Hu Yanqi, born in the 1980s: Entrepreneurship becomes a team

Hu Yanqi, who graduated from Dalian Maritime University majoring in automatic control, can be said to be an outstanding representative of the post-80s generation. After graduating from college in 2005, he registered and set up Dalian Maisouyou Technology Development Co., Ltd. and became CEO for the first time. Now, more than four years later, he has owned two companies with more than 20 employees, all of whom are outstanding graduates from colleges and universities in Dalian.

As one of the first batch of college students' entrepreneurial enterprises supported by the government in Dalian, Hu Yanqi's company has now passed the most difficult survival period and entered the stage of rapid development. The college students' entrepreneurial alliance project he initiated has been favored by many venture investors and has a very broad development prospect.

Four years of tuition to dig gold

In 2001, Hu Yanqi entered Dalian Maritime University with a great dream. At the beginning of his enrollment, he discussed with his parents that they would give him the tuition fee of more than 20,000 yuan for four years of college, and promise not to ask his family for a penny of living expenses in the following four years. Since Hu Yanqi has been independent since childhood and has never done anything out of line, his parents agreed to his request after careful consideration.

But to his parents' surprise, Hu Yanqi took the tuition fee of more than 20,000 yuan as the capital to dig the first bucket of gold in his life.

Resourceful Hu Yanqi took 20,000 yuan capital and began to look around for business opportunities. His first chance came in the second semester of his freshman year. At that time, the new dormitory area of the school was completed, which was far away from the teaching building. Students had to walk 20 minutes to get to their classrooms every day. Mr. Hu aimed for the opportunity. After doing some serious research, he decided to buy 100 new bicycles and bring them to school. As a result, the 100 bicycles were snapped up by the students in less than three days. Later, when Hu Yanqi settled his accounts, he earned more than 2,000 yuan.

This time Hu Yanqi's troubles caused a great response, many students who want to buy a bicycle began to take the initiative to find him. So he took the money into the second and third batch of bicycles. As the business grew, many students offered to work for him and help him sell bicycles. Hu became the "boss" among his students.

The bicycle business allowed Hu Yanqi to experience the pleasure of making money for the first time, and his money of more than 20,000 yuan quickly doubled to more than 40,000 yuan.

Hu was encouraged by his first successful gold mining experience. After monopolizing his market, he moved to other universities, including the Dalian University of Technology, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, and Dalian Neusoft Institute of Information, and built up a network of universities with students as their marketing representatives.

Thanks to their outstanding performance, Hu's team was recognized by Dalian Netcom and Dalian Unicom, and they successfully won the campus agency rights of these two big companies.

During their four years in college, Hu Yanqi has accumulated a lot of experience and interpersonal resources. Recalling his four years in college, Hu said with emotion, "At that time, I always had inexhaustible energy. When I saw a good project, I wanted to study and try it. I not only keenly smell a lot of business opportunities, but also often lead the students to talk about sponsorship, night all night to do planning cases. At that time, I got used to the extraordinarily busy and fulfilling life of a startup. I didn't feel tired at all, just like a workaholic."

Give up $100,000 a year to start a business

It was the last year of his short college life, and while his classmates were struggling to find jobs, Hu seemed more fortunate than them. "Because I majored in automation and had a good command of English, I received several job offers from foreign companies," he said.

In June 2005, just before he graduated from college, Hu Yanqi faced a difficult choice: a respectable job with a foreign company with an annual salary of 100,000 yuan, or the risky path of starting his own business. The two forces of ideal and reality fought fiercely within him.

At this time, many classmates and friends advised Hu Yanqi to face the reality and go to work separately. After all, it was too difficult and risky to start a business. But his heart has always had a belief: taking advantage of the young to fight for their dreams once, to create their career, no matter how much secular pressure, no matter the result is successful or not, have no regrets. Finally, Hu Yanqi made an important decision at the turning point of his life: to give up his well-paid job and start his own business!

If you want to start a business, you have to have start-up capital! Hu Yanqi agonized unceasingly for this, he had run many banks to negotiate a loan but had no result. At this time, a poster of the entrepreneurship competition on campus, which reads "Passion to start a business, the government takes out 1 million yuan free to support college students to start a business", happened to be blown by the wind at his feet. Hu Yanqi is keenly aware that this is a godsend opportunity for him to open the door to entrepreneurship. To seize this rare opportunity, he stayed up for two days and two nights finally wrote a 50-page "online virtual university" business plan, and rushed to register before the deadline.

After that, Hu Yanqi led his team all the way through and finally won the first prize in the entrepreneurship competition and 30,000 yuan of government entrepreneurship award funds.

In August 2005, less than a month after graduating from college, Hu Yanqi with three business partners, with his 50000 yuan of money in the university and a government award of 30000 yuan, rented heroine Chen xian the smallest 20 square meters office building, set up the technology development co., LTD., Dalian on the real business.

Development is too fast and bumps in the road

Starting a business is hard, but Hu Yanqi is happy with the hard work of starting a business. To launch their website, We DE University, before the start of school in September, Hu and his team worked up to 15 hours a day. When tired, they would nap on the floor and eat meals in a small office.

Hu Yanqi knows that compared with competitors in the same industry, he does not have a strong fund, a large team, let alone a background and connections. Only do faster and better than others, to break out of a world. Therefore, they rely on this belief to work hard, value time more than anything else, eager to work 24 hours a day, and even set a record in Jinxi Building: the whole building lights at 12 o 'clock every night they are the only company.

In this way, a month later, the "We DE University" website smoothly launched. Then, they started to promote it in all colleges and universities in Dalian. At the same time, Hu Yanqi and his team also planned and published Dalian's first Life Guide for College Students, and held a series of marketing activities such as a welcome party for freshmen.

It always pays off. Through hard efforts, Hu Yanqi finally ushered in the first big customer -- China Unicom.

China Unicom did not trust these young graduates very much at first, but later facts proved that it was right to choose them at the risk. The plan of Hu Yanqi's team successfully increased China Unicom's market share in the Dalian college freshmen market from the original 20% to 50%. Unicom's boss repeatedly praised the Hu Yanqi team fought a beautiful battle, and decided to take them as China Unicom Dalian university market the only designated partner, "we DE university" website from the popular Dalian university.

Later, Hu Yanqi's company successively became the university market partner of China Telecom, China Netcom, Dashang Group, Bank of China, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, and many other enterprises. We-de University has also quickly become a familiar platform for college students to obtain information about part-time jobs without payment.

But Hu Yanqi did not expect that only a year later, their website was forced to shut down. "When the popularity of the site exploded, our servers crashed and the site was shut down for nearly two weeks. We lost members and advertisers stopped working with us." "Mr. Hu sighed.

The defeat was a big blow to Mr. Hu. "The feverish confidence, the self-righteous passion, the feeling that you're the best..." Hu Yanqi analyzed the reasons for the failure in the initial stage of the business, "It's funny to think about it now. At that time, we were always talking about meeting the needs of customers, but we were imagining and creating the needs of customers without making clear the real needs of customers."

After the closure of the website, Hu Yanqi had a deep reflection and quickly adjusted his mindset. He said to his team: "Although we have a dream of the Internet in our hearts, we are not strong enough to support this dream. Let's keep this dream in our hearts first, and we will explode again when the time is right!"

Hu Yanqi led his team to get up again and make use of their advantages in Internet technology to provide services such as website construction, e-commerce system, and multimedia display system for enterprises, and gradually won back a good reputation and sufficient capital.

When it comes to the company's current development, Hu says with a smile, "I can only break even at present. For me, the most important meaning of starting a business is not how much money I make, but the most valuable experience in my life, a process that can accelerate my growth and transformation. In the four years since I started my own business, I have experienced things that my peers could not experience in 10 years."

The current employment situation is quite severe. To help more college students who are determined to start their businesses, Hu Yanqi not only gives voluntary entrepreneurship counseling lectures in colleges and universities in Dalian for a long time but also sets up the Dalian University Students' Entrepreneurship Alliance and the "College Students' Entrepreneurship network" to help college students solve their entrepreneurial problems