Real-life story: The inspiring journey of a delivery driver, from earning 300 yuan a month to achieving entrepreneurial success.

 That winter, the rain fell in fine droplets, hitting the windshield of his electric scooter like countless tiny days. Li Ming had only recently arrived in the city, living in a cramped shared apartment, with only an old mobile phone and a second-hand electric scooter to his name. The early days of delivering food were tough: low platform subsidies, inconsistent orders, sometimes earning only 300 yuan a month. From that 300 yuan, he still had to squeeze out money for transportation, phone bills, and a few hundred yuan to send home to his family. Life felt like a narrow zipper, always tight and suffocating.

He had considered giving up. But when he thought of his elderly mother at the dinner table in the countryside, wiping away tears and saying, "It's not easy for you out there," he gritted his teeth and persevered. Day after day, he learned the rules of the game from delivery routes, peak order times, and the speed of food preparation at different restaurants. He began to observe carefully: which roads were prone to traffic jams, which restaurants had consistent order volumes, and which customers placed orders frequently. Gradually, he refined his time management down to the average time spent per kilometer and per order.

The turning point came from a small detail. One rainy night, he casually put an old woman's medicine in his delivery bag and helped her open the door. The old woman wrote a thank-you note and recommended his phone number to her neighbors. This word-of-mouth reputation transformed him from an "ordinary rider" on the platform to a familiar and reliable person in the community. Regular customers would leave messages in advance, willing to pay extra for a cup of hot tea; some restaurants would prioritize preparing and packaging orders for him; some customers liked his posts on social media, becoming his first batch of promoters.

Once, a small noodle shop nearby was overwhelmed with orders, and the owner was desperately looking for someone to help manage deliveries. Li Ming offered to try a one-week trial run, handling "order matching + delivery + follow-up" tasks for the shop. After that week, the owner gave him a small reward, and more importantly, they established a long-term partnership. Li Ming replicated this cooperation model with other businesses, gradually building his business into a small-scale "errand-running + food delivery" service. His income steadily increased, and he hired two former fellow delivery riders to help, integrating more orders into his routes.

The real turning point in his entrepreneurial journey came when he decided to formalize this service. He used his savings and small loans to rent a small warehouse-style kitchen of just over ten square meters and partnered with several businesses to set up a "cloud kitchen"—a food processing and centralized distribution center specifically designed for food delivery. Through centralized purchasing, standardized dishes, and professional delivery, he lowered costs while ensuring speed and quality. Initially, there were only dozens of orders, but after six months, the number of orders from this small kitchen had increased several times over. He began to learn how to use data analysis to determine peak hours, the best packaging methods, and rider scheduling algorithms, making the entire operation smoother and more efficient.

Entrepreneurship was not a smooth ride. Regulatory issues, taxes, personnel management, and cash flow problems followed one after another. Li Ming learned to leverage social resources: attending industry conferences, networking with wholesalers in the supply chain, platform technicians, and even finding a friend in finance to help standardize his financial statements. Most importantly, he always maintained sensitivity to frontline users: even as the company expanded, he would personally listen to feedback from customers and delivery riders, making adjustments promptly.

A few years later, the delivery driver who once earned only 300 yuan a month had transformed his small kitchen into several branches and a delivery team of over thirty people. He invested part of his profits in employee training, vehicle purchases, and information system upgrades, providing more ordinary delivery riders like himself with stable jobs and opportunities for advancement. He didn't boast about how he became rich overnight, but instead embodied his growth in every detail: strict cost control, dedication to service quality, and respect and reward for his employees.

Li Ming's success story is not accidental, but the result of countless rainy nights and days of hard work. Starting from a monthly income of 300 yuan, he used his observational skills, resilience, and a touch of business acumen to connect scattered opportunities into a stable business. His story reminds us that the difficulties of the lower class can become a training ground for willpower, where diligence and learning go hand in hand, and kindness and professionalism are equally important, ultimately leading to a new world in seemingly insignificant positions. For many, success is not a dazzling myth, but a pragmatic process of doing every order well and using every penny wisely. It is these seemingly ordinary efforts that transformed Li Ming from a delivery driver in the rain to an entrepreneur who can provide opportunities for others.