Oh well haven’t blogged in a month, but at least I had a great month filled with solid learning experiences! So… where do I start?

Been having tea with tons of people as well!

Getting the product-market fit right

Guess I’ll start with the current state of my startup. Right now, we’re still working on the concept and trying to get product-market fit right, in that we’re still meeting and talking to the primary target audience of our product (salespeople), and gathering feedback from them to refine our concept.

But real life ain’t business school where assumptions and clear logic are enough. Assumptions have to be tested against the market and my partner and I are currently trying to get our startup’s first product – a mobile assistant that aims to improve on the way salespeople interact with their clients – prototyped.

As my partner and I are not (yet) hardcore iOS developers, we’ve been spending the last week or so talking to iOS developers, working on our project briefs as well as thinking of ways to raise development capital for our little project over here. I think that out of the many meetings we went for, we did come across some gems and we really hope to have chosen a quality partner by the end of the week.

Looking for capital

Secondly, my partner and I are also looking into the many government funds for funding for our project. We strongly believe in our company vision to help transform the world into a much friendlier, kinder and considerate place with our products and have been talking to people all over on how our startup can secure some seed money.

We’ve probably got enough to start production of a prototype or two by ourselves, but some government support will really help! Do let us know if any of you readers out there have connections to managers of government funds! We would love to talk to meet them!

Growing the team

Geniuses required!

Finally, after some discussion, my partner and I have also decided to start looking for talent based in KL. We’re currently looking to fill in the following two positions:

General requirements:

- Based in the Klang Valley

- Able to speak English fluently

- Self-motivated and able to work independently

- A good team player and with a proactive attitude

- Minimum diploma and above

1. iOS Developer

- needs to be proficient in Objective-C and able to work independently

- must have a strong interest in design thinking and UI design

2. Web Developer

- must be comfortable with design back-end systems and working with databases

- Required skill(s): HTML, JavaScript, PHP, Web Design, CSS

Interested applicants please email us at quirkapp@gmail.com with your resume, expected salary and recent photograph. We will get back to you as soon as possible. Would also really appreciate it if you spread the word to friends of yours who have just graduated and want real hands on experience on how working with a startup is like!

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Guess that pretty neatly sums up what I’ve been working on lately! Will write about some of the many things that I’ve learnt real soon!

The questionnaires we had to process!

I think that it’s just super amazing how we actually made some pretty good friends and mentors though conducting a survey. I guess it all comes down to being humble and showing a keen interest to learn.

Looking back at the whole exercise, I guess my team and I are just really blessed to have such awesome people around us, helping us every step of the way. A big shout out goes to all of you awesome people that helped me out in any way, be it passing me a number, introducing me to some friends, or even passing our survey along. Special thanks goes out to Pamela and Melissa who actually took us out to meet insurance agents they knew, which in turn introduced us to a whole lot more awesome people!

And the great thing was that I wasn’t just meeting great insurance agents – my awesome friends and family never fail to support me, continuously introducing me to new and interesting mentors who each have powerful lessons to teach me. One of the key perks of being employed is having the opportunity to work and learn the trade from a good boss. Not having a boss, I’m just so blessed to be surrounded by mentors from different fields who readily and generously share the wealth of their experiences with me. Thank you so much.

Through all this, I have really learnt two main things

1. If you are interested in starting a business… just go start! Find some way to begin and just go do it. Start small if you have to! Persistence, focus and the alignment of your venture with your deepest values will cause magical things to happen helping you learn so much faster along the way! There is just no substitute for just starting! Saying that you need experience or capital is just making another excuse for yourself! I’ve started small, with just tons of interviews, surveys, brainstorming sessions and consultations with mentors – and I feel that I probably learnt so much more than I would if I took up a typical marketing position at a typical marketing firm.

2. And that true success in life probably isn’t just measured in dollars and cents – the number of lives whom you’ve touched are really important too! In this whole process of trying to get EasyGreet started, I’ve realized that what motivates me in business is really the people. I love interacting and connecting with people, and businesses are what drives value – and potentially human happiness if done correctly – up if done correctly. For more thoughts on happiness and about the meaning of success, do check this extremely meaningful article out.

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Guess that’s it for this week! Hope that my partners and I will have more to share in the days to come! Count your blessings when you can! (We’re sure blessed with our secret hideout as well!)

Our secret hideout!

Here are just a few crucial concepts that in my opinion, are fundamentally important in making an internet-based-business succeed.

What I've learnt so far!

1. You have to be the very best at what you do.

It’s a misconception that internet businesses don’t require much work. I’ve talked to tons of people who are of the opinion that you can just set up a website to sell stuff online and just expect to generate sales without too much effort. That’s extremely unlikely to happen.

A mentor of mine once told me that money on the internet is probably much harder to make as compared to traditional brick and mortar businesses. He is right in many ways on that.

What the internet does is that it makes the world much smaller. A small sundry mart in a small Asian suburb does not have to necessarily compete with a gigantic Wal-Mart in the USA, but an internet startup has to battle with the biggest and strongest players out there from the very beginning! There’s no such thing as comfortable protectionist policies out there on the global internet!

Only the most outstanding players survive, and hence, Zipf’s law, that states that the number one in a field will be way disproportionately more popular than the second ranked player in the field, is amplified on the online arena! On the internet, if you’re not the best, the rapid pace of innovation will just leave you forgotten in the dust.

For those of you more into math (:

If you ever want to start up an online business, do take a feather out of Pokemon’s Ash Ketchum’s hat and focus on being the very best and strive to be the very best. In the hypercompetitive arena of the internet, there’s no place for #2 or #3.

(always worth listening to every now and then )

Speaking of being forgotten…

2. On the internet, Mindshare is necessary for survival.

Quick question – what do  you think separates Groupon from the millions of other clones out there? In my opinion it definitely isn’t the system, service or business model but rather the mindshare that Groupon possesses. People know and remember Groupon, not the thousands of other clones out there, and with a limited bookmark bar in your browser (as well as a limited attention span) people naturally will only use the service which stands out in their memory!

Hence, Mindshare is a crucially important asset for most online business models and if you can observe existing online businesses such as job and property portals, you can see that due to the large amount of competition in the field and low barriers to entry, players have found themselves having to shell out large amount of advertising expenditure to stay competitive. If you are ever in doubt of that, do keep a lookout for Jobstreet and Property Guru ads all around, I’ve seen them all over Singapore AND Kuala Lumpur!

One important implication of this is that competing with established players can be costly, sometimes more so than with a brick and mortar business model. So what do new entrants to the market (like me) have to do? We have to jolly well be creative and create a blue ocean (go check out Blue Ocean Strategy, awesome book) ! That’s why it’s so vital to come up with something new, different and creative that people can remember!

A novel fresh take on a business model makes it so much easier to earn the Mindshare necessary to succeed in this field at a minimal cost. But then again, a fresh take on a business model does not necessarily have to be a completely new one…

3. Radical simplicity really matters.

… it could be that all it takes is that your model is a much simpler and improved version of an older business model!

Look at Friendster vs Facebook, Wuala vs Dropbox and so many more examples out there! Those newer models gained so much more ground because they were so much easier to use with just a few key differentiating features but otherwise very similar to the older models! Facebook’s clean simple interface and Dropbox’s remarkable desktop and mobile integration were key to having the possibly not so tech-savvy masses – the vast majority of users out there.

The adoption curve - the money's clearly in the centre!

To court them, you have to be very, very, very easy to use. There is no too easy to use here! Hence, do try to make radical simplicity a part of your internet startup if you’re working on one too!

Send me feedback and your opinions!

These are just a couple of my thoughts and I really welcome feedback as I’m actually working on some internet business ideas and am always willing to learn more! Let me know what you think and what else you want to hear from me! Now that I’m unemployed and currently working on my startup plans, I’m dedicating Monday mornings to writing and keeping you guys updated on my journey through the exciting new frontiers of technopreneurship!

Alternatively, do send feedback to me at kevin (at) kevinc.net!

A pretty cool story about the man who just made a whopping $635,000 selling virtual property! In short, it played out something like this:

Kid born to a father who was a financier banned from the London Stock Market for shady deals, grows up wanting to be an actor, but as hard as he tried, never made it really big. Kept playing video games while trying to write screenplays, but found himself procrastinating all day to write the said screenplays. Ends up building, developing and selling virtual property on Entropia Universe, an MMORPG that has a set exchange rate for its virtual currency to real world currency. Spends $100,000 life savings on buying virtual space station. Develops said space station. Sells refurbished space station for a cool half million bucks this month.

Pretty awesome story huh? I thought so too.

Read all about it here:

Meet The Man Who Just Made A Cool Half Million From The Sale Of Virtual Property – Oliver Chiang – SelectStart – Forbes.

The man who walked again.

I was about to retire to bed when I saw the following headline on Gizmodo – Frank Reynolds Treated His Own Spinal Cord Injury and Walked Again. I just had to read the article and watch the TEDxBoston video attached.

To cut a long story short, Frank Reynolds was paralyzed way back in 1992 due to a spinal cord injury. Doctors told him that his situation could not improve. He watched the movie Lorenzo’s Oil about a couple from a non-medical background that stunned the medical world by discovering a cure for their son’s illness. He was inspired. He researched neurosurgery and spinal cords. He tested a new procedure on himself. He walked again.

Now he has gone even further – he started up a new company, InVivo and is currently looking for investors for its IPO.

All I can say is – WOW. He overcome something that most people would have just accepted as plain bad luck with pure determination, willpower and creativity. He took his misfortune, turned it around and is now preparing for an IPO with it. Making lemonade with lemons indeed.

Just when I was feeling stuck with the implementation of my business ideas, along comes this video, out of nowhere, to inspire me once again.

Watch this space.

Awesomeness is returning.

Just how fun work can be when you do it right.

When I talk to my friends about my entrepreneurial aspirations, sometimes they tell me that they want to start their own businesses too. However, most of the time, I hear that response with one short caveat – that they’ll only do so after a few years of working experience in some large multinational company, supposedly to gain experience and to be more financially stable.

I never quite agreed with that line of thought and by beliefs were further confirmed when my supervising professor for my professional attachment paid me a visit at the Jipaban office. My supervising professor had been involved in dot coms since way back before the turn of the millennium, before the dot-com crash, and was extremely eager to hear all about the Jipaban.com.

Somewhere in our conversation, he mentioned this – that he had many students who also similarly told him that they wanted start their own businesses. When he asked them how they were working towards their aspirations, they told him that they’ll go start out working for a large, stable firm, gain experience and finally come out, 10 years later and start out a business of their own.

His reply was simple. It was – why do you think that the experience you gain at working for a large firm would be the most relevant to your future entrepreneurial exploits in the future? Really, would experience in spending your day focused on solving someone else’s problems and working on making that person rich be the best teacher at teaching how to make yourself rich? I really don’t think so.

Why I don’t believe that this is the way to go.

When you work for someone, it’s your job to make your boss rich, not the other way around. Always remember that.

When you spend the majority of your time thinking about how to maximize someone else’s profit and not your own, I believe that it’s easy to get caught up constantly focusing on that issue and not on what’s efficient – increasing your personal wealth and working towards financial freedom. Working to make others rich is vastly different from working for yourself.

When you work for yourself, you make all the decisions, but you reap all the benefits (and losses) incurred by your actions; when you work for others, an artificial safety net is put under you. When you work for yourself, it’s so much easier to be motivated to understand every aspect of your business – you try to understand it from a macroeconomic point of view, you analyze customer feedback, you check the data religiously; when you work for others, that kind of intense motivation to master the business just isn’t there.

I believe that the only way to really teach yourself business is to immerse yourself inside a business that you really care about, and experience the pure joy of working hard to make it all come together. That’s just something I don’t see happening much if you decide to work at a large firm where the red tape just ties you down.

The red tape, politics, and artificial safety net does more than limits your potential to shine, but I also believe that it is one more additional barrier that stands in the way of you learning good business habits. Getting used to the wrong level of thinking, a totally different level of decision making, would not only hold you back but may go on further to negatively affect the business decisions you make! You may have been better off starting with a blank slate as you might have incorrect perceptions and habits you may have acquired about business by immersing yourself inside an employee culture!

Money ties you down.

Another reason I don’t want to apply for a job in a big multinational the moment I graduate is because money just ties you down. Holding a high paying, “stable” job is quite a bit like giving in to the urge to just lie down in an extremely comfortable sofa – it’s really comfortable to get into it, and very hard to get out.

I have always believed that the worst thing that can happen to someone is to get too comfortable. When you’re too comfortable, there’s nothing forcing you to get faster, smarter and better – you just take it easy. As a result, you just end up sloppy, lazy and inefficient.

Life’s short – you gotta be efficient.

All in all, I strongly feel that working for someone else just happens to be the roundabout way of doing things should you want to start your own business in the future. I believe that it’s not only inefficient, but also that being trained to be a good employee might not make you a good boss. I guess that’s exactly why I’m so happy during my internship over the past 10 weeks at Jipaban – I’m right on track to getting to where I want to be.

Now I’ve just got to apply those lessons I’ve learnt with diligence and focus!

What do you do about your problems?

Life can be hard, and no living person can claim to have gone through life without facing problems.

What really matters however, is the way that we treat our problems. Do we treat our problems as something that frustrate us, piss us off and cause us to hurt emotionally, or is there a more empowering way of looking at problems?

Yes there is.

Problems can be immensely empowering when you look at them the right way. Instead of letting them piss you off, ask yourself this simple question – how can I help others solve this problem that I now face in an easy and efficient manner?

The fact of the matter is that if you’re facing a problem, it is highly unlikely that you’re the only person out there hurting because of that particular problem. Think about it, almost every problem that you face in your daily life has been encountered by countless other people before. The reality is that the problem persists because no one out there has taken the initiative to solve it in a creative and effective manner.

So go solve it! The greatest thinkers, the greatest entrepreneurs, the greatest contributors to society are men who felt that they could not accept the status quo and took it upon themselves to do something about mankind’s problems! Solving a previously unsolved problem is a sure-fire way of adding great value into the lives of others and is in fact a fundamental part of entrepreneurship.

Find a problem, apply a generous helping of creativity and thought to it, and who knows, maybe it’ll be your next big business idea!

The next time you start to feel frustrated when something goes wrong with your life, know that you have the power to turn it around and convert that problem into a gift, a resource of new insight and value that you can use to improve your current circumstance.

That new girl you hired just suddenly quit on you? Do you get all hot and bothered about it, or do you think about how you can create a system that reduces the probability of hiring such irresponsible people?

Another irritating person flaming you and your business on Facebook? Do you start whining about how irritating such immature people are, or do you think about how you can go about converting that vocal dissenter into your most ardent fan?

Don’t let that treasure trove of great ideas go to waste. Keep a record of the different problems you face every day and spend some time thinking about how to solve them and improve the overall human condition.

Everyone loves a problem-solver because such people add immense value into our lives. So decide to stop being someone who complains about problems today and become a problem-solver instead. You’ll be a problem solving master in no time if you spent some time thinking creatively about solutions every time you face a problem. Now to start thinking creatively about how to pack for my trip back home later today…

According to the Boston Consulting Group, the two countries with the highest growth of millionaires over the last year are the two countries that I’m based in - Singapore with a 35% increase in millionaires from 2009 to 2010 and Malaysia with a 33% increase! Read the full article here.

This is amazing!

That millionaire dream is possible. Just gotta work at it one step at a time, building the necessary competencies to achieve my objective.

That’s all there is to it.

Conventional wisdom tells you that people react to tangible, material rewards. The bigger the carrot you dangle in front of a person, the harder they work. So is it true that the more money you put in front of a person, the harder they work?

Well, this very interesting video suggests otherwise.

Ain’t this presentation style just so awesome? I just couldn’t bring myself to stop watching it!

Anyway, the main takeaway for this video was this – what people really want isn’t money. It’s really things like autonomy over their work, a sense of mastery as well as being in a position to make a contribution.

I’m not saying that money isn’t important, it still is, but when people start getting sufficient money to meet their needs, it really isn’t what’s going to push them to run that extra mile.

Remember this, economists – human beings aren’t just profit maximizers, we’re purpose maximizers too.

Do what makes you happy!

I’ve realized that the days that I feel the most down are the days that I don’t really have anything to do or anyone to meet. Days like that can feel pretty darn depressing.

When I really thought about it, it occurred to me that most of what we call modern entertainment doesn’t really make you happy, but are just temporary distractions to life.

Really, just take a moment to think about it.

A movie in the cinema, partying the night away in a club, escaping the country for a holiday – yes these things can be fun, but it sometimes seems that we do these things as a form of escape from reality, and escape from our sometimes less than satisfying lives.

What really makes you happy? What are the keys to happiness then?

Victor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning that:

“Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

And I think that’s a very big hint to that big secret. Happiness usually requires action of some kind. I’ve realised that I’m the most happy when I am working on something that is important to me, and close to my heart.

I’m happy when I feel that I’m going somewhere with my work and achieving my purpose in life.

I’m happy when I feel that what I’m doing is positively impacting others.

I’m happy when I’m achieving goals that are important to me.

I’m happy when I’m cultivating a successful relationship with someone dear to me.

But I’m definitely not happy sitting around and doing nothing. Some people may say that it’s the best thing ever to not have anything to do, but sloth is a very real sin. Possibly the worst sin that you can commit against yourself.

Finding true joy and happiness in your life will never be about inaction. Hopefully, you’ll find your calling in life – that something that makes you wake up early in the morning just because you can’t wait to continue working on it, that one project that you can’t stop thinking about.

Don’t settle and spend your life doing anything less than that.