I'm a tech creator Dai Wei, who went to the United States to start a business, was once again on the verge of failure.
On December 19, according to the "China Entrepreneur" magazine, the coffee chain about Time Coffee, opened by Dai Wei, the founder of Ofo, in the United States has suffered a business crisis, and only one store on Madison Avenue in New York is currently open, and the other four are all shown to be "permanently closed".
This means that Dai Wei's entrepreneurial project is likely to fail again.
According to people close to the project, About Time Coffee's current operations have been in trouble, the funding chain has encountered a bottleneck, and the entire project is on the verge of shutting down.
According to public reports, the project is the second project that Dai Wei started in the United States, the first project is a mobile power bank rental company, but in the end the project was not successful.
Judging from the projects started by Dai Wei, it is mainly to copy the commercial projects that have been successful in China, but due to market and other factors, these projects are destined to be difficult to succeed.
First of all, taking the mobile power project as an example, although many domestic mobile power projects are very good, they are not necessarily applicable to foreign countries, and the consumption habits of consumers in the United States are very different from those in our country, so from this point of view, it is naturally difficult to copy.
The second is the coffee project, Dai Wei's initial strategy was to focus on the layout of megacities with high population density on the East Coast of the United States, and because Luckin Coffee's project is in the front, the feasibility is high. Therefore, many entrepreneurs have set their sights on the coffee market.
Due to the low market penetration rate of our coffee, the market prospect is relatively broad, and the subsidy is large, it is easy to promote in the domestic market. However, the U.S. coffee market is saturated, and for U.S. consumers, their consumption habits and product dependence have been formed, so it is not wise to choose the coffee track.
Clearly, Dai Wei's About Time Coffee project confirms this point.
Judging from Dai Wei's entrepreneurial process, except for New York, the opening of stores in other big cities could not be pushed at all, so in the end, the location of the entire Dongmei was stopped.
In terms of financing, the About Time Coffee project has been funded by 40 million US dollars (about 2 yuan800 million yuan), raising more than $10 million in funds, including IDG, Zhen ** and Beijing Weili Capital, an early investor in ofo. Of course, for these angel investors, $10 million is not a relatively large amount, which is also in line with Xu Xiaoping's statement that "investment is investment".
It is precisely because of ofo's entrepreneurial experience that Dai Wei himself is a relatively successful entrepreneur in the eyes of many investors, so some investors are still willing to continue to make some attempts on Dai Wei.
Kanjian Finance believes that Dai Wei, as an entrepreneur, does have experience in doing big projects, but the practice of copying the successful domestic model to start a business is obviously not feasible.
For example, the About Time Coffee project, which focuses on innovative products such as pearl coffee and taro coffee, is still aimed at young people, and its entrepreneurial ideas are basically the same as domestic entrepreneurship, but most of the payment methods in the United States are cash and credit cards, which is destined to make the Internet model difficult to work.
From this perspective, the failure of Dai Wei's entrepreneurial project is reasonable. Of course, if the project continues to be a business in China, the chances of success may be higher, because Lu Zhengyao's Cudi Coffee is doing well at the moment.
Kanjian Finance believes that because of the failure of the ofo project, there are still more than 16 million users' deposits that have not been refunded so far, which has led to Dai Wei's credit in China has gone bankrupt, and he himself has been on the limit list, if he wants to solve his own problems, he must first deal with the user's deposit problem.
However, with Dai Wei's current ability, it is obvious that there is little hope of solving the problem of ofo's arrears of user deposits. Of course, if he doesn't solve this problem, this stain will always follow him, which also means that it is difficult for him to start a business in China or carry out other business operations. Of course, for Dai Wei, he may not return to China in a short time, and his tossing will not stop.