This will continue to be the case for the next 30 years.

For 37signals, things like speed, simplicity, ease of use, and clarity have always been their focus.

Ten years later, no one will suddenly wake up and say, “Dude, I think the software is a little harder to use.” No one would say, “I hope my application runs a little slower.”

More than 20 years old, no amateur life, working 14 hours a day, are you good employees?

Remember, fashion fades. Only when you focus on long-lasting features will you find yourself holding on to something that is never outdated.

5. Create unique products

When you focus on making a product, it’s often easy to build a great product. But the reality is that once you make a name for yourself, imitators will swarm up.

But there is a great way to protect yourself from being swallowed up by blind followers:

Make yourself part of your product or service. Inject your unique ideas into your product, make it unique, and turn it into something that no one else can do.

Let’s take a look at the Zappos.com website, a multi-billion dollar American online footwear retailer.

Sneakers sold by Zappos are no different from shoes sold by Foot Locker or other retailers.

But Zappos ’products are unique because they are integrated with the CEO Xie Jiahua ’s customer service philosophy.

At Zappos, customer service never uses a standardized response language, they can chat with customers for a long time.

The company headquarters and customer service center are located in the same place, not across the ocean. All Zappos employees have to work in the call center and warehouse for a month when they join the company.

It is this dedication to service that makes Zappos unique among shoe retailers.

Integrate your characteristics into your product and everything related to your product:

How you sell, support, explain, deliver … competitors can’t replicate the uniqueness of your product.

Second, how to run your product well?

1. Forget the plan

There is a saying “Plan cannot keep up with change”. There are too many uncontrollable factors: market environment, competitors, customer groups, economyStatus, etc.

Writing a plan makes people feel like they have something in their hands, but in reality it’s completely out of control.

We can call plans “conjectures”, such as “strategic conjectures” and “financial conjectures”, but we don’t have to worry about these “conjectures” at all, otherwise we will lose more than we get.

20-year-old, no amateur life, working 14 hours a day, is it a good employee?

Planning is to use the past to promote the future, which is equivalent to putting on your blindfold. The problem is: planning and improvisation don’t coincide.

You must be able to improvise, and you must seize every opportunity that comes. This is not to say that you should ignore the future or prepare for the challenges ahead.

Prevention exercises are worth doing, just don’t feel like you have to write these questions in black and white or tangled up for this.

In most cases, people do n’t have to look at their long-written plans again. The huge plans will eventually become fossils in file cabinets.

You can decide what you want to do this week, without having to worry about planning for the whole year. Just figure out the next most important task and start doing it.

Make a decision right before the action starts, rather than prescheduling something early. Unplanned work may seem overwhelming, but blindly following unrealistic plans can have even more dire consequences.

20-year-old, no amateur life, working 14 hours a day, is a good employee?

2. Don’t always think about growing up

People often ask, “How big is your company?” Although the topic is small, the answer that people expect is not as small as possible. The larger the number, the more impressive, professional, and powerful you are.

More than 20 years old, no amateur life, working 14 hours a day, is it a good employee? Will we point at Harvard and Oxford:

If they can expand, open branches, hire well-known teachers, operate globally, open branches … and then they can become great schools.

Of course not.

None of these are our criteria for evaluating prestigious schools. So why use these standards to measure a business?

Maybe your company’s optimal size is 5 people, 40 people, or 200 people. Maybe you just need to add a laptop by yourself.

20-year-old, no amateur life, working 14 hours a day, is it a good employee?

Do n’t imagine in advance how big you want to be, you must develop slowly, and take a step at a time—the practice of soliciting people before the time is up has made many companies dead.

Blowout growth should also be avoided-this will cause you to over expand and miss the optimal size.

3. Small companies are not just a springboard, small companies are a great goal in themselves

Did you find that small companies want to grow, but big companies dream of becoming more agile and flexible?

Remember, once the company is bigger, if you want to shrink it, you will inevitably have to lay off employees, crack down on morale, and completely change the business model.

You don’t need to target climbing up at all. We are not only talking about the number of your employees, but also your expenses, rent, IT (information technology) facilities, office furniture, etc.

These things do not come to you, but it is up to you to decide whether or not to carry them.

If you decide to take them on the road, you are starting with new troubles. Because of the huge overhead, you can only force yourself to create a very complex business model-it is more difficult and nervous to operate.

Don’t feel insecure just because you are targeting small companies. No matter who it is, as long as the company he runs can continue to grow and remain profitable, regardless of size, it is proud.

4. Don’t raise funds as a last resort

Although starting a business requires funds, no matter what type of business you start, you should spend as little money as possible. The reasons are as follows:

① Loss of control

You have to listen to someone else’s money. In the beginning, everyone was peaceful, but alsoNot bad. But no one knows what will happen next. Using other people’s money will only leave you alone.

The idea of ​​”cash out” will overwhelm the dream of “creating a great company.” Investors want to get their money back-the sooner the better (usually 3 to 5 years).

Once the partners only want to cash out the money quickly, long-term sustainable development will become a bubble.

② Addictive with other people’s money

There is nothing better than spending someone else’s money. But when you’re done with it, they will take more shares from you every time you go.

③ Financing is not a good deal

When you are just getting started, there is absolutely no advantage in negotiation. It is often difficult in financial transactions.

④ Customers are no longer listed on “Totem Pole”

Spending someone else’s money will eventually make your career cater to investors, not customers.

⑤ It ’s extremely troublesome to raise money

Financing is a difficult and energy-intensive business. It would take months to meet for discussions, study laws, sign contracts, and so on.

These tedious things will waste a lot of your energy, and this time should be used to create a great cause.

5. Marketing is not a departmental issue

Do not assume that only marketing personnel are responsible for product marketing.

The finance department is an independent department, but marketing is not. Marketing is the work that all employees of your company need to do at all times.

More than 20 years old, no amateur life, 14 hours a day, is it a good employee?

People can’t help but communicate, and by the same token, people can’t help but do marketing:

Every time you answer the phone, this is marketing;

Every time you send an email, this is marketing;

Every time someone uses your product, this is marketing;

Every word you write on your website is marketing;

If you are designing software, every error prompt is marketing;

If you run a restaurant, the mint after your meal is marketing;

If you are in retail, the cashier can also do marketing;

If you are in the service industry, you can also do marketing on the bills to your customers.

20s, no amateur life, working 14 daysHours, is it a good employee?

You have to understand that excellent performance in these small details is more important than choosing a small meeting gift for the customer. Marketing is not the work of several people, it is the sum of all the work you do.

6. Actively control negative news

In the event of an accident, someone will break the news. But if you speak for yourself, the results will be much better.

Otherwise, you can only watch rumors, sky-high rumors, and false appearances.

When a problem occurs, you should tell your customers immediately (even if they don’t notice it at first).

Don’t think that you can cover the truth. Paper can’t cover the fire. If you don’t take it out, someone will expose you.

Now they post the scandal online, and everyone knows that there are no secrets now.

20-year-old, no amateur life, working 14 hours a day, is it a good employee?

If you’re frank, honest, open, and the crisis is fast enough, people will respect you more.

Do n’t retract your head, and do n’t try to suppress bad news, you should let your customers have the right to know as much as possible.

For how to control negative news yourself, our suggestions are:

① The news should be released by the senior management of the company, and the situation should be controlled by the person with the highest position in the company;

② The message should be widely disseminated, and every effort should be made to convey the message. Don’t try to hide the truth;

③ Do n’t say “no comment”;

④ Express your apology truthfully and explain the situation in as much detail as possible;

⑤ Carefully care about the customer’s experience-and then prove that you are really responsible for the customer.

Three, corporate culture is not a slogan, it is action

1. Who created the corporate culture?

Fast-food corporate cultures are man-made. They consist of a large number of mission statements, statements, and rules. They are so superficial, ugly, and hypocritical.

Man-made corporate culture is just a picture, and the real corporate cultureHua is a masterpiece polished by time.

You can’t create corporate culture. Corporate culture is naturally generated. This is why new companies often have no corporate culture. Corporate culture is a by-product of consistent behavior.

If you encourage people to share, then sharing becomes part of your company culture;

If you return the trust of others, then trust will become part of the corporate culture;

If you treat customers well, treating customers well will also become your corporate culture.

20-year-old, no amateur life, working 14 hours a day, is it a good employee?

Corporate culture is not established by playing billiards among colleagues or by expanding sports;

Not enforced through company policy;

Not even at Christmas events or company picnics.

I ’m in my 20s, I do n’t have an amateur life, I work 14 hours a day, is it a good employee?

Those are objects, they are events, not corporate culture. Corporate culture is also not a slogan. Corporate culture is behavior, not language.

So, don’t worry too much about corporate culture, don’t force it, you can’t install a culture in your company.

2. Here are some actions that can form an excellent corporate culture:

① Treat employees as adults

When you look at employees as children, they behave like children. However, many companies and managers treat their employees in exactly the same way.

Employees must apply to their superiors for approval before doing anything. Every small amount of their expenses must be reported to the approval.

20-year-old, no amateur life, working 14 hours a day, is it a good employee?

When everything is reported to the company for approval, you create a brainless culture. You have succeeded in creating an antagonistic relationship between your boss and your employees that stems from your mistrust.

When you limit your employees everywhere, you will get no benefit. The time employees spend on a small job will not miraculously become hard working hours. They will find other ways to pass the time.

You can’t ask your employees to work 8 hours, minutes and seconds a day, no matter what, it’s just a legend. They might stay in the office for eight hours, but they won’t really work all the time.

People need to make small jumps, which helps break the dull day. Take a moment to watch your circle of friends and you won’t lose anything.

More than 20 years old, no amateur life, working 14 hours a day, is it a good employee?

Let’s talk about how much time and money you will spend monitoring your employees.

How much does it cost to install monitoring software? How much time does IT staff have to waste on monitoring employees instead of doing more valuable practical projects? How much time did you waste writing rules and regulations that nobody sees? Looking at these costs, you will soon realize:

Distrust of employees is the biggest expense.

② Put people on time at 5 o’clock

The ideal employees in many companies ’minds are:

More than 20 years old, no amateur life, working 14 hours a day, and laying the floor under the desk overnight will not collapse.

But if the office is full of such crazy night owls, it doesn’t seem as good as it looks.

I ’m in my 20s, I do n’t have an amateur life, I work 14 hours a day, is it a good employee?

This makes your poor management ability fortunately obfuscated, creating a fallacy that “this is the only way we can compete with our competitors.”

What you need is not to work longer, but to work more efficiently.

When people have something at home, they will finish the work during office hours because there are still things at home waiting for them to do. They need to pick up children and participate in activities, so they must arrange their time wisely.

You need someone who cares for your family, someone who has an amateur life, and someone who needs to pay attention to several things.

You can’t expect work to be the whole life of a person-at least you don’t want to live with such people for a long time.

③ Make your voice come true

What does it feel like when a businessman bluffs? It’s all rigid wording, official accent, hypocritical friendliness, legal terminology, etc.

You must have seen these things, as if they were written by robots. These companies are talking to you, not talking to you.

This professionalism mask is ridiculous, everyone knows, but there are still small companies competing to follow suit.

They think that bluffing confession can make them look bigger and more “professional”, in fact it only makes them look funny.

More than 20 years old, no amateur life, working 14 hours a day, is it a good employee?

There is nothing wrong with being real. Being honest is wise.

The first impression you leave on others is your speech—why start with a lie? Don’t be afraid to be yourself.

The remarks we include here include the languages ​​you might use in every aspect-email, wrapping paper, interviews, blog posts, reports, and so on.

20-year-old, no amateur life, working 14 hours a day, is it a good employee?

Communicate with customers just like chatting with friends. Explain the problem as if you are sitting next to them.

Avoid “professional” and “commercial” terms when speaking. Don’t use popular terms to express things that can be expressed in common words.

Don’t talk about “monetization” and “transparency”. Instead, use “make money” and “honesty.” If you can finish a sentence in 4 words, don’t use 7 words.

Things are written for people to read, not exam writing. No matter what you write, read it out aloud to see if you feel like talking to someone in person.

If not, think about how you can make it more spoken.

20s, no amateur life, working 14 hours a day, is it a good employee?

Who says writing an article must be formal? Who says writing cannot retain personality? Forget those rules and start communicating!

When you write something, do n’t think it ’s written for everyone in the world. Just think about someone and write for that person.

Today, anyone can start a business. Tools that could not be reached in the past are now at your fingertips:

Technologies that cost thousands of dollars in the past can now be used for free for only a few dollars;

Now one person can do the work of two people, three people, or even the whole department;

A few years ago, those materials that ordinary people couldn’t get, now it seems like this.

* This article is an independent opinion of the author and does not represent the standpoint of Noteman.