Top Business Success Tips You Can Learn From Alibaba Founder

By Kibet Tobias

A lot has been said about success but people still want more. Every year, many authors write about how they went from grass to grace.

Don’t you wish you were a millionaire already? Of course, you do. But success won’t come by reading a lot about how someone else made it.

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Here is an inspiring story you can learn from:

Alibaba.com began as a small online retail platform founded in the early days of the internet as Chinese e-commerce but has now become the world’s largest retailer. Like any other verified retailer, Alibaba supply high quality products to Kenyan market at relatively cheaper price.

The retailer was founded by Jack Ma, a former English teacher from Hangzhou who wanted to create a platform where companies from the East and the West could come together and trade. Before becoming an employer, Jack Ma was a job seeker like most people.

1. Never give up

Jack Ma understands failures more than you do. He did not just fail once; he failed too many times, and people thought he was a loser.

He failed three times in middle school, he struggled to get a University degree, and he applied for a job 30 times but all his applications were rejected.

The more he got his applications rejected, the more he kept pressing on. When life made no sense, Jack didn’t have pity parties.

In an interview, Jack say he lost a chance to his close cousin just because he was not handsome as his cousin.

“My cousin and I waited for two hours in a long queue to be the waiter for the four star hotel in my city, on a very hot day.

“My cousin’s score was much lower than mine, but he was accepted and I was rejected!” he says.

There was a time when he couldn’t even get a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC).

He was a teacher before he went into business, and has never forgotten one thing from that life – that a teacher always wants his students to be more successful than they are. Today, he advises.

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In 2003, he and his staff went home to look for products to list for sale. Unfortunately they lacked what to sell on the online marketplace – reason? They were too poor.

“Everybody couldn’t find four things at home we could sell because we were too poor. So we gathered 21 products, we listed on the website, we waited for three days, nobody came to buy,” he recalled.

2. Make your business ideas reality

Before he started his company, Jack recounts how he spent two hours explaining his idea for an internet business to 24 friends in his apartment, and how 23 of them told him to forget it.

Jack slept on the idea, and upon waking, decided he still wanted to pursue that dream: “Most people have fancy ideas in the evening, but when they wake up in the morning, they go back to do the same job. We have to do something different.”

3. Endure hardship to reap rewards

Jack ended his interview with some words for people starting businesses: “As entrepreneurs, today is very difficult. Tomorrow is even more difficult.

“But the day after tomorrow is very beautiful. Most people die tomorrow evening.”

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“You have to work hard, you have to learn,you have to rely on your team.”

Alibaba now has more than 10 million merchants operating across multiple retail technological platforms, as well as 440 million active users.