-perpetuating.
  • Elements of Value - When customers evaluate a product or a service, they weigh the perceived value against the asking price. Products and services deliver fundamental elements of value that address four kinds of needs: functional, emotional, life-changing, and social impact.
  • MMRs, neutralizers, differentiators - There are three types of product features: MMRs, neutralizers, and differentiators. Customers often provide feedback on MMRs and neutralizers. The product management team must take responsibility for reinforcing the startup’s differentiator.
  • The 9x Effect - Companies often overweight their new product by a factor of 3 while consumers overweight the old product’s benefits by a factor of 3. So you have to be 9x better than the existing alternatives to win their market, which is called The 9x Effect.
  • 4 Guidelines for Website User Experience - To deliver a better website user experience, we concluded four guidelines from the book Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: start with simple navigation; make an impressive home page; use visual hierarchies to present information; improve mobile loading speed.
  • Change Aversion - People hate new changes in a product they are already familiar with. To avoid change aversion, you can let users understand in advance and afterward, allow them to switch, ask them to give feedback, and finally remember to follow-through.
• Strategy and Decision Making
  • Good Strategy, Bad Strategy 1 - A good strategy is often surprising but reasonable. A bad strategy is a formalism. Here are four hallmarks to detect bad strategies: fluff; failure to face the challenge; mistaking goals for strategy; bad strategic objectives.
  • Good Strategy, Bad Strategy 2 - Bad strategies are easier to be made in terms of three facts: it’s painful to make a choice; people like to follow templates without thinking; people tend to misbelieve that a positive attitude and a strong desire can earn them everything they want.
  • The Second Curve - When you know where you should go, it is too late to go there; if you always keep your original path, you will miss the road to the future.
  • Case Study: Amazon acquiring Whole Foods - Driven by the goal to take a cut of all economic activity, Amazon decides to develop grocery services. However, its grocery business has no first-and-best customer due to cost disadvantage. By acquiring Whole Foods, Amazon is buying more than a retailer - it’s buying a customer.
• Marketing
  • What is a Market? - If two people buy the same product for the same reason but have no way they could reference each other, they are not part of the same market.
  • Diffusion of innovation - How does your product gain popularity? Answers from the model, the chasm, and the math.
  • TAL and the Chasm
  • Why take niche-and-next approach? - If the goal is to take over the mainstream market, why should we focus on the niche market in the beginning? First, You have to satisfy your customers so that they can be reference-able to others. Second, pragmatists favor market leaders. So be a big fish in a small pond.
  • Growth Phase 1: PMF - According to Ryan Holiday, to begin with PMF, we need to start with MVP and evolve with feedback, use data and information to back PMF, understand the needs of customers as early as possible and develop answers with the Socrates method.
  • Growth Phase 2: growth hack - How to find your growth hack? Ryan Holiday has some advice for you. Target a few hundred or a thousand key people, not millions. Do not target all people - target the right people. Focus on new user sign-ups instead of awareness. Use growth techniques.
  • Growth Team - A growth team is a team with the responsibility to measure and improve the flow of users. There are three mandatory skills of a growth leader: building growth models, developing experimentation models and creating customer acquisition channels.
  • AARRR Model - AARRR is a startup metrics developed by Dave McClure: Acquisition - how do users find you? Activation - do users have a great first experience? Retention - do users come back? Referral - do users tell others? Revenue - how do you make money?
  • Buyer Persona - To better sell products, you need to know your customers better. A generic buyer profile doesn’t help in knowing his buying decision. The most effective way to build buyer personas is to interview buyers who have weighed their options but finally made the decision you expect.
  • CAC / LTV / PBP - Customer Acquisition Cost is the cost to convert a customer to buy a product/service. Lifetime Value is the estimated net profit we can make from a customer. Payback Period refers to the period of time required to recoup the funds expended in an investment.
  • Lean Analytics: Simplified - Data and metrics play a vital role in business. The book Lean Analytics suggests some metrics for start-up founders to assess their success. By choosing the metrics more effectively, the entrepreneur can navigate through the unknown more effectively.
  • Lean Analytics: Slides
  • Mobile Analytics Metrics
  • How to run a tech community? - Why do people need the tech community? What is the value proposition of it? What are the interesting examples we can learn from? Why does it align with your blockchain company?
  • SaaS Sales Performance Metrics - David Schneider, ServiceNow's President of Customer Ops, shares his sales performance metrics for SaaS companies that are aiming for hyper-scale.
  • Persuasive Copywriting - Copywriting is the simplest and most direct way of impressing your customers. Persuasive copywriting = three means of persuasion + copywriting. Three means of persuasion are emotion, logic, and credibility.
  • 6 Elements to Create Sticky Ideas - Why some stories managed to spread quickly, live long and prosper? In Made to Stick, Heath brothers summarize six elements to create sticky ideas -- Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Story, SUCCES for short.
• People Management
  • Tips for First-time Managers - Julie Zhuo, the vice president of product design at Facebook, based on her own experiences as a first-time manager, gives some useful advice on how to become a good manager in her book The Making of a Manager.
  • Managerial Leverage - Managerial leverages can maximize the output of an organization. Those leverages are information gathering, information-giving, decision-making, nudging and being a role model.
  • Task-Relevant Maturity - A manager’s most important responsibility is to elicit top performance from his subordinates. Unfortunately, one management style does not fit all. A fundamental variable to find the best management style is task-relevant maturity (TRM) of the subordinates.
  • Managers and Bozos - Steve Jobs coined the phrase “bozo management”. Bozos referred to the professional managers who know how to manage but don’t know how to DO anything. It turns out the best managers are great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manger but decide to be one.
  • Responsibilities with RACI and DACI - When the organization grows too big, it becomes unclear that who should do what and who should decide what to do. RACI and DACI are here to clarify those responsibilities.
  • 3 Skills to Boost Group Performance - It is a common misbelief that the performance of a group hinges on the average capacity of its members. The truth is, the interaction and communication among group members are much more impactful. From the book The Culture Code, we conclude three skills to improve group performance: creating a safe working environment, showing your vulnerabilities, establishing a common purpose.
  • Making progress 30km/day - The Amundsen team successfully reached the South Pole first and won the competition with the Scott team. The success of the Amundsen team lies in their abundant resources and making progress 30km per day no matter what the weather is.
  • Good to Great - Leading a company to leap from good to great is like pushing a giant flywheel to breakthrough. Disciplined people, disciplined thought and disciplined action are indispensable.
  • Bikeshedding - Bikeshedding refers to the fact that members of an organization give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. To overcome the bikeshedding, we should have a clear agenda of the meeting and not mix complex topics with easy ones.
  • Ownership - The authors of the book Extreme Ownership were once task unit leaders of US Navy SEAL in Iraq. They draw on their experiences in the battlefields and conclude five rules for successfully leading a Navy SEAL team, providing useful references for any organization.
  • Building momentum for startup - The acceleration of rockets takes a propeller, and the acceleration of startups take the similar. There are two propellers: 1. Listen to the customer. 2. fast execution. How to achieve these two? Here is the answer from Suhail Doshi.
• UX Research
  • How Dropbox scale its design research - Dropbox's design research team grew from 4 members to 30+ today. How do they scale the efforts healthily, even when the headcount for the team is limited? More researches usually mean more harm if they are done improperly.
• Communication
  • Nonviolent Communication - Judgments and violence are tragic expressions of unmet needs. Nonviolent communication can improve communication quality by valuing everyone’s needs. It is NOT about being nice or making others do what we want.
  • Tailoring the arguments for persuading the decision maker - To improve the chances of success in persuading decision-makers, the way of message delivering should be considered carefully. There are five decision-making categories and they should be treated with different strategies.
  • Bullshit Detector - North Americans bullshit the most. Develop your mental device to detect deception, dishonesty, corruption, fraud, insincerity, hypocrisy and falsity.
  • Small Talking - Initiating a conversation with strangers is the biggest social fear. Actually, people often appreciate it when you make an effort to speak with them. Here we provide some ideas on how to start a small talk, what we should talk about and how to end it in a courteous way.
  • Exactly What to Say: Keywords for Impacts - There are several keywords and templates of sentences that can help you influence people. For example, a sentence like “I’m not sure it’s for you, but” is a non-intrusive recommendation. Saying “are you open-minded to do something” can encourage people to do something.
• Managing Self
  • Time Management: Principles - It is very inspiring to learn time management from system admins (SAs) because we share the same challenges such as endless interruptions, simultaneous projects, and rush requests. SAs’ principles of time management may solve your problem of time management.
  • Time Management: Focus - Focus is the best friend of productivity. A fundamental work we can do to stay focused is to de-clutter our brain. Always be aware of stress and sleep level. Remember an un-distracting environment is necessary. Deal with interruptions effectively.
  • Time Management: Routines - Routines are useful tools in time management since they enable us to think once and do many. A routine can be anything in real life that has certain patterns. Try to develop your own routines!
  • Time Management: Cycle System - The key to perfect follow-through is the cycle system. It is called the cycle because it repeats every day and the output of one day is the input to the next. Three tools are used in the process - a to-do list, a calendar and a list of long-term goals.
  • Time Management: Cycle System in Action - The cycle system enables people to follow through. It suggests every day should start with your to-do list, hours needed and plans. The secrets also lie in writing down goals and scheduling things with the calendar, instead of your brain.
  • Work-life balance - Some job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family. We should be careful with time frame and approach balance in a balanced way.
  • How to Get Rich? - How to get rich without getting lucky? Naval Ravikant summarized a few tips for you. Seek wealth instead of money or status. Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. Ignore people playing status games. You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity.
  • Taking truly restful breaks - People will burn out when having too much pressure. A truly restful break can help them to recover willpower and the power of attention. To take truly restful breaks, you need to fully switch off, take short breaks early and often and get out of the office.
  • Loving long with healthy diets - American Journal of Medicine says, disease, not age, is the most significant cause of death among over-100-year-old patients. And diets tend to the primary reason for disease. People often underestimate how food affects their physical and mental health.
  • Productivity Tips from Professionals - MIT surveyed nearly 20,000 professionals from around the world - 50% from North America, 21% from Europe, 19% from Asia, and the rest from Australia, South America, and Africa. Takeaways are ...
• Business Model
  • Stages of Company Building - Initial Product > PMF > GTM Scale & Consistency > Org Building > Enduring Public Company
  • Economic Moat - An economic moat is the ability to maintain advantages over its competitors. It can provide protection for business’ long-term profits and market share. Technology is not an economic moat as it will always be duplicated.
  • Why Startups Have to Innovate? - Why startups have to innovate? Anna Karenina principle answers this question. Each successful company earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem whereas all failed are the same. If a startup does not innovate but copy from the market leader, people will not buy it.
  • Intangible Economy - The intangible economy is rising. It has three characteristics: Intangible assets can expand rapidly. Intangible assets are high-risk and irrecoverable investments. Intangible assets are easy to be duplicated.
  • Infinite Game - Business can operate like an Infinite Game and the ultimate goal of participants is to stay in the game as long as possible. In order to achieve that, businesses should get back to long-term thinking. In the book The Infinite Game, the author suggests companies need to have a Just Cause, build trusting teams, be flexible to changes, and learn from worthy rivals so as to gain advantages in the game.
• Leadership
  • Definition of Technology Leadership - We engineers often boast about leadership without a clear definition of what we are saying. Here are the definitions to distill the clarity from those chaotic ramblings of the mass.
  • Technology Leadership Radar - How to evaluate the performance of a technology leader? Each company or individual has its own answer with engineering rubrics. And those rubrics usually focus on a specific role - IC (Software Engineer, Product Manager, Designer) or Engineering Manager. Is there a grand unified framework to evaluate the potential business impact that a technology leader could make?
  • Start with Why - People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it. Simon Sinek coined a phrase ‘Golden Circle’ which has three tiers, from core to exterior - why, how, and what. However, average leaders think from what, how, to why.
• Corporate Ladder
  • Sponsor - Successful Caucasian men receive more career guidance than women and multicultural professionals even though more women have mentors than men. The reason is mentors can not help with promotions but sponsors can.
  • 12 Habits that can Boost Women's Promotion - There are 12 habits American women think would be helpful to their promotions. For example, remember to claim your achievements often because others will not notice and reward your contributions unless you say it. Also, you need to be aware that expertise is not the only criteria.
• EP Doc Templates
  • EP Doc Templates - Templates make it easy to think and design clearly and rule out blind spots. (Though it may also introduce blind spots...) Here is a collection of templates that help you build better products.
  • PRFAQ - PRFAQ means press release and fequently asked questions. People at Amazon adopt it to write down requirements and important features of yet to be developed products.
  • ADR - ADR means Architectural Decision Record, a mini-doc to capture significant architectural changes that are not worth a full design doc.
  • OKR - A simple template for OKR with guiding policies.
  • Investment Memo - Template for writing an investment memo to capture the learning process before spending a large amount of money.

• Listen to customers

  • Continuously communicate with customers
    • Making friends with customers is the simplest strategy: once they become your friends, you can bother them for feedback frequently. To a certain extent, sending chat messages is easier than emails and meetings.
  • Pick customers you serve
    • Exclude customers who are not painful about the problem you are solving
    • Exclude customers who want features that you haven't made yet

• Fast execution

  • Define just the right scope
    • Usually, satisfy the simplest use case and wait to see what else people want. You will naturally know what to do next.
  • Develop an intuition for problem-solving
    • The product is a combination of art and science. Too data-driven products lack soul and surprise. How to practice intuition? Try to validate ideas without code.
  • Maximize autonomy and promote a culture of prioritization by persuasion. At the same time, allow teams to choose their work based on their emotions, lives, and interests. Use persuasiveness and dynamic adjustment to drive progress.

Who Does Xiaomi Learn From​

• Tongrentang: Aiming for a century-old enterprise, Tongrentang is the best example. Its characteristic is high product quality, even though the prices are not cheap.
• Walmart & Costco: Innovation in business models, lowering prices, with most products priced at less than half of similar existing products. A research and development system that hires a small number of the best talents, where one person is worth fifty. Eliminating traditional marketing and channel costs: removing market expenses from marketing, focusing solely on word-of-mouth marketing. Simplifying sales channels, focusing only on direct sales. Although the prices are low, the sales volume is extremely high.
• Haidilao: What is word-of-mouth? Exceeding user expectations.

A business model of high quality, low price, and optimized efficiency can only be executed by those who have made money and are not short on cash. Affordable, high-quality smartphones are merely a means to acquire customers, drawing users into mobile internet platforms and e-commerce platforms (+ smart hardware).

Internet Thinking = Seven-Character Formula (Focus on Extreme Word-of-Mouth Fast) + Sense of Participation (Mass Line)​

• Focus on Extreme: Centering on smartphones, TVs, and routers, doing it oneself, serving as the entry point for the ecosystem, while other companies handle other products within the ecosystem.
• Word-of-Mouth? Exceeding user expectations, even bringing the product into a friendship. This is the core of internet thinking.

De-Management​

Pursuing super flat structures, where leaders understand all the details, enabling quick responses and decisions. Pursuing super flat structures, where leaders understand all the details, enabling quick responses and decisions.

Comments​

Prerequisites

• Platform-level products, making the platform affordable, allowing monetization through applications at the platform level.
• Having top-tier talent and capital during the bootstrap phase.
• Achieving likability in branding.

• Listen to Your Customers

  • Continuously communicate with customers
    • Making friends with customers is the simplest strategy: once you become friends, you can easily and casually ask for their feedback. At a certain point, sending a short message is easier than emailing or having meetings.
  • Selectively choose your customers
    • Eliminate customers who do not feel the pain of the problems you solve
    • Remove customers who want features that you have not yet developed

• Execute Quickly

  • Define the right scope
    • Generally, meet the most basic use case, and then wait to see what else people want. You will naturally know what to do next.
  • Cultivate a good intuition for problem-solving
    • Product is a blend of art and science. Overly data-driven products lack soul and surprise. How to practice intuition? Validate ideas without using code as much as possible.
  • Maximize autonomy and promote a culture of prioritization by persuasion. At the same time, allow teams to choose their work based on their emotions, lives, and interests. Drive progress through persuasion and dynamic adjustments.

Simply looking at the current trend of MAU cannot predict its future trajectory. For example, in the Growth Accounting Framework — during a certain period, some people start using your product (user acquisition), some leave your product (churn), and some leave and then return (reactivation), resulting in a net MAU value. As time goes on, user acquisition and reactivation become increasingly difficult; the more users there are, the higher the churn rate. The overall MAU curve tends to flatten or decline.

So what are the indicators that can predict future MAU? Andrew believes there are two:

1. Positive feedback from user acquisition
2. Positive feedback from retention and reactivation

Positive Feedback from User Acquisition​

UGC + SEO Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Yelp, Houzz, Wikipedia

1. New users see good content
2. Some new users join in to create new content
3. Google indexes this unique new content
4. Users search for more content

Paid Marketing Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Blue Apron, Casper, Uber

1. New users click on ads
2. Some new users try the product
3. Some become paying users
4. More budget is allocated for advertising

Viral Marketing Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Dropbox, LinkedIn, Instagram

1. New users register
2. New users invite/share content with friends
3. Some friends click on the link
4. Friends respond to the invitation/shared content

The conversion rates and numbers of these four steps can be calculated. For example, 30% of new users may import contacts and send invitation links to 10 people, of which 40% actually send the link, and 50% of those who receive the link will register. Thus, the growth factor is 0.6, meaning that from 1,000 registrations, there will be 600+ new registrations; over time, this could reach 2,500.

How to improve? Break down the steps and tackle them one by one.

Positive Feedback from Retention and Reactivation​

Social Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Instagram, LinkedIn, Gmail

1. Users create content
2. Content is seen by other users
3. Content receives social feedback
4. Notifications are sent to the content creator

Personalized Content Positive Feedback​

Representative Companies: Zillow, Credit Karma, Netflix

1. Users subscribe or add
2. New content appears
3. Users are notified or receive a push feed
4. Users see and like the content

Non-Scalable Channels​

PR, promotions, holiday features, conferences, content marketing, partnerships, and app store feature updates. These are all drivers that can attract people into these positive feedback loops, but they are not the positive feedback itself. These drivers are either difficult to attribute or hard to sustain over time.

There are billions of mediocre products in the world, and no one can experience them all in a lifetime. The vast majority of these are subpar; people don't need mediocre products. What people need are a few truly excellent ones. Creating excellence requires focus, and focus means saying no to good things because they hinder your ability to create something great.

2017 - The Second Half of the Internet: Skyward, Grounded, Globalized​

• Skyward: True high technology, along with traditional ABC — AI, Big Data, Cloud
• Grounded: Not just being grounded but going underground — merely connecting consumers is not enough; WeChat has already solved this problem; moreover, the barriers to connection are low, and you must delve into all aspects of the industry chain.
• Globalized: Countries are not boundaries; more likely, they are sources, currencies, and cultural habits. For instance, the boundary for Toutiao is language. The competition between China and the U.S. spans five to ten years. Collaboration among enterprises is necessary. Software talent is scarce in Southeast Asia.

2014 - New Business in the Era of Connectivity​

2012 - My Entrepreneurial Story​

After graduating from Tsinghua University with an EE degree, I went to the University of Delaware for my PhD. My advisor was not particularly available, and I saw the wave of social media online. In 2004, I gave up my PhD to start a business and contacted two classmates to become partners. We pooled together 300,000 RMB, rented a three-bedroom apartment in Haifeng Garden on Xueqing Road, with each of us having a room and working in the living room. We developed many products.

In August 2004, we launched our first SNS, Duoduo You, and by August 2005, our daily user growth was in double or even single digits, requiring us to invite friends and classmates. The problem was: wanting to target everyone made promotion difficult, leading to low density. The lack of focus stemmed from inexperience; we didn’t know what was important and what wasn’t.

In August 2005, we changed our approach and made three new attempts, one of which launched on December 8, targeting college students, expanding from Tsinghua, Peking University, and Renmin University to other schools. We started with the student festival of the Tsinghua Electronics Department, subsidizing ticket sales, spending 3,000 RMB to acquire about 5,000 users, with a customer acquisition cost of approximately 0.6 to 1 RMB per person. By the end of December, we were still wavering between this and another project. At this time, the team was still three people.

The difficulty of cloning lies in the feeling that you can differentiate yourself slightly; when your understanding of the product is not deep enough, you don’t know why it does what it does, nor do you know which differences are critical. ==Subtle differences can have significant implications.==

Competitors numbered in the dozens, with people in China and around the world cloning FB, such as 5Q, Zhanzuo, etc.

Why did the campus network succeed? Good luck (Tsinghua) and simplicity.

In 2006, we sold to Qianxiang Interactive for possibly 2 million due to financing issues.

1. The investment letter's lock-in period was a pitfall; the other party signed but did not invest. I recommend checking out Venture Hacks and Founders at Work.
2. I didn’t realize how big this could be; I only wanted to raise 1 million USD, but that was far from enough. I needed to meet people with sufficient insight.
3. I probably didn’t meet enough VCs.

After the handover, in 2007, I started working on Hainai and Fanfou. There were several important reasons for leaving:

1. External: In September 2006, FB launched the most significant revision in SNS history: Feed. The importance of Feed can be compared to the search box of search engines. This created new opportunities.
2. Internal: ==Time is always scarcer than money==.

Building a company to a certain level can be achieved through individual or team effort, but to reach a top-tier level, like IBM, Microsoft, Google, or Facebook, requires the enhancement of the entire society and comprehensive national strength. Not everyone can achieve that well, partly due to Tencent.

Tencent's dominance, with QQ and QZone, restricted the development of other mainstays. Some businesses belong to the mainstay, while others are branches; the mainstay provides nutrients to the branches, but mainstays can compete for nutrients with each other.

In July 2009, regulatory issues arose, leading to the shutdown of a batch of Weibo accounts. At this point, waiting indefinitely was not an option; the deadline was six months, after which we had to move on.

In January 2010, we launched Meituan, completing it in 20 days, and it was the earliest to go live. Speed was crucial; LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman once said that if a product version doesn’t embarrass you, it’s because you launched it too late. Additionally, you need to clearly understand the scale of the problem you are solving.

Let’s talk specifics about the market.

Great products can only emerge when there is a massive market and demand. User numbers:

• Billion-level: FB, Google
• Hundred-million-level: BAT, future Meituan
• Ten-million-level: Meituan in 2012

Generally, entrepreneurship either solves a new problem or uses new methods to solve an old problem. If you view market demand abstractly enough, there are only a few types of problems in the world, and many things can be done repeatedly. Marc Andreessen believes that we consider the things we are willing to do or invest in, and if they fail, we try again in three years, six years, or nine years. For example, cash flow and payments are old problems: PayPal in 2009, Square in 2012. Other examples include gaming, information retrieval, and business transactions.

Churchill said: The further back you can see into the past, the further forward you can see into the future. History and futurism are crucial.

Taking Wang Xing's historical perspective as an example: social networking and group buying both belong to the internet, which belongs to IT, and IT encompasses many other things. For instance, three of China's Four Great Inventions are IT-related. What can you do with IT? Generation, transmission, storage, processing, and display of information. For example, in transmission, current fiber optics and mobile communications have established the underlying communication, and now we can only work on upper-layer SNS. From a long-term perspective, IoT is reliable; it’s just a matter of time.

Specifically regarding Meituan's position: E-commerce can be categorized into product e-commerce and service e-commerce. Digitalization is unstoppable, but specific services cannot be replaced by digital means. Meituan is service e-commerce.

Regarding the number of competitors: marathon runners aiming for gold medals do not concern themselves with how many people are competing.

Copywriting is the simplest and most direct way of impressing your customers. Persuasive copywriting = three means of persuasion + copywriting. Three means of persuasion are emotion, logic, and credibility.

1. Capturing readers' emotions​

An excellent copywriting creates emotional resonance with customers. And emotions push people to act. If your copywriting hits the bottom of the consumers' hearts, customers will spend much time and money on your products.

2. Cultivating creative thinking​

More than rhetoric, creative writing deals with real problems. Using real-world practices to improve your creativity:

• Writing more in various styles.
• Reading more fiction and digging into people's emotions.
• Jumping out of the comfort zone, learning something new, and asking harsh questions against yourself.

3. Considering different requirements for different assignments​

4. Telling stories and secrets to customers​

Telling a secret is a beautiful way to ignite customers' interest -- Most people are curious about things behind-the-scenes. Doing this improves the click-through rate (CTR).

5. Applying sweet talk​

Straight compliments satisfy customers' self-esteem. People like to feel unique. This method originates from the three types of persuasion by Aristotle.

6. Valuing less of the grammar​

It does not mean you can completely ignore the grammar. Our ultimate goal is to convey the message to customers. Sometimes, concise and crisp expressions are the most important, instead of grammar.

To increase product sales and leave a good impression on potential customers, copywriting plays a crucial role. How can you improve your copy? In Andy Maslen's "Persuasive Copywriting," six key copywriting methods are introduced that may inspire you.

Create Emotional Resonance with Readers​

Good copy can evoke emotional resonance with customers. Emotions play a critical role because they drive us to take action. Therefore, once the copy touches the hearts of consumers, they are likely to spend significant time and money on the product.

Read and Write More to Foster Creative Thinking​

It is undeniable that some rhetorical techniques used in writing can be beneficial. However, creative writing requires the ability to address potential issues, which is more important than merely using fancy writing techniques. If people can refer to the methods mentioned below, they will surely find their creativity flowing.

• Writing more articles across various fields can cultivate creativity.
• People should read novels and delve into the emotions and thoughts of the characters.
• Stepping out of the comfort zone to learn knowledge that is not directly related to oneself, while asking some probing questions to help reshape oneself, is essential.

Consider Different Requirements for Different Tasks​

Sometimes, certain companies provide relevant requirements for copywriters to reference. If there are no specific requirements, authors should research to clarify writing points and reflect them in the text. Additionally, especially for beginners, it is crucial to keep paragraphs short and clear, and to pay attention to the tone of voice used for different tasks.

Tell Stories or Share Secrets with Consumers​

This is a great way to pique customer interest, as people are irresistibly drawn to captivating stories. Moreover, most people are curious about behind-the-scenes secrets. By adopting this approach, customers are less likely to resist the temptation to learn more. Thus, they will click on the headline to discover the story or secret behind the product.

Offer Compliments or Use Wise Methods Found in Greek Mythology​

Straightforward praise satisfies customers' self-esteem. Additionally, they enjoy feeling special and unique. This falls under one of Aristotle's three modes of persuasion (ethos, pathos, logos), specifically "pathos," which fulfills customers emotionally.

There's No Need to Rigidly Follow Grammar Rules​

This does not mean that grammar can be ignored. The ultimate goal of copywriting is to provide effective reading for customers. Frankly, sometimes people do not even notice these minor grammatical errors; on the contrary, such writing can make the copy clearer and easier to understand.