Lei Jun's Startup Masterclass · 5 / 14

The Internet Seven-Word Mantra

"The internet is actually a mindset — a way of doing things. That way can be summed up in seven words (four concepts): Focus, Excellence, Word-of-Mouth, Speed." Lei Jun says anyone who truly internalizes these seven words becomes unstoppable. The scary part: you have to actually live them.

Focus · Excellence · Word-of-Mouth · SpeedOne phone a year by design10+ changes on Xiaomi 1SMarketing is a false premise
Great Products Speak for Themselves
"You must always ask yourself: how can I make a great product? A great product speaks for itself." Let the product persuade your customers, then let your customers persuade others. Lei Jun distilled this cycle into the Internet Seven-Word Mantra — not a marketing trick, but a way of working.
Interactive Demo 1 · The Seven Words, One by One

Everyone has heard these four concepts. The hard part is knowing how far you have to go before it actually counts. Click each word to see Lei Jun's benchmark.

Interactive Demo 2 · Spot the Differences on Xiaomi 1S

Xiaomi 1S could have just "cut the price of Xiaomi 1 to ¥1,999 and called it a day." But Lei Jun ended up changing over a dozen things — every single one. Tap the hotspots on the phone to discover the changes almost no one noticed.

This is a Xiaomi 1S
Four hidden changes on the body
Tap them one by one
Found: 0 / 4

Headphone jack · interior painted black

The interior of Xiaomi 1's headphone jack was visibly bare. "How many phones care whether the inside of the headphone jack looks good? At least I noticed." So he fixed it.

Navigation keys · switched to discrete buttons

The buttons below the screen were redesigned as discrete, independent keys. The original phone had some early mistakes — 1S was the chance to fix them one by one.

USB port · reshaped to a rectangle

The sole reason: it looked better. Users would almost never notice, but Lei Jun insisted on changing it anyway.

10+ other changes · every last one

"In the end I changed over a dozen things, every last one of them. I could have skipped all of this, right? But that's not my style."

The headphone-jack change — nobody noticed. But Lei Jun's conclusion: "If you've put in the effort on a hundred details, at least one or two of them will be felt by someone. That's what our effort is for." Excellence isn't about being seen in every detail; it's about being able to live with yourself.
Two Battles Where Speed Mattered

The Day Google Acquired Motorola

A launch event was scheduled for August 16th — the same day Google announced its Motorola acquisition. Lei Jun said his luck was uncanny: by pressing ahead with the Xiaomi phone launch, Xiaomi became the next day's headline, while the Google–Motorola deal dropped to second.

An All-Nighter to Counter JD.com's Price War

Xiaomi had carefully prepared a Xiaomi 2 launch when JD.com's founder suddenly sparked a price war. After sitting with it for hours, Lei Jun decided they should be "inexplicably delighted and fired up" too. He came up with a plan after 10 PM, asked his team if they could execute by 9 AM — they said yes. Many teammates headed back to the office and worked through the night. The price war lasted only half a day; he later joked he'd overreacted. But what if it had run for three days? Everyone watches the live scoreboard and compares prices. If you're not fast, you make no noise at all.

Marketing Is a False Premise
"Don't think about marketing for marketing's sake — marketing is a false premise. The essence of word-of-mouth is that you worked honestly and earnestly, used genuine materials and real effort to build something. I believe users can feel that." Lei Jun never claimed Xiaomi's phone was perfect — he knew it had many flaws. But when sincerity is pushed to its limit, someone will see it. In an era saturated with marketing hype, genuine quality becomes all the more valuable.
Product Manager's Perspective
Focus & Excellence · Bet on One Thing

For a solo product, the Seven-Word Mantra isn't empty inspiration — it's the optimal solution under resource constraints. You have one unit of time, and each of the four concepts points to the same truth: concentrate your limited energy on a single point.

  • Focus: Juggling five side projects simultaneously is the indie developer's version of the "product flood" strategy. "One phone a year is an act of confidence": cut four, make the one good enough to charge money for. That beats five half-finished products combined.
  • Excellence: Your "headphone jack" is the empty-state copy, the error message, the loading animation — details nobody demanded. Of a hundred efforts, one or two will get shared on social media. That's your free customer acquisition.
Word-of-Mouth & Speed · The Solo Advantage

Big companies can bet on probability through product floods. You can't. But your decision chain is just you — that's your only structural advantage over any large organization.

  • Word-of-Mouth: Without an ad budget, word-of-mouth is your only growth channel. "Marketing is a false premise" applies to you even more than it did to Xiaomi: ten promotional posts are worth less than one product improvement that makes users want to share it themselves.
  • Speed: Ship a feature the day a trend hits, fix user feedback overnight, and AI coding tools have compressed "an all-nighter" to two hours. Don't waste that advantage.
Lesson Takeaways
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The Internet Seven-Word Mantra: Focus, Excellence, Word-of-Mouth, Speed. The terrifying part is that you have to actually live them.

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What "doing it" actually looks like: Focus means one phone a year. Excellence means pushing until you're broken. Speed means rewriting a launch plan overnight.

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Word-of-Mouth doesn't need its own effort: it's the natural result of the first three.

Source: compiled from Lei Jun's public startup lectures