Tag: founder

SALES: Solve Your Client’s Problems, Not Sell Your Customer Products

14 July 2016
Founding A Startup is like Being Shipwrecked from Day One

This analogy helps if you’ve watched or read the Life of Pi.

Founding a startup is like being SHIPWRECKED from day one.

The minute you start you’re trying to survive, alongside a starving tiger no less.

The hyena & orang utan are perhaps the co-founders that bravely started that crazy journey with you.

The zebra, your trusting 1st investor, surely gets eaten at some point.

Getting funded, which gets all the sexy press, is like hitting a jackpot of flying fish — it just delays what could be the inevitability of a lonely death in the high seas.

But boy, it is indeed as exciting as seeing a luminescent pool of fish at night.

Being “successful” though, is finally discovering a bountiful island to get off your boat.

16 April 2016
Artisanship — A Pursuit of Excellence — Should Become the Goal for Singaporeans

Following the grand plan that the Prime Minister laid out in the 2013th edition of the National Day Rally, from the new Changi Airport “Jewel” project, to new housing and industry initiatives, one thing that Singaporeans are most concerned about is how they will play a part in this progress.

The Pursuit of Excellence is the Key to Our Relevance and Survival

My vision for how Singapore can march into the next few decades can be summarized into 1 word, “Artisanship“, which denotes a dedication to becoming the best and most skilled in something.

1. To have the best skills – from chefs, programmers, seamstresses, mixologists, scientists, architects, engineers, builders, performance artists, animators, illustrators, photographers, singers, writers, dancers. doctors, armed forces…
2. To have the highest service standards and pride in service (Read Post)
3. To develop social grace

The government, its agencies, and our booming tourist economy can only provide the infrastructure. We have the schools, we have the global companies setting up their Asian headquarters here. We have an unprecedented influx of tourists visiting our country.

But if we as a people do not guide our young to be the best in what they do, we will end up needing to import resources, becoming a population that can only consume but not produce.

Right now, we have a whole generation of Singaporeans angry at feeling “left behind”, but the biggest worry is that the generation-to-follow is one that believes in “working smart, not hard” without being particularly very skilled in a chosen field. There is also no substitute for diligence, for “blood and sweat”, to achieve what we want, to become a viable work force, to partake in the success of the nation.

So many of our young want to be a founder of a tech startup without being a good programmer or having ample business experience. So many want to be a restauranteur without being a good chef. So many want to be a designer without knowing how to sew. So many want to be a boss before they know how to be a good employee.

That shortfall of excellence is the crux of our problem.

We cannot pursue the goal of being a global hub but not have our own citizenry participate in, and enjoin in that progress. That gap in skillset and the inability to meet expectation with reality is the cause of disenfranchisement in this country.

We cannot wait for leadership to guide us along. We alone must teach and mentor our young to first achieve excellence in what they do. Or we can sit and be paralyzed, pour our grievances online about injustices while the world moves along without us.

To become Artisans, the people alone must work hard to achieve the skills.

[highlight]My next post is on Authenticity. Watch out for it. [/highlight]

24 August 2013
Pivot Your Impending Failure Into “Accidental Genius”

There’s a little known fact outside the medical world: Viagra, Pfizer’s game-changing solution to erectile dysfunction, was originally conceived as sildenafil, aimed at treating chest pain caused by heart disease.

Administered 3 times a day during a trial, the drug had a side effect, causing erections in the male subjects.

With that and in not so many words, Viagra was born.

How This Applies to the Entrepreneur

Are you working on something that hasn’t seen the success you’d like it to have? Are you focused on the platform while missing the potential of one of your features?

Oftentimes, as founders of startups, we are so fixated on the vision of what we want to achieve, as we should, that we fail to realize when we have accidentally stumbled upon “genius”.

There are many of such “accidental genius” creations in human history, ranging from the mechanical clock, which was initially intended to regulate monastic prayers to the phonograph, originally meant to be record phone conversations.

How It Happened to Me

When I initially rolled out SENATUS.NET, my vision was to create a gated online community, with authenticated login required to access private information.

I launched it here in Singapore during 2008/2009, just when the popularity of Facebook finally hit the populace. The comparisons between SENATUS and Facebook were inevitable, even though the business models and the intended use cases were starkly different.

[box]In fact, Facebook was itself also launched as a private network at first, with invitations given only to students of Harvard, then Ivy League schools, and colleges nationwide, before being open to public users. The rest is history[/box]

Some of the members who registered on my network were expecting the experience to be the same on Facebook, the number of users to be in the millions, the interactivity including the presence of third party apps (games) to provide similar R&R time.

The reality is that the average user is not going to take the time to understand why your product is different — user behavior is primitive and instinctive — Just look at the number of times people pick something up and start using it without looking at the instruction manual. Or simply just watch an iPhone user try out an Android smartphone.

Not everybody gets a chance to demonstrate their innovation at CES (the famed consumer electronics tradeshow in Las Vegas), nor has the budget to do a press junket for media and tech bloggers (and for them to subsequently explain to readers what you do).

During that particularly “dark” year in 2009, I literally role-played the restaurant owner sitting in my empty eatery, waiting for customers to come through the door, i.e. waiting for members to register on my network. Few did, and on hindsight I knew why: They couldn’t see inside the website (which was the point) and their curiosity wasn’t piqued enough for them to make the effort to register.

From Wilderness to Openness

SENATUS was built on Python/Django, an incredibly powerful content management system, and I had used it to not only add social networking features but also a rather simplistic magazine at the time.

And in that wilderness, I had what I call my ‘Hansel & Gretel’ moment.

The breadcrumbs of content I had left public were in fact what readers were responding to. It was as though through it, they finally understood the premium positioning that I wanted my network to have.

With that moment of Eureka, I poured my resources into fleshing out the magazine component of our website. Our luxury and lifestyle magazine went ‘live’ in 2010, and we quickly went on to win Gold Award in Best Online Magazine at the Asian Digital Media Award, emerging best against entries from media conglomerates from Asia Pacific to the Middle East. In 2012, after a further upgrading effort, we won the Silver Award.

The networking components of my website continue to exist, deployed for registered members but also intelligently used to make our editorial content “come alive”, allowing interactions with our team of editors, writers and photographers, facilitating discussions that can incorporate multi-media visual resources from across the Internet to create an all-encompassing experience.

[box]That is what I consider the Future of Magazines. You are welcome to take a look here: http://senatus.net/community and request an account if you’d like access. Yahoo, through Melissa Mayer, becomes only the second portal after us, to adopt an in-house newsfeed for its content.[/box]

I still believe in my core product — the network — but I have evolved my platform in order to continue doing what I do.

[highlight]Are you sitting on an “Accidental Genius”? Perhaps it’s time to take stock of the treasures you’ve already unearthed.[/highlight]

22 February 2013
Lessons from FC Barcelona for the Entrepreneur: Do the Dirty Work
Everyone who plays soccer knows this: FC Barcelona led by World Player of the Year Lionel Messi, is one of the most followed and idolized teams in the modern era.

Yet almost all the recreational players who celebrate the successes of the team and watch their games week in and week out, don’t play anywhere like them, don’t apply any of the tiki-taka philosophy to their teamplay, don’t overwhelm their opposition, no matter how individually talented each player is.

Why?

I surmise it’s because fans just focus on the glamorous bits of the game, the masterful dribbling, the scoring highlights and the spectacular video bites that engage the short attention span of the viewer.

In many ways, it’s the same malaise that bugs entrepreneurs who decide to start a new venture. They pour through magazine coverage, blog posts, and autobiographies of successful businessmen, unconsciously culling out what the appealing parts are, adopting marketing cliches and punchlines as mottos, and in doing so, inevitably miss the woods for the trees.

In reality, there’s a whole lot of dirty work that FCB players do that brings them success. These critical components of their games aren’t sexy, don’t make the news, and certainly don’t sell football shoes. High court pressing, passing, self-sacrificing cover runs, supporting teammates and providing a passing option – these are the most boring yet quintessential parts of FCB’s game.

How This Applies to the Entrepreneur

The equivalent lessons for the founder of a startup are pretty straightforward and I shall limit my discourse on digital platforms, where my experience lies — focus on unit testing, user experience and site layout, growth, distribution, hiring, branding, marketing, profitability and most important of all, efficiency of effort.

I’ve observed many founders spending an inordinate amount of time networking, believing that rubbing shoulders with peers in the business, can somehow bring them success but those who oftentimes don’t make (enough) traction are the ones who aren’t efficient about their networking efforts.

Networking isn’t about having a beer with fellow founders, developers, venture capitalists and chit-chatting about why your own startup is great (or going to be) — that’s the kind of conversation you have with a client you want to win business from.

No one’s really listening when you talk about how you just hired 10 into your staff, that you’re getting $5 million funding, when your TV commercial is going to run, or the number of downloads your app has on iTunes.

Let’s face it: Unless you’re selling life insurance policies specifically for entreprenuers, fellow founders aren’t your target market either. Read: The 20 folks you met aren’t going to be the ones who provide that magical catalyst for you. The reality is they’re busy with their own business.

My advice is to leave the seemingly-glamorous parts aside and focus.

Efficient Networking

A founder needs to be pragmatic about how she spends her time, especially if that’s time spent away from developing the product — Know who your counterpart is, understand what value that person can bring to what you do, explore and hopefully strike up key partnerships that make sense, invest in shared intelligence that can reap you insights into what you’re doing.

[unordered_list style=”arrow”]
- What have you done with that stack of business cards?
- Does that Venture Capital firm even invest in your industry?
- Is that developer someone you can hire, poach, or propose to become your partner?
[/unordered_list]

The point is simple: Focus on the dirty work | Be efficient with your play.

Good luck.

[highlight]The author in no way suggests you should be anti-social and calculative with the time you spend with friends and family. But if it’s work, then make sure it pays off .[/highlight]
1 February 2013