Lately, many of you have been asking about entrepreneurship and starting side businesses. What’s the core of it all?
Honestly? Both entrepreneurship and side businesses are inherently opportunistic. There’s nothing shameful about that — it’s simply the reality in front of us.
All the entrepreneurship frameworks, all the struggles, all the hustle — when you strip it down, it starts because you don’t have much money. It’s being broke that forces people to get creative.
But here’s the flip side: the greatest advantage of starting a business is having nothing to lose.
So where does the real opportunity lie for entrepreneurs? Either the giants in the existing market can’t see where things are heading — and that gives you a head start — or they can see it clearly but simply can’t adapt fast enough to act on it.
Since entrepreneurship is fundamentally opportunistic, what exactly are you betting on?
I think early-stage entrepreneurs need to first choose a large market. But choosing a large market alone isn’t enough. Many large markets have existed for years, even decades. Some major human needs have existed for centuries. If something has been around for decades, you can’t possibly beat all the competitors in a short time.
The only reason entrepreneurs can succeed, then, is change — change that happened recently and is on its way to becoming something much bigger. You might not be the only one who sees it, but you are among the first to participate in it. It’s not that people before you couldn’t think of it — it’s that this thing only just happened. So yes, you need to pick a large market. More importantly, you need to pick change — a market undergoing change significant enough to matter.
Markets can change in many ways: a new government policy, a shift in industry dynamics. But what kind of change actually qualifies? What kind of change do we need?
What we actually need is change that levels the playing field — change that erases the existing transaction barriers in the market. Because startups have limited resources, the market you choose must have everything in place already. The conditions must be fully — or nearly fully — met. You’re looking for a situation where only one thing remains to be done. That’s the space you should enter.
Not everything operates by this logic, of course. Some companies can push others and even create change — they act as bulldozers, flattening the market themselves and then cultivating it. But that’s not relevant to startups that haven’t yet built up their resources.
The same applies to side businesses. What you’re looking for is a log that someone has already been dousing with gasoline — but hasn’t yet lit. You want to be the match. If that moment hasn’t arrived, you can only wait.
There’s one more critical point: you must have leverage.
Even if a large market is changing, even if you can fan the flames and help it spread, even if you reach a certain scale — you might still be making barely anything. How do you actually make it work? At its core, you need leverage.
Take Xiaomi: their leverage in brand-building was social networks. Their leverage in the supply chain was Foxconn. You use a small amount of your own money and resources to unlock multiples of traffic, users, capital, and resources that belong to others.
Say you’re running a side business. You start with a few dozen paying customers and a few thousand dollars in sales. To truly grow — reaching thousands of customers, roughly a 100x increase — you absolutely cannot achieve that through organic growth alone.
So every era has its own form of leverage. Once you’ve spotted the change and grabbed the opportunity, you still need to ask: what leverage exists right now in this industry that I can borrow and amplify?
For example, the WeChat era gave rise to many companies — early micro-e-commerce businesses, WeChat movie ticketing platforms, and more. Without that new channel, that new platform, it would have been nearly impossible to grow so fast and reach such scale in such a short time. The search engine traffic era, in the same way, built companies like Autohome and 58.com — both used search engines as their core leverage.
When you’ve managed to do something well that has existed for a long time, it’s not purely because of exceptional talent or intelligence. Ask yourself: why couldn’t the people before you pull it off? Why is it that at this particular moment in time, with your approach, you are the one who made it happen? Why did you outpace so many others doing the same thing?
That, I believe, is a question every entrepreneur must ask themselves — every single day.