A Day In The Life Of A Startup

Yesterday I got the opportunity to experience first hand what it was like to work in a startup! It wasn’t my first time setting foot into a startup before though. Last week I had the opportunity to visit 2359 media because of an event called Walkabout Singapore that provided a behind-the-scenes look at the workspaces of Singapore’s startups (it’s a shame I didn’t get a picture inside 2359!). I did manage to get a good half hour chat with the founder of 2359 though and that was nothing short of interesting and fascinating!

A few days before Walkabout, I visited a friend and co-founder of Intraix too. This is them doing up the office they moved in to recently!

So when a friend of mine who needed some urgent help at another startup called BiggerBetterSale (BBS), I jumped on that opportunity to actually be part of a startup for a day! Working in one is definitely very different from just visiting one (or founding one, of course). This is us in the BBS office

I won’t go into all the details about what this startup does, about how they are disrupting the e-commerce business model by coinciding their online flash sales with the Great Singapore Sale that targets mainly physical retailers (oops I’ve said too much already. Okay no just kidding.)

But here’s some of my thoughts from the point of view of a (one day) employee of a startup!

Systems and Processes

As a startup, it’s understable that everything is raw, everything is intense, and Facebook’s philosophy of ‘move fast, break things’ definitely applies. However having a good system such that all employees have a clear understanding of the business is definitely a worthy investment to make. Even a simple chart to highlight some processes would have been very useful at my job yesterday to avoid repeating instructions and re-explaining job scopes to multiple groups of people.

Constant Motivation

The guys at BBS are excellent motivators that could keep even part timers like myself and a few others super motivated! Although we weren’t equity holders and won’t even be around next week to follow through with the startup, I actually felt a part of the team and really wanted to do my best to help them meet their work objectives! The verbal motivations included: ‘Whaddup troops! How’s everyone doing! Are we still going strong!’ and ‘Good job guys you are really doing great I never thought we would get so much done today but you guys are fantastic and I love you guys so much man!’. Not to mention free meals and snacks to ‘fuel our troops’ through the day! But I think the best motivator was the fact that the founder, directors and other senior guys in the company came to shake hands and introduce themselves to each and every part-timer. I felt like they really appreciated the work we were helping them with.

Clear Objectives

For co-founders of a startup, the objectives would definitely be very clear for them. But as an employee, I feel that it’s very important to be briefed on objectives and goals (which BBS did too of course). They were very clear about what needed to be done. Something along the lines of this was said to us: “Launch is 30 May and we’ve got to do A and B and C and D etc etc. For today we will complete A and B or no one goes home! If you have to stay late we will have pizzas and beers and free cab rides home for you!”

So that’s my 2 cents worth about what you should pay attention to if you are an entrepreneur looking to start hiring some employees, interns or part timers!

I look forward to your comments if you have any! Do leave them in the comment box and I will definitely reply you! Cheers!

Predicting Trends

I always saw myself more of an accidental entrepreneur rather than a I-have-always-wanted-to-be-an-entrepreneur-and-I-was-born-ready-for-this kind of entrepreneur. I relied mainly on my guts and instinct and jumped on whatever opportunities came my way. I feel that this has some benefits because when I just jumped right in without really considering too heavily about the risks and costs involved, I got things started a lot quicker without looking back.

This has its pros and cons of course. The pros of this is that you get to overcome any risk-adverse thoughts that might creep slowly but surely into your mind when you ponder upon an idea for too long. “What if it doesn’t work out?”, “What if I fail?”, “Do I really know what I’m doing?” “I’m sure someone else will beat me to this.” and the list goes on and on.

The cons, then, is that by jumping right into something, you most probably would not have done proper market research and studies to find out if what you’re going in is really worth all that time and effort!

A bit of balance between the two would be ideal. Jump right into something if you have a real strong and good feeling about it; but also make sure you do a bit of homework to know what you’re doing.

I was faced with this situation before and found a small simple trick to help me make some decisions.

In May 2012, I had two competing ideas in my mind as to what I should do. They were both very similar online retail businesses but in two very different industries. The first was to sell bicycles, and the second to sell nail polish.

To be honest, I really wanted to sell bicycles over nail polish even though I already had a strong connection with nail polish retailers and suppliers. But I knew I had to be practical about it. So what did I do? I turned to Google.

Google has a particular application called Google Trends.

What it does is explore trends in the world based on what people are searching through the Google search engine. How ingenious of Google!

Anyway so what I did was search the terms ‘buy nail polish’ and ‘buy bicycles”. I figured if my future customers were going to buy from me, they would have to first find me by searching these terms. And the results:

The graph at the top shows that when it comes to people searching for ‘buy nail polish’ on Google, the trend is an upwards one whereas the graph at the bottom shows that it’s the opposite for people searching for ‘buy bicycles’! That was my first indicator that perhaps nail polish would be a much better product to sell.

Again, the top half shows the results for ‘buy nail polish’ and the bottom half shows the results for ‘buy bicycles’. Notice that in the first result under regional interest, SINGAPORE is placed number 3 city in the world with a score of 91! (A score of 100 shows maximum interest in this search term). For a small city to hit number 3 in the world could only mean one thing – the local market is HUGE! But then under ‘buy bicycles’, Singapore was number TWO with a score of 83! This didn’t make it very much easier for me to make a decision.

But I noticed something interesting under related search terms for ‘buy nail polish’ and that was for the terms ‘opi’ and ‘buy opi’. And a further search on google trends for these two terms helped to seal the deal for me.

This is the result for regional interest for the terms ‘opi’ and ‘buy opi’ and it got me really excited! Why? Because OPI was the brand of nail polish that I had the best suppliers and prices for, and by knowledge from my girlfriend, a really hot favourite amongst the female population in Singapore!

And that was that. I jumped right into http://www.naildeck.com and never looked back. Because I knew that I was selling what people wanted.

Any thoughts or comments? I’d love to read them in the comment box below! Thanks!

P.S. Sorry for the long post I hope you managed to last till the end; and if you did, thank you so very much!=)