做产品是先看到顾客有需求，还是看到别人很好赚？

Three weeks ago a mall promoter in the Klang Valley offered me mooncakes at buy four get two, even buy four get four, well before Mid-Autumn. Mooncakes look like great business: a short season, high prices, gifting demand. Guangzhou Restaurant sold about RMB1.652 billion of mooncakes in 2025, over 30% of revenue, at more than 53% gross margin. I've heard of friends with spare cash in a bad economy starting a mooncake brand, finding an OEM, making packaging, running ads, and losing money. Entering because others profit isn't wrong; the question is why customers need one more of you. Optimism spreads upstream too: brands order, factories expand, but factory orders aren't consumer sales and can turn into brand inventory. The same happened with poon choi for Chinese New Year: made-to-order is safer than freezing big batches and hunting for buyers. Starting from customers, you ask whether mooncakes are too sweet, boxes too big, gifts fairly priced. Starting from envy, you ask about cost, OEMs and ad budgets, but not why anyone should buy yours. A family needing two boxes won't need twenty because there are 200 brands; everyone just spends more fighting over the same orders. After the festival, the same mooncake is worth a fraction. My approach: find customers, take pre-orders, stock against real orders, and count profit after ads, commission, discounts and leftovers. If you spend more time studying others' profits than why customers buy, you end up chasing inventory.