Let me briefly record the transcript of my talk on Lunch 2.0 meetup. I talked very fast, and may be only used 3 minutes. It was supposed to talk about my business baixing.com. But as always, we want to be low profile about what we are doing, I talked about something instead. It is basically based on a Chinese blog article about entrepreneurship I recently wrote.

I started by saying “I am Jian Shuo wang, CEO of Baixing.com. It is a online classified service that provide housing, jobs, second-hand, services, and community. Since the business model of classified is so simply, let me talk about three things I learn from 4 years of my company”. Tomorrow is actually the 4th year anniversary of baixing.

Then I said about the first learning:

First, Focus. After doing many different things, the CEO of blogcn.com, a blog hosting company, to claim that he spent 4 years to learn that blogcn.com should really focus to blog. That is also what I learn. Baixing is all about doing classified well, as Dianping.com is created to do dianping well (reviews). Many company started with an idea to do something, but it is too easy for us to forget what were are supposed to do.

That was my short first point. The second:

The second is, cost. We discovered a magic formula that no one else in this world every understand: Profit = Revenue – Cost. (laughter). In good times, we only care about revenue, because founders look at valuation of the company. $1 in revenue may make $20 difference in valuation. They don’t care to spend $10 to get $1 revenue. Today, luckily, everyone is getting back to the essential of business: spend $1 to get $1.10 back. That is the reason we look at cost.

Then I talked about the third learning.

Third learning, simplicity.

We want to add more features, but never really understand the cost of it. We are all tech companies, and we know to add a comment feature is just few hours of coding. But when we put it online, we learn a new word: spam. Then we need to hire people to moderate it. If we are talking about people, we are talking about hiring, firing (if you are “lucky”), creating report, review report, and everything related to people management. You need to bring people out for dinner, and think about moral building. Back to feature. Someone may want to delete a comment…

“CDE!” my audience laughed.

Right. Like CDE.. Then you need to create a cool concept called user account, and they need to signup, set password, change password, and stupid people like ourselves may even forget passwords…

Think again before adding many feature.

OK. That is the three things I learn from my past 4 years as an entrepreneur: focus, cost and simplicity. Thanks

Pretty short talk, isn’t it? I guess it is just three minutes.