According to data disclosed by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in April this year, there are currently more than 11 million people who have returned to their hometowns to start businesses and innovate.
At the beginning of this year, a survey by this newspaper also showed that 56.1% of the interviewed young people thought about returning home, and 12.1% of the interviewed young people were already preparing for returning home.
However, starting a business has never been easy. How are young people returning home doing?
What problems did they encounter on the road to entrepreneurship?
And how to break out of their own world in their hometown?
From some samples of entrepreneurs in small towns, we may be able to see the answer.
The turning point of the peak opens a new way for the sales of agricultural products
Shi Zhengwei, whose hometown is Tushi Town, Youyang Tujia and Miao Autonomous County, Chongqing City, is only in his 30s, but he has already experienced wind and rain.
When he received the university admission letter that year, his father who was working outside was accidentally injured, and his family owed 80,000 yuan in debt for medical treatment.
In order to alleviate the difficulties at home, Shi Zhengwei has been working part-time during college, and has started express delivery business since 2008.
I thought that life would go up all the way, but who would have thought that in 2010, the express delivery business encountered trouble again.
At the end of that year, roads were blocked by heavy snow, and a batch of goods to Yunnan was delayed for more than two months.
The sender took Shi Zhengwei to court and demanded compensation of 500,000 yuan in damages.
In order to solve the problem, he took the initiative to find the boss of the shipping company to plead guilty and expressed his willingness to compensate, but because he was unable to compensate, he had to issue an IOU.
Seeing that it was not easy for the young man who just graduated from university to start a business, and his attitude was sincere, the company boss decided not to pursue his compensation, and offered to hire him to work in the company.
It was this coincidence that Shi Zhengwei joined an agricultural company that was engaged in Pueraria lobata. Since then, he has dealt with agricultural products and learned about agricultural industry management.
By 2015, Shi Zhengwei had been working in agriculture for 5 years, and he had an idea: There are so many agricultural products in You County, why not build a county-level platform and create a county-level brand?
In this way, the common people's agricultural products have standards and brands, so naturally they don't have to worry about selling them.
Just do it.
Shi Zhengwei registered the company back then and started to explore the road of digital operation. In 2018, he also developed a WeChat mini-program to display agricultural products entering the city.
Like the dilemma faced by many entrepreneurs in small towns, the beautiful vision of "driving Youyang's agricultural products to go global" quickly ran into reality.
How to connect small programs with logistics and data, how to integrate platforms and digital tools, and how to use these tools to push agricultural products to a larger market?
This made Shi Zhengwei difficult, "We don't have technical talents, and there are many obstacles to the use of digital tools. Everyone doesn't know how to do this..."
When young people start a business in their hometown, if they want to break the situation, they often cannot rely on their own strength.
Although he has experienced a lot of ups and downs, Shi Zhengwei, who can always turn around at critical moments, has encountered new opportunities.
In July this year, the Fengshou Haohuo project team, an important part of Tencent's public welfare undertakings, went to Youyang County, Chongqing for research. Under the recommendation of the local government, Shi Zhengwei's "Youhaohuo" became the co-creation partner of the plan.
"As early as the beginning of the year, 'Youhaohuo' had always wanted to test the waters of the Tencent platform, but did not find an opportunity." What surprised Shi Zhengwei was that Tencent took the initiative to contact him later.
The Harvest Goods Program is a special agricultural aid program jointly launched by Tencent’s Sustainable Social Value Business Unit and Tencent Advertising to help the digital transformation and upgrading of agricultural product brands under the guidance of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs since 2021.
The project aims at the three shortcomings of tools, talents, and products in the transformation and upgrading of agricultural product brands in poverty-stricken areas. It provides digital tools for counties, cultivates people who can use digital tools, and creates brands that can reflect the capabilities of digital tools in the short term. It also provides traffic support, brand Promotion, follow-up counseling.
As a result, the people, goods, and places of "Youhaohuo" have changed.
The project team helped "Youhaohuo" build digital tools to accumulate fans and explore business strategies.
"In the past, we only had a small program. Now we use the small program to add corporate WeChat, as well as video accounts, public accounts, communities, etc. The entire series of tools are superimposed and used to form an ecological chain and create a market-oriented platform. to sell products.” Once the tool is used, how to realize it is also a problem.
Shi Zhengwei mentioned that when using the video account for live broadcast, in addition to ordinary viewers, the staff of the project team will continue to observe each live broadcast, and then analyze the replay data with the employees of "Youhaohuo" to improve the live broadcast strategy and product operation direction , for continuous optimization.
In the process, the "Youhaohuo" team gradually figured out the operating rules of the video account carrying agricultural products. In just a few months, it has accumulated 100,000 fans. Views have reached more than 4,000, and nearly 1,000 yuan has been converted.
With such a breakthrough, Shi Zhengwei is now vigorously leading the "Youhaohuo" platform to sell agricultural products from mountainous areas such as Wuling Mountain, Daliang Mountain, and Wumeng Mountain, hoping to attract more entrepreneurs to join the army of digital operations. Solve the employment problem and lead the common people to increase their income and become rich.
Brand blessing native products break new ground
Although they are thousands of miles apart and do not know each other, Liu Shuxing, the founder of the "Serbia staple food" brand, like Shi Zhengwei, has also plunged into the field of agricultural products in Ulanchabucha Youqian Banner, Inner Mongolia.
In 2016, Liu Shuxing, who was originally engaged in the health care industry, came to Chayouqian Banner from Henan, and immediately fell in love with the local naked oats.
After some investigation, he chose to put down roots here.
After that, Liu Shuxing set up a project, invested, and built a factory in Ulanqab. The company signed an order with farmers to process and sell the purchased naked oats in a unified manner, forming a complete industrial chain.
With experience in the medical equipment industry, Liu Shuxing’s best business method is "conference sales". As the name suggests, this refers to attracting investment and promoting products through offline conferences. Applying this sales method to naked oats also It was a quick success.
However, after the outbreak of the epidemic, the business of offline stores has been hit hard, and the "sales" has been greatly reduced. The situation forces companies to open up online battlefields.
How to direct offline traffic to online?
And how to create a brand of naked oats, so that the product can go to a larger market?
Helping county-level agricultural product brands gain sustainable vitality is also the goal of the Tencent Public Welfare Harvest Goods Project.
During the Farmers’ Harvest Festival for two consecutive years, Tencent helped nearly 100 counties promote more than 200 types of agricultural products through live broadcast to help farmers and brand communication.
"Flavour World" is a gourmet documentary launched by Tencent Video, which is well-known.
In the Harvest Goods Program, the project team promoted several brands such as "Serbia staple food naked oats" and "Qikou wharf yellow millet" to be selected as "excellent flavors".
During the training, Liu Shuxing's team also made up the lesson of social marketing, which improved the global management capabilities of entrepreneurs in small towns.
"For example, during the training process, the lecturer taught us how to do experience and how to do scene-based marketing. The production workshop is a scene, and the effect of live broadcasting from the anchor to the factory is very good. We can sell more than 1 million yuan in 3 days for one event. .”
As a result, naked oats have changed from "sellable" to "group sold".
Now, with the help of "group marketing", Liu Shuxing not only sells his own brand products, but also sells other agricultural products of Chayouqian Banner.
The most important thing in the surge of digital operation in rural areas is people
Compared with Shi Zhengwei and Liu Shuxing, the post-80s Ma Yongbo's choice of returning home seems to be more "all-or-nothing": He has worked in first-tier cities, worked in many Internet companies, and has an annual salary of one million. He is quite skilled in Internet and digital operations.
But at the beginning of 2020, because he was optimistic about digital operations in the county, he chose to start from scratch and start a business in the county.
After struggling in reality for two years, Ma Yongbo came to Lin County, Shanxi Province in April this year at the invitation of his friends.
Here, Ma Yongbo started his two "encounters".
The first time is to meet "things".
When he arrived in Linxian County, after more than a month of research, Ma Yongbo, who had a sharp eye, found that the local people liked to eat a kind of rice dumplings with red dates and yellow rice, and the sellers often fought price wars.
Just as the Dragon Boat Festival is approaching, Ma Yongbo and his partners are going to start a round of testing the water with this rice dumpling.
They found a new way to establish a new positioning for the zongzi, took a famous name, made an exquisite design, and only sold it on the Internet. With the operation of a set of digital means, the zongzi sold from one order a day to more than 1 million yuan in sales. Ma Yongbo became famous in one fell swoop in Lin County.
Since then, Ma Yongbo and several other partners have created the "Lime Smart Selection" platform to help increase the sales and popularity of local agricultural products in Lin County.
The other time was meeting "people".
Three months before Ma Yongbo arrived in Lin County, Lu Peng, director of the Economic and Technological Sociology Research Office of the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, came to Lin County to serve as the deputy county magistrate.
As a scholar, he set himself a goal before going to Lin County: to start a social value practice of making and sharing cakes.
Under his leadership, Linxian County and the "Harvest Goods Project" cooperated hand in hand to use external forces to revitalize the stock of county society and stir up the wave of rural digital operations in Linxian County.
Lu Peng believes that "talent is the sharp hammer that breaks the ice of the county economy", and the most important thing for the development of the county economy is people.
Ma Yongbo is exactly the "spray" attracted by this wave. His big city experience and digital marketing ability have found a place to be used in Lin County.
The stage set up by Fengshouhaowu and Linxian County, besides Ma Yongbo, also gathered more small-town entrepreneurs: Linxian’s famous entrepreneurial young man who returned to his hometown and "mushroom fan" Guo Kaijia, Ren Yuchao, who returned from Beijing to start a business selling eggs, etc. .
There is a platform, and there is no shortage of touching stories about returning home. "Lime Smart Selection" wants to take the path of bringing goods with content, but in the early stage, due to the limitation of content dimensions and the difficult start-up stage, the carefully crafted story content The audience is small.
In July this year, the Fengshou Haowu project team went to Linxian County, Shanxi Province for investigation. Under the recommendation of the local government, the project team learned about the current situation of these enthusiastic entrepreneurial youths in Linxian County, and together they discussed the idea of "telling stories with IP" to bring content The idea of jointly cultivated Liu Liqiang, a local young man who suffers from leg disabilities but is self-improving and entrepreneurial, as an IP figure.
The results of the pilot project are beginning to show. The "Lime Smart Selection" video account has achieved a jump in the initial stage, and the number of attention has increased significantly. The more users see and buy.
County-level agricultural products need to break the circle, digital tools are sharp weapons
With the proposal of the national common prosperity strategy, the advancement of the rural revitalization strategy, and the extension of the digital economy to the countryside, more and more young people choose to return to their hometowns to start businesses or find employment.
There is a huge digital gap between urban and rural areas, and the soil is different. There is no mature methodology for returning home to start a business or get a job. It requires more aggressiveness and the help of all parties.
Xiao Liming, vice president of sustainable social value at Tencent, expressed his original intention for the joint launch of the "Harvest and Good Things Project", "We should take the cultivation of rural digital management talents as the core focus, and explore how to keep Tencent's tools, capabilities, and brands in counties and Entrepreneurial young people returning to their hometowns will help county-level agricultural product brands gain sustainable vitality in a sustainable way."
In order to help the cultivation of rural talents, the project team cooperated with the local government to launch a global management ability training plan for entrepreneurs in small towns: they organized internal and external lecturers to develop practical and excellent small courses, focusing on video accounts, public accounts, corporate WeChat, private domains, etc. The theory and practice of operation and platform rules are mainly explained; in addition to live lectures, after-class test questions are specially developed to enhance students' understanding of key course content; Students who do business with Tencent digital tools also provide continuous learning resource support and establish continuous community guidance.
The purpose of this combination is to enable entrepreneurs in small towns to truly grasp the ability to use digital tools, so that even in small towns, they can have a long-term vision.
It is reported that the program officially started on November 10 and lasted until the end of December. Nearly 1,900 entrepreneurial youths from 38 counties in poverty-stricken areas participated in the online training; The local government of the Banner and local returnee entrepreneurial youths jointly built the "Agricultural Assistance Base" and trained a local team that can successfully use digital tools.
Over the past year, young people like Shi Zhengwei, Ma Yongbo, and Liu Shuxing have become leaders in rural digital operations, leading the growth of more possibilities in the county's digital soil.
"In the future, urban and rural areas will be fully integrated, and young people can freely choose their preferred working status and lifestyle between urban and rural areas. We look forward to the joint efforts of Tencent Charity and all sectors of society to help more young people returning to their hometowns succeed in entrepreneurship and help more A steady stream of agricultural products from the counties of the county have come out of the mountains, driving farmers to achieve more income!" Xiao Liming said.
This is also the expectation of more returning entrepreneurs.
Source: China Youth Daily