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This article was transcribed by SimpRead; original source: linux.do
Many people wonder why I’m writing this article. In fact, regular readers already know: over the past five years—full of stumbles and setbacks—I’ve been in a quasi-entrepreneurial state, enduring numerous setbacks and accumulating valuable insights, hard-won experience, and precious knowledge.
I’m not trying to sell courses—I simply want to speak from the perspective of an ordinary Chinese person. Over these years, I’ve reflected deeply on the various challenges entrepreneurs commonly face. If you’re currently recruiting investors—or if you’re a government official overseeing local industrial upgrading—and happen to read this article, I hope it offers you a vivid, contemporary perspective from today’s youth on entrepreneurship, thereby providing a living case study to inform your policy decisions. And if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur reading this, I hope it helps lay some foundational understanding and helps you avoid common pitfalls.
A few points need clarification:
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The discussion herein applies only to ordinary university students and young people. It does not apply to affluent young people (e.g., “rich second-generation” individuals) or middle-aged professionals who possess accumulated capital/inherited wealth, extensive social networks, or stable customer bases.
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Each of the hurdles listed below eliminates over 80–90% of aspiring entrepreneurs; those who ultimately succeed are exceedingly rare.
Hurdle 1: Choosing the Wrong Industry
China offers many entrepreneurial avenues—but not every path is open to you. Before entering any industry, rigorously assess your existing resources. Internet success stories sound inspiring, but that doesn’t mean you’re qualified to tread the same path. Most successful industries emerge only under the perfect confluence of timing, geography, and human factors—and most entrepreneurs are still students.
Suppose you’ve been fascinated by power-generation technology since childhood—and even possess exceptional talent. Are you qualified to launch a power-generation and sales business in China in 2026? Why not? Because electricity is a monopolized resource, strictly controlled by the state for public welfare. Moreover, the underlying technologies are already mature—but tightly controlled by the state. You likely don’t even know these technologies exist, and the state has no obligation to disclose its core technologies to you so you can “avoid stepping on their toes.”
Suppose you’ve long been passionate about chip design and programming—and possess strong technical skills. Are you qualified to launch a chip IDE (integrated development environment) startup in China in 2026? Why not? Because the main challenge in chip IDE development isn’t coding—it’s post-implementation silicon validation (“tape-out”). Tape-outs require enormous investment. Even if you’re a wealthy heir with ample funds, your IDE cannot gain industry traction unless it demonstrates numerous successful tape-outs and perfectly replicates the user experience familiar to veteran engineers. An IDE that fails to achieve market adoption will collapse quickly—unless the state subsidizes it. Remember: your target users are chip engineers—a relatively small, specialized group. And most of them are mid-career or senior engineers. Whether your product gains market acceptance hinges entirely on their endorsement. To win their trust, you must align with their established workflows. But as a student—even a wealthy one—you lack the deep, practical insight of experienced chip engineers.
Here’s a useful habit: read history and newspapers regularly. China began encouraging talent to enter the IC (integrated circuit) industry back in 2008. Today, it’s already a traditional industry—and traditional industries follow fundamentally different developmental patterns than emerging ones.
You casually stumble upon a WeChat public account article describing yet another “genius teen” who made a major breakthrough in drone technology—with real-world deployments at airports and government agencies. This teen didn’t attend a top-tier university (985/211). Suddenly, you feel inspired—the sky opens wide—and you spot an uncharted “blue ocean.” Eagerly, you rush to your boss seeking resources to pursue this direction. Your boss encourages your entrepreneurial spirit—at the motivational level. After just three months, however, you realize you can’t even handle basic software and hardware drivers. You curse society and complain: “Why is technology advancing so fast—yet leaving me no slice of the pie?” What you don’t know is that this news-covered teen began drone research as a child, enjoys rich political and business connections through his family, and benefits from strong institutional support—from both school and faculty—while you have none of that. You lack clear self-awareness and even basic media literacy: the ability to decode the hidden implications behind news reports. Instead, you become mere “tooling” for media platforms—generating likes, shares, and views. Failure thus arrives inevitably: you simply aren’t qualified for this industry.
When everyone perceives a sector as “cool”—and your competitors are uniformly smarter and better-connected than you—why do you believe you’ll win?
Recognizing your current strengths, available resources, and genuine interests—and selecting a suitable industry—is the first critical step toward entrepreneurial success. Most aspiring entrepreneurs fail right here—and this failure yields zero positive feedback, because it stems from a fundamental gap in cognition. After failing, most people merely blame societal injustice—reinforcing the absence of feedback.
After all, people cannot earn money beyond what their cognition allows—and naturally, they cannot recognize anything beyond that cognitive boundary—including lessons from failure.
Hurdle 2: Setting Unrealistically Large Goals
Suppose you’re either exceptionally insightful—or fortunate enough to receive sage advice—and thus successfully sidestep Hurdle 1’s pitfalls.
You’re technically proficient, emotionally intelligent, and possess strong team leadership skills. You harbor grand ambitions: building AI software for all Chinese citizens. So your first product? An AI-powered food-tracking app for the entire nation.
Assume you’ve devoured Jin Hui’s blogs and tutorials (all free—I don’t sell courses, again emphasizing this), mastered nearly every algorithm and technique, and—in just one month—built and polished your AI product to perfection, matching the meticulous standards of your academic assignments. Then you hit a fatal problem: nobody uses it. Despite passionately recording numerous explanatory videos on Bilibili and promoting them across all social media platforms, after one month your product remains virtually unknown. You stare at your beautifully designed UI and highly functional algorithm interface, baffled: Why isn’t anyone using it?
Eventually, you swallow your pride and conduct forced street interviews. Most passersby respond: “Your app tracks food and calculates calories—so what? I can just search for that on DouBao. Also, your registration process is terrible—why does my avatar upload keep failing? There’s no onboarding tutorial—how am I supposed to know how to use this thing?” Such questions flood in relentlessly. You’re speechless, utterly confused about where you went wrong. You executed every step flawlessly—yet ruined the entire project. Ultimately, you abandon the venture—and swear off entrepreneurship forever.
Countless teams perish precisely because they set goals too large. Every young person starts brimming with energy and ambition—they can’t imagine a vocabulary-learning app sustaining a team, nor would they proudly tout their product as “just a cloud-based vending-machine payment API.” That’s not “cool” enough to satisfy youthful competitiveness and vanity. Consequently, most young founders initially aim far too high. If fortune smiles upon you—if you happen to launch precisely when a product category explodes and massive capital floods in—and if your IQ/EQ are high, your health robust, your parents alive and financially unburdened—you might become the next Lei Jun or Zhang Yiming. Sadly, China today faces overcapacity: most industry niches are already saturated.
In today’s China, it’s extremely difficult for fresh graduates to build a product truly usable by everyone. The last widely adopted “everyone-can-use” products were Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) and DouBao. DouBao was built by ByteDance—a tech giant—making it irrelevant for young founders to emulate; indeed, you’re not even “at the table,” and—remarkably—it remains unprofitable to this day. As for Xiaohongshu’s founding team, look them up online—and then wisely step back.
Ultimately, Hurdles 1 and 2 address the same core issue: misalignment between your entrepreneurial vision and your actual resources. With more experience, a more credible professional team, or deeper funding, the idea might work—but for you now, it’s impossible. Don’t let internet novels cloud your judgment.
Hurdle 3: The Perfectionism Trap
Suppose you’re unusually gifted—calm, focused, and brimming with youthful passion and ambition—yet uniquely able to suppress youthful impulsiveness. You understand the value of deep, sustained effort within a manageable niche—and begin by building your own “slice of cake.”
You select a relatively low-competition, yet established, niche “blue ocean” market. Your parents, teachers, and school administration all support your venture—and you’ve leveraged relevant school policies.
You’ve always excelled academically—the “good kid” praised by adults. You apply this exam-solving mindset to entrepreneurship: just as you’d triple-check every exam paper before submission to ensure full marks, you obsessively refine every tiny detail before launching your software—even with AI assistance, you find polishing details still consumes enormous time. Unless corner radii match perfectly, unless gradient colors satisfy your aesthetic sense, unless API response times stay under 50ms, you struggle to focus on the next detail—just as you’d insist on solving every difficult exam question correctly before proceeding.
Unfortunately, this “exam” seems to have infinite questions—and you and your team keep spontaneously adding new ones, deriving satisfaction from both proposing and solving them. Indeed, this process sharpens your technical and aesthetic skills. Yet when your product finally satisfies everyone on the team, a full year has passed. Meanwhile, dozens of similar products have launched—stealing users who should’ve been yours. You suddenly grasp that even niche “blue ocean” ventures have strict time windows. You suddenly understand why big-tech employees endure midnight overtime—to meet these deadlines. Ideas conceived outside the window hold little commercial value.
Because you grew up under exam-oriented education—not holistic education—this ingrained test-taking habit forces you to demand perfection before “submitting your answer.” In reality, any mature team launches at ~70% (or even 60%) completion—and immediately begins aggressive promotion and seed-user acquisition. Perfectionism may make you an outstanding “screw”—but never an exceptional entrepreneur—unless your chosen industry meets all of the following conditions:
- Extremely high entry barriers: you’re confident fewer than 10 potential national competitors exist—and you’re tracking all of them.
- User pain points directly correlate with your meticulously refined UI or algorithm performance.
- Profit margins are low—or non-existent.
Hurdle 4: Lacking Resilience
Suppose you’ve received sage guidance—and read extensively—learning about the perfectionism trap from Everyone Is a Product Manager, consciously avoiding it from day one. Congratulations—you’ve cleared the previous hurdle.
If you persist in building your product at this stage, you’ll discover demand is widespread. Even sectors deemed “red oceans” reveal untapped opportunities once you dig deep and identify a cohort of seed users. Any industry with entrenched incumbents doesn’t imply those players deliver excellent products—merely that they entered early and captured market share. Demand is diverse, and standardized services offered by incumbents rarely satisfy everyone. When enough dissatisfied users coalesce into a cohesive, commercially viable micro-community, they remain a worthy target for entrepreneurship. A prime example: Bambu Lab entered the already-crowded 3D printer market in 2020—and succeeded.
At this point, external skepticism becomes inevitable. If no one questions your direction, it implies they see profit potential—and begs the question: Why aren’t they doing it themselves? Thus, nearly everyone you engage with—whether sincerely or insincerely, kindly or maliciously—will likely challenge your venture. They’ll ask: “Does this really generate revenue?” or “Didn’t Company X already launch something similar? Why duplicate it?”
If you’re already stressed by unmet, demanding requests from seed users—or demoralized by internal team conflicts—you may emotionally unravel—or even abandon entrepreneurship—upon facing a single fundamental question.
After all, no one ever questioned your perfect math score: “What’s the use of scoring so high?” But entrepreneurship demands constant readiness to face skepticism, offense, or even slander—from anyone, anywhere. Such criticism may be well-intentioned—or hostile. Don’t waste energy guessing others’ motives. If you lack this capacity, entrepreneurship demands courage to risk failure—and stake everything on your conviction. Otherwise, poor luck will likely lead to failure.
Hurdle 5: Internal Team Distrust
Suppose you’re not only exceptionally capable—but also forged an ironclad resilience and boundless courage through extraordinary life experiences. You withstand relentless pressure: looming assignment deadlines, approaching exam weeks, teammates’ occasional insults and doubts, and users constantly challenging your design and technical competence. Congratulations—you’ve conquered the prior hurdle. Welcome to the next.
Assume neither you nor your teammates are “prodigies”—nor did you grow up basking in parental, teacher, or peer validation. You possess fierce determination rooted in a deep desire for societal recognition—born from lifelong scarcity of such validation. You weren’t the student delivering peace-themed speeches during weekly flag-raising ceremonies, nor the chemistry/physics olympiad winner celebrated campus-wide. You simply excelled at exams—and gained admission to a reputable university—where you met peers who claim shared aspirations but have zero product-building experience.
Your circumstances mirror each other: lacking validation, you collectively channel this hunger into fierce drive to prove yourselves to the world. This drive propelled your team past the first four hurdles—bringing you here.
But everything carries a cost. Your lack of validation, competitive drive, and craving for recognition fuel your determination—yet simultaneously sow seeds of suspicion.
Team roles are clearly divided: one handles product design, another algorithms, and a third operations/backend/DevOps. Yet users only know the product designer. When the product succeeds, praise goes solely to the designer. When problems arise, blame falls on the algorithm and backend developers. Prolonged remote collaboration—with scarce offline interaction—gradually plants distrust within the team.
The technical members think: “You get credit for good design—but I take the heat when things break.” This breeds resentment. Their initial motivation stemmed partly from desire for reward and societal recognition. Now, however, they remain invisible to users—fostering growing discontent toward the product designer.
The product designer feels exhausted—constantly fielding user complaints. Occasionally praised, but mostly criticized and dismissed. Steering the product’s strategic direction amid waves of feedback is tough enough—but adding features invites betrayal from teammates: “This won’t work,” “That button can’t be added.” Powerless and frustrated, they quietly nurture anger toward technical colleagues.
Finally, tensions explode. A minor feature-launch user complaint triggers mutual accusations—releasing six months of pent-up grievances—ending in team dissolution and product collapse.
Hurdle 6: Inability to Implement Compliant Payment Systems
Suppose you’re not only intellectually brilliant and guided by wise mentors—but also possess extraordinary resilience and observational acuity. You anticipate all prior pitfalls and implement robust countermeasures. Your team operates smoothly within a discreet, low-profile niche—unnoticed by outsiders—progressing steadily with harmonious team dynamics.
Finally, your product proves viable at small scale. You plan monetization—designing pricing tiers. Leveraging deep pricing expertise, you craft a user-satisfying structure. Next: integrating payment gateways. You assume this is trivial—“a few clicks away.” But you discover: both WeChat Pay and Alipay require formal company registration, valid business licenses—and for platform-type products, an EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) license. Researching company registration reveals daunting complexity: mandatory initial capital injection, multi-year paid-in capital requirements, and—for some licenses—proof of three months’ social insurance contributions by the company.
Suppose you’re resourceful enough to arrange social insurance payments for yourselves. Congratulations—you’ve forfeited your “fresh graduate” status. You’ll be excluded from standard campus recruitment—and hope your classmates don’t physically assault you over this.
And due to student pride, you refuse “fourth-party” payment channels offering 10–20% service fees—sourced via dubious means. After deliberation, you terminate the venture: a business that can’t even receive money cannot possibly sustain itself.
Hurdle 7: Incompetence in Promotion and Operations
Suppose you encounter a miraculously influential benefactor—or reside in Hangzhou or Shenzhen, where supportive local governments swiftly resolve this hurdle. You finally secure your first substantial revenue from early users—and rejoice, believing yourselves the next Lei Jun or Steve Jobs.
You earnestly produce promotional videos across platforms, mimicking the visual flair of legendary tech product ads—spending immense time crafting a “decent-looking” promo video. You’re convinced everyone will experience the same “mental climax” you felt watching those ads—and rush to adopt your product, catapulting you to overnight fame as the next Jobs. You even spend ¥500 on paid traffic.
The next morning, checking your phone, you discover your video is suppressed—with a cold, robotic system notification: “Content Non-Compliant.” Suppressing laughter from others, you frantically consult multiple groups—and learn: external links in video descriptions violate rules; they must instead appear in pinned comments. You’re unfamiliar with these unwritten internet “rules”—you’ve only ever scrolled comedic clips on this platform.
You never noticed how those “sponsorship videos” you previously scorned actually placed links.
You also learn new accounts receive bonus organic traffic for their first few videos—and paid traffic cannibalizes this allocation.
You discover recommendation algorithms and traffic distribution mechanisms differ wildly across platforms—and their rules vary: some ban external links outright; others permit them under strict conditions.
You begin studying operational fundamentals: learning DAU (Daily Active Users) and CTR (Click-Through Rate); understanding the distinction between private-domain and public-domain traffic; learning to estimate platform algorithms accurately—and leveraging algorithm logic, target-user demographics, peak activity times, and interest profiles for precise ad targeting. You learn to instantly distinguish paid-traffic videos/articles from organically viral hits. You grasp that many successful products thrive not because they’re technically superior—but due to synergistic excellence in product quality, promotion, and after-sales support. You learn about “matrix accounts” and “product matrices.”
Of course, you might fail at any of these steps—especially as a beginner without personal IP or private-domain assets.
So you watch your product’s DAU stagnate perpetually at 500—with a sub-10% paid conversion rate. Amid plummeting team morale, you shutter the project—but gain invaluable lessons. You’re no longer naïve or narrow-minded like peers fixated solely on GPA.
You’ve paid an expensive tuition fee—for one profound truth:
- A product manager makes a product usable;
- An engineer makes a product functional;
- An operations specialist makes a product used.
Hurdle 8: Taking Every User Comment at Face Value
Alright—suppose you’re the ultra-lucky “Roguelike game” player who clears the entire game on the first try. Your team suddenly welcomes a woman with rich operational experience (based on my personal observation, women often excel more in this domain than men). She’s energetic, intimately familiar with core social-platform mechanics and content boundaries, adept at coordinating线上线下 (online/offline) resources and partnerships—and skillfully shields your team from several “internet troublemakers.” Your team stabilizes and enters the product’s viral-growth phase.
Your user base swells daily—receiving 999 user feedback messages. This experienced colleague successfully steers your large community away from common pitfalls (e.g., turning into “course-selling groups,” “dead groups,” or “political rant groups”). Feedback you once treasured like gold now arrives in four-digit daily volumes—but you retain your humble, unconditional commitment to fulfilling every user request.And so your software grows ever larger, and the entry points for various features become increasingly complex. Users even begin arguing with one another in group chats, as their conflicting needs cannot all be satisfied. Eventually, you can’t even recall which specific incident triggered the rapid decline in your product’s reputation—leaving behind only a handful of eccentric users. Ultimately, demoralized and exhausted, you’re forced to disband your team.
Only during your post-mortem analysis do you realize a critical truth: you are the true drivers of this project. Without Steve Jobs, Apple would never have become Apple. A product cannot go far without its own distinct personality and aesthetic sensibility—and user needs are not only diverse but often mutually contradictory; it is impossible to satisfy them all.
They say, “Blindly believing everything written in books is worse than reading no books at all.” So too is it with users’ feedback—why should it be any different?
This expensive tuition fee teaches you another unforgettable lesson: an outstanding entrepreneur, when confronted with others’ feedback, must listen much and act little.
Obstacle 9. Inadequate On-Call Response
Suppose you somehow gain foresight and read this article ahead of time—thereby avoiding all the prior pitfalls. You enjoy harmonious relations with your users, and your product’s monthly revenue climbs steadily.
But once your Daily Active Users (DAU) reach a certain threshold, your system suddenly begins exhibiting frequent, varied bugs—some severe enough to impede normal usage.
You panic—because you know that even a single day of downtime means losing users. Yet you’re just an ordinary student—not a programming master who can glance at an error log and instantly pinpoint the root cause, fix it within ten seconds, deploy the patch rapidly using a robust, battle-tested disaster-recovery system, and eliminate every possible failure mode. You lack all that knowledge—because you’re still a student, and such expertise comes only from years of hands-on experience.
AI can’t help you either—you don’t even know how to articulate your problem clearly enough to prompt AI effectively: how to structure your query in natural language, preserve all essential context and preconditions, ask precisely what you need, verify that AI’s response isn’t nonsense, and correctly implement the solution. You simply lack the domain insight required.
Let’s assume, against all odds, your AI’s “machine spirit” is especially pleased that day—and your prompt happens to hit the bullseye, enabling AI to resolve the issue successfully. From then on, however, you grow perpetually anxious: constantly monitoring your users’ group chat on your phone, scanning for bug reports. Each time one appears, you rush to pull out your laptop to debug and fix it—naively hoping the “Omnissiah,” deity of machines, will again smile upon you. You fix the bug—but at the cost of introducing four new ones. Eventually, you patch all known bugs—though now every API call slows down by 1,000 milliseconds. You shrug it off, thinking, “No big deal.” And thus, bit by bit, the “shit mountain” grows.
By Year Two, your user base has grown tenfold—and system issues multiply relentlessly. One day, even AI fails you completely. Desperate, you seek out seasoned large-model infrastructure engineers—but receive no replies. Your product collapses under mounting performance failures—the “point of no return”—and floods of user complaints follow. Soon, competitors launch near-identical products, yet with superior interaction performance, aesthetics, and polish. Users begin migrating away. Within less than two years, you’re forced to abandon the project and dissolve your team.
At that moment, two realizations strike you:
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You finally understand why your balding senior programmer classmate always carries a backpack whenever he meets you for dinner.
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You recall a game you played for years—suddenly, one day its servers crashed. It took four hours to restore service. You raged online because those four hours robbed you of rare, precious gameplay time. Now you realize: they fixed it in just four hours! Truly professional engineers. And you also grasp, viscerally, just how torturous those four hours were—for users’ patience and trust.
Obstacle 10. Unequal Profit Sharing
Suppose you possess precognitive abilities and have already read this article—and further, that you’ve earned the favor of the Omnissiah: your computer remains perpetually blessed with machine-spirit grace. Through divine intervention, the Omnissiah shields you from all structural system risks and prevents the emergence of “shit-mountain” code. Your product thrives; users coexist peacefully; revenue surges.
Along the way, as your project expands its scope and capabilities, additional members join—until year-end arrives. To honor your commitments, you convene everyone for a meeting to discuss profit distribution.
You’re a man of integrity: as the project’s founder, you’ve shouldered the heaviest workload. Yet to avoid even minor proportional discrepancies sowing discord among teammates, you propose splitting the final income equally. Your proposal is immediately opposed by your earliest comrade—the very first person who joined your cause. The newest members, naturally, accept it with enthusiasm.
After much persuasion, everyone reluctantly agrees. But shortly after receiving their payouts—net of a 20% dividend tax—your founding comrades abruptly resign and leave the team. With your core engineer and algorithm designer gone, your product can no longer keep pace with feature updates or handle on-call incidents. Before long, you find yourself unable to maintain or support the project alone. You abandon it. Meanwhile, your former comrades build an identical product from scratch—applying the lessons they learned while working with you—and successfully launch and operate it independently. You lack even basic legal knowledge, so suing them is impossible—and to save money, you never drafted a legally binding contract covering intellectual property rights for your product.
In utter desolation, you quietly wander to a barbecue stall beside campus, scrolling through your phone while eating skewers. You stumble upon an X News article about DJI’s founder—and burst into laughter after reading only the first paragraph. You realize his first major failure stemmed from exactly this same situation.
Conclusion
Of course, many other pitfalls exist—but here we’ve focused only on challenges typical for modest-scale products built by students. If you’re a “rich second generation” (born into wealth), or if your starting resources approximate those of a quasi-heir, then everything discussed above likely doesn’t apply to you. Likewise, if your product isn’t internet-, software-, or AI-related, these points won’t resonate either.
Other common failures—like flawed pricing strategies causing unexpected user attrition, or noncompliant early-stage products triggering external reports and sudden collapse—are too numerous to list exhaustively. Feel free to supplement them in the comments.
Scaling up introduces further crises: PR disasters, copyright infringement, product cloning, and more. Moreover, depending on whether your product targets B2B, B2C, or even B2D markets, entirely different sets of challenges arise. For simplicity’s sake, we haven’t differentiated between these user-segment dynamics here—perhaps a topic for a future discussion.
I’m Jin Hui, a post-00s full-stack engineer. For more technical deep-dives and product analyses, feel free to subscribe to my channel.
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