Q: How long have you been working for a start up?
A: I started on a part time basis since last year, but ever since March 2016, it has become nearly a full time job. Being my own boss, I still am free to go do the odd contracts here and there, especially if the money is good - but otherwise, I am very busy with this project now. That's why I have not been blogging of much lately. It is very exciting indeed!
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| In the office this morning |
Q: What kind of programme are you involved in?
A: It is called an 'accelerator' - basically, the rail industry is required by law in the UK to spend money on innovation, to improve their services through technology. They have thus put together a pot of money collectively to invest in a small number of technology start ups which are creating technological solutions for the rail industry - somehow, we're mostly focused on improving customer experience for the travelers, which is a big issue for them; but we're also solving a few other logistical issues concerning capacity, ticketing and pricing as well. The start ups get free office space, some seed capital and investment and access to the key decision makers in the industry: just week, I presented my ideas to the minister of transport at a huge event they organized, which is freaking unreal. In return, we're expected to work hard, bring a prototype to the market which will be tested this spring and then hopefully lease the product to the rail industry by this summer, so it is quite an ambitious time line when you consider that we're already in March now.
Q: What are some of the benefits about being in a start up?
A: It is the flexibility of being your own boss. I have been working for other people all my life and it is nice to work for yourself as I get to make the rules up as I go along and change them to suit my needs. When I worked for others, I had to ask for permission whenever I wanted to do anything, especially if it had to do with money and that was frustrating. Even if say I had a marketing budget to spend, any decision needed the sign off from a senior director before I could go ahead and spend that money. Being the boss means that I can get things done a lot more quickly and there's nobody to veto my decisions - I know that can be a bad thing at times but it is a double edged sword. I admit, I am the kind of guy who hates people to question my judgement and I can be very, very stubborn sometimes.
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| My corner in the office. |
I think it also suits my character to work for myself - I am pretty much responsible for the business side of things and my business partner is doing the technology. I get very fed up when I see him try to type or edit anything as I type so much faster than him and even little things like clicking on an icon, I think I do it just slightly faster but even then, I get crazy impatient when I am in work mode: I just wanna get work done ASAP and it is a torture for me to have to work with others under such circumstances. That is why I like to be left on my own, with a cup of coffee and I can get just on with work without having to be disturbed. I wanna hang a sign on my head that says, "Alex is working, back off. Do not disturb me under any circumstances. Email me if it is really important but don't talk to me." We're a small company and I wouldn't need to manage any staff at this stage: if we need anything done it will be outsourced.
Q: There has been much talk about bad hiring practices in Singapore whereby expatriates tend to hire people from their own country rather than Singaporeans. What do you think about it as someone running a small business?
A: I think that anyone who makes bad business decisions deserves to go bankrupt. We have some investment, some seed capital for our business - but it is not a bottomless pot of money for me to spend on things that I don't need. I am being so careful managing our finances right now as we need to get the business into profit-making territory as soon as possible. Spending money hiring people for all the wrong reasons: giving in to nepotism, hiring someone just because s/he is your friend or from the same hometown - that's bullshit. That's just unbelievably stupid. I have worked so bloody hard to build up a business from scratch - why would I sabotage my own business by making a bad decision like that? If I wanna support my community, I will do that socially, on a personal basis, but not through my business.
Q: How hard is it for a start up to get a business off the ground?
A: It is incredibly hard - there are two components to it. Firstly, you need to identify a gap in the market, a problem that is screaming out for a solution, a gap in the market for your product. Secondly, one you have created that product, you need the business expertise to bring that product to the market. It doesn't matter how brilliant your product or service is, unless you know how to make your target market aware of it, unless people start buying and using your product or service, you're not making any money. I've seen a lot of small businesses fail because they have failed to understand the second half of that equation: they have some amazing ideas and their products are fantastic, but they simply do not have the right business brains on their teams to bring their products to the market and eventually they run out of money and momentum. Both halves of the equation are equally important in the running of any successful business.
A: I am the head of sales & marketing - I am the person responsible for the second half of that equation. I don't make the product: I am not a technology expert at all, my background is in finance and sales. I am not even that good with technology: but I know enough to run the business side of things in the company, so ensure that we bring out product to the market successfully. I have others in the team who are responsible for the technology and product development - I tend not to get involved in that and they tend not to get involved in what I do.
Q: What are some of the problems you face?
A: I think it is a question of being taken seriously - we're two guys with a brilliant idea who have somehow managed to get ourselves onto a very prestigious accelerator programme where we have access to free office space, seed capital, investment, access to the top decision makers in the industry but we are the smallest and youngest company on the programme. Now that can be seen two ways: you can take the positives and say, hey you guys must be really onto something amazing here, that's why you're able to get on the programme along with other start ups which have had a longer track record. On the other hand, it's a bit like being the shortest, youngest, most inexperienced guy on the basketball team: you are looking at the other players who are older and taller and I don't think it is a question of me being intimidated - it's more like I feel I have to work twice as hard to prove myself when in such company otherwise others won't take me seriously. There have been times at events organized when I feel so much pressure when speaking to people in the industry about what I do: others on the programme can hide behind their track record, whilst I have to sell a dream about what it could be and what we want to achieve. It is not an easy job, I'm relying so much on my enthusiasm to convince people that our ideas will work well. It is a huge challenge and I'm trying my very best!
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| Every business needs a frontman to present their products & services. |
Q: What are you busy with this week?
A: I am desperately trying to find an intern! My original intern dropped out because he realized that being in his final year, the demands on his time are too great: with his dissertation deadline looming and his final exams coming, he just didn't have enough hours in a week to do this. I shall now be looking for someone in their first or second year at university but steer clear of final year students. If you know someone suitable in the London area, let me know!
Q: How are you going to make money from this?
A: This sounds like a question my father will ask! But it is a fair one: we are building the product at the moment and it will be ready for the market in about two months. We had a meeting with our main partner (one of the main train operating companies in the UK) and we said we wanted to launch in four weeks. The guy on the other side of the table inhaled deeply and said that would be rather ambitious and they would take longer than that to get all the agreements in place before we could work out the technical details. I said fine, let's not worry too much about the deadlines for now, let's just focus on getting to that launch. Once we launch, some revenue would be generated and if it is a success, then we will start making a profit very soon. An exit strategy would be for us to build up such a brilliant product that someone would offer us a huge sum of money to take over the whole operation, then we'll be glad to sell it off - at the right price. But yeah, otherwise, I'm quite happy to run it for a while and see how profitable it is: if it turns out to be a real cash cow, then I would be a fool to sell it off. Yes it is a gamble but in life you've gotta take chances.
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| We could potentially make a lot of money from this. |
Q: What if someone steals your ideas, ie. "potong jalan"?
A: That was a question that my father asked. The bottom line is that there's nothing to stop anyone from trying to copy what we do and do it better - it's not like you can put a patent on your product to make sure no one can legally copy what you do. They may not be able to copy you but they can easily build something faster, more efficient and better. We see this a lot in the tech industry - take mobile phones for example: Apple didn't have to copy Nokia to crush the competition - they just brought out the iPhone and dominated the market by bringing out a better product. Such is business, even if you spot a gap in the market, that gap won't exist for long and thus there's nothing to stop someone from trying to "potong jalan" by competing with you. That is a risk factor we have to deal with in the world of business - in the previous companies I had worked for, none of them had a particularly unique product: they were just very good at what they did so they managed to maintain a big enough client base to generate enough revenue and profit.
However, if someone tried to do what we do, they'll face an uphill struggle: because we're on this magnificent accelerator programme, we have free office space, access to the key decision makers in the rail industry, a multitude of events and workshops organized to fill in the gaps in our knowledge about the rail industry (and these are organized by industry experts) and on top of all that, we have investment from the rail industry and we have business mentors! Oh and unlimited coffee on tap. It is hard enough doing what we do with so much incredible help, if anyone wishes to try this without this framework of support - ha, I say, good luck to them trying to potong jalan. This actually puts me in quite a comfortable position to do this start up - there are plenty of people who are trying to get their businesses off the ground without any help at all and they do actually succeed: I do have so much respect for businessmen like that.
A: Oh yeah. You bet. Totally so. At least in my head it is, that makes it much more exciting for me this way.
So that's it from me on this Q&A. If you have any other questions for me, please let me know. leave a comment below, I would love to answer more of your questions on this topic. Many thanks for reading. I'd better get back to work now!
2 months to develop a product ready for market??!!! That is blazing fast. What kind of rock-star engineers did you hire?
ReplyDeleteAaaargh. I pressed the wrong button and lost my comment.
DeleteI will write you a longer explanaion later.
But will leave you with an analogy: this is an incubator programme, so the eggs have been laid and we're just incubating them. We're not trying to get 2 pandas to mate! So 2 months is a more reasonable time scale in that context.
Longer comment coming up later.
OK Weiping, hopefully I won't lose the comment this time before I post it.
DeleteAmongst the companies involved in the incubator programme are those who have already had tried & tested products from other markets and they are merely making tweaks to customize it for the rail industry. For example, there is a company doing something quite clever with GPS-navigation in crowded places like shopping malls, airports and they have a proven track record with a successful product: so for them, they are only dedicating a small team to create a version for busy railway stations. Even for my team, it's not like we're staring at a blank canvas thinking, "now what does the railway industry need...?" We got on the programme on the basis of a very strong pitch for a good idea (simple, efficient, not to complicated: the beauty is in its simplicity, the best ideas don't have to be rocket science). So yes 2 months to actually build the nitty-gritty for the website, app, getting the pricing/payment/billing side right, that's a big ask for my techno-geek partner who is responsible to make that happen, but otherwise, yeah he is a rock-star engineer who was working at 11 pm last night to met our deadline. And if we don't meet it, it's no big deal as our rail partners understand that it can take longer than that - as we're designing a solution for them, we're having a lot of meetings with their team (IT people, yield managers, commercial business partnership managers, pricing strategy guys etc). It is not a question of how fast we move, but also how fast they move - we can only move as fast as them given that we're creating the solution for them. So it's not like an engineer sitting down on his computer creating a innovative little app - everything we do has got to be to customer specifications and the customer is one of the biggest rail operators in the UK and once we get that off the ground, we are going to replicate that with another rail operator in the UK. Once we get those two off the ground, then I can just sit back and say, I'm in bed with two of the biggest rail operators in the UK, the rest of you form an orderly queue and I'll deal with you in turn, okay? Fingers crossed, that's what will happen later on this year, come autumn!
I guess having your customers being reasonable with their demands do play a big part in upholding the delivery dates. It is just my previous bad experiences with having to iron out the specification with customers(the business guys from my ex-company tend to promise the moon for the cost of peanuts) that made me wonder 2 months in delivering a complete product (including requirement gathering and collaborating with the customer) is really blazing fast.
DeleteOh Weiping, we have business mentors who are dealing with this and we had a meeting this morning. On Monday, when our train company partner told us, "we can't do this by April", I responded by saying, "don't worry, we can still do this in May as long as we have the right product that you need." Our business mentors actually went to the guy whom we had the meeting with and spoke to them to find out how the meeting went and I was told, "Alex, what were you thinking, that's the WRONG response?!?!"
DeleteAnd I was like, whaat? I am the business guy, not the IT technie guy, so I don't want to be the one pushing for an impossible deadline that my IT guys can't deliver on time. But I was told the right response should have been, "why is April not a realistic deadline? What do you think the barriers are going to be? Who do we need to speak to in your company to ensure that we can overcome those barriers? How can we simplify the process so that we can get an MVP off the ground by April?" You get the idea, I was supposed to have challenged the guy on the issue of the deadline instead of being so "yes sure we'll do whatever suits you and your time table." The problem is that my CTO is not great at such discussions, so I tend to take the lead in such meetings and I'm trying to talk about deadlines on delivering tech solutions.
Oh man Weiping, you can see why this is not easy for me. The good news is that they have told me how I can put things right with them following that "wrong answer".
On one hand, yes it's a slap in the face to be told I said the wrong thing (like categorically, I was told Alex, wrong answer). On the other hand, I think back about the many times in the past when I've had bad meetings with my boss in my old company, when he made mistakes during the meeting and I didn't speak up as I didn't want to challenge his authority and he was blissfully unaware of his mistakes and "wrong answers". So much to learn, so much.
Don't worry, man.
DeleteWith respects to my bad experiences, they were more due to the business people not consulting the technical team on what could be delivered in a reasonable amount of time. As long as you did take into account of the feedback from the technical team, you are considered fine from the standpoint of the engineers. From the standpoint of the technical team, we try not to over-promise and under-deliver, which is why, when dealing with PMs that clinch business deals without evaluating current resources(through consulting the team) is a real pain in the ass.
Back to my present circumstances, now that I am being outsourced as a SES to another company for a project, I get to negotiate first-hand on the deadlines and do requirement gatherings for what I need to deliver. This feels so much better as I am in control of what my own work pace, when I work.
Hi Weiping, yeah I've heard horror stories about sales guys promising the moon only for the technical team to walk out and say, "we can't deliver that, not in that amount of time, you must be crazy". So I thought my response was right, in being not so hardcore in terms of pushing for a deadline (it's not a 'sale' per se as well, it's just agreeing on a timeframe). Anyway, it's such a steep learning curve for me.
DeleteThe companies doing the hiring of fellow countrymen are usually MNC and the hiring manager is usually not the boss so they can't be arsed if the company loses money. Local SME tend suffer from nepotism as they usually hire family members and relatives.
ReplyDeleteWell Choaniki, therein lies the problem: the middle management need to be managed, they should not be allowed to get away with mistakes like that and if they do, then the company loses money. Likewise for local SMEs who give in to nepotism, how does anyone in Singapore make money under such circumstances?
DeleteIf I am to hire someone, I would start from within my social circles - so the chances of me hiring a gymnast is probably quite a lot higher than say for you, but I would only hire that gymnast if s/he has what it takes to do that job well. My company's profits come first.