I recently read Dan Niu’s First Time in Business (《第一次做生意》), an introductory book on entrepreneurship and management written for ordinary people. Unlike all those “let me teach you how to get rich” chicken-soup books out there, this one feels more like a bucket of cold water — the author uses a large number of real cases to tell you: starting a business isn’t an escape route from the workplace, it’s a discipline that requires clear-eyed awareness.
The book is divided into three parts — entrepreneurship, management, and operations — with no abstruse theory, just hard-won experience written in blood and tears. Below are the core viewpoints that resonated with me most after finishing it.
1. The Entrepreneurship Part: Count Your Pennies First, Then Find the Right People, and Only Then Talk About Dreams
1. Entrepreneurship ≠ Innovation — Ordinary People Shouldn’t Chase Trends
There’s a line in the book that impressed me deeply: “Don’t look for a market in the blank spaces; look for blank spaces within the market.”
Dan Niu’s view is straightforward: creating demand is the behavior of a rare few geniuses. For ordinary people, starting a business is itself just a job. Having no competition isn’t necessarily a good thing — it may mean there’s no market. Having competition, on the other hand, actually shows that there’s room for development. Rather than chasing “unprecedented” innovation, it’s better to find your own differentiated position within an already-validated market.
This reminds me of the case in the book about the “self-following suitcase” — sounds cool, but the price was high and the safety risks were big, so consumers scratched the itch once and gave up. That’s a classic “itch point”: you can live without scratching it. Only a real “pain point” makes people act and makes them willing to open their wallets.
2. Before You Quit to Start a Business, Count the Opportunity Cost
There’s a case in the book: a woman quit her job to start a business and made 200,000 a year, but when she worked at a company she made 500,000 a year. On the surface she succeeded as an entrepreneur, but in reality the opportunity cost was staggering.
The decision framework Dan Niu offers is very practical — ask yourself three questions:
- Am I leaving the company because of a “problem” or because of an “opportunity”?
- If I decide to go for it, can I do it without hesitation and without being timid?
- Have I done a financial projection and know where the break-even point is?
“If you go ahead knowing full well that the odds of success are so low as to be almost impossible, that’s not called entrepreneurship — that’s called gambling.”
3. Co-Founding a Business: Partnering Is Easy, Cooperating Is Hard
This part is brutally real. Dan Niu says that to co-found a business you need to find people who “share the same values, have complementary abilities, don’t put too much weight on interests, and aren’t anxious about gains and losses” — a probability so low you don’t even need a calculator.
What stings even more: friends can give without counting the cost, but business always insists on conditional exchange. Many people partner up just because “he’s a good person,” only to end up doing all the work themselves while splitting the money down the middle.
The “Four Quadrants of Partnership” the book lays out is very practical: What do I need? What can I give? What do you need? What can you give? Only when “what I need happens to be what you can give, and what I can give happens to be what you need” can a partnership last.
2. The Management Part: Picking the Right People Matters More Than Training Them
1. You’re Not Recruiting — You’re “Selling a Position”
This chapter’s viewpoint is very counterintuitive. Dan Niu says recruiting is actually just like sales — you’re not picking people, you’re “selling” the position to the right people.
Many bosses complain they can’t recruit, but the real reason is that they only know how to say “what I want,” not “what I can give you.” And behind a job seeker’s surface expectations (like two-day weekends or salary) often hides a deeper need — a sense of security, a sense of belonging, a sense of achievement. Understanding the other person through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is how you match precisely.
The book mentions a cruel truth: “Excellence isn’t cultivated — the person was already excellent to begin with; the company merely acts as a catalyst.” So rather than spending enormous effort trying to reshape people, it’s better to set the bar right at the start.
2. Management Is About Managing Matters, Not Managing People
Many people think management means “managing people.” Dan Niu believes this is the biggest misconception. Because of differences in education, personality, and cognition, “people” are almost impossible to manage.
Real management works by establishing systems and standards so that selfish, greedy, lazy people have no opportunity to make mistakes — rather than hoping they’ll become altruistic and great.
He also distinguishes between P-type people (professional, who create direct value) and M-type people (managerial, who help the team form value). “Don’t pick managers from among your top salespeople” — people who perform well are often only good at doing the work themselves, not necessarily good at getting others to do it.
3. Never Befriend Your Employees
This chapter’s title is grating, but the logic is clear. We live in two worlds at once:
- Social norms: emotion-driven, friendly, with fuzzy boundaries
- Market norms: interest-driven, cold, with clear black and white
Mixing these two norms inside a company leads to disastrous consequences: you get too close to a subordinate privately, so when they make a mistake you can’t bring yourself to say anything; you want to fire them, but you agonize over “will this hurt our friendship?” “Every business decision should be made from a business standpoint, and shouldn’t be mixed up with too many emotional factors.”
4. Don’t Take Your Employees’ “Monkeys” Onto Your Own Back
This metaphor is so vivid. The “monkey” means responsibility. Many bosses, despite their managerial titles, spend every day doing their employees’ work, exhausting themselves while their subordinates have nothing to do.
The solution is: make clear what a subordinate’s responsibility is. The preparation before the work, the adjustments during the work, and the summary after the work — all of these should be the subordinate’s “monkey.” The superior’s role is that of a guide, not a decision-maker and executor.
“As long as the consequences stay within a range the company can bear, sometimes you have to watch with your own eyes as your subordinate steps into a pit — otherwise the other person won’t grow.”
3. The Operations Part: Evolving from Survival to Strategy
1. Profit = Squeezing Cost from Upstream, Seeking Value from Downstream
When everyone is shouting “competition in the industry is white-hot, costs can’t be cut any further,” Dan Niu asks back: have you actually spent any effort thinking about what your customers truly need?
The book uses a packaging-optimization case to illustrate: many times the cost hasn’t really hit a ceiling — the effort just hasn’t been aimed at the right place. “Only quality that the market needs is real quality; only quality that the market is willing and able to pay for is real quality. Quality that the market doesn’t accept isn’t ‘good quality’ — it’s ‘excess quality.’”
2. Strategy Solves the Problem of “Tomorrow”
Many small and micro enterprises have no strategy; the boss himself doesn’t know what he’s going to do over the next few years. As a result the team is demoralized and cohesion is weak — because employees can’t see the future.
Dan Niu says: the whole point of strategy’s existence is to solve the problems that “tomorrow” might bring. It contains three kinds of goals:
- Performance goals: how much sales to complete this year
- Capability goals: what capabilities the enterprise should possess next year
- Social-contribution goals: the enterprise’s value to society
Most people only set performance goals and never set capability goals. But if success can’t be replicated, it will forever remain mere “individual heroism,” and the enterprise can’t grow big.
3. Find the Intersection of “Passion × Strength × Profit × Social Value”
At the end of the book, Dan Niu shares the thing he spent the first ten years of his entrepreneurial life searching for: something that is at once a passion, a strength, and — because it brings direct value to others and to society — a way to make money.
None of these four dimensions can be missing:
- Without passion, you can’t survive the low points
- Without strength, you can’t out-compete others
- Without profit, you can’t stay alive
- Without social value, you can’t go far
Closing Words
First Time in Business is not a “success-ology” book — it’s a “guide to avoiding pits.” Dan Niu doesn’t tell you how to get filthy rich; he tells you which places are easy to step on landmines and which mindsets need correcting.
For me, the biggest takeaway is clear-headedness: starting a business isn’t an impulsive romance — it’s a long campaign of counting pennies, reading people, and building systems. If you’re also considering starting a business, or you’re already on the entrepreneurial road, I’d suggest reading this book — at the very least, it can help you step into a few fewer pits.
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