What being a long distance runner taught me about entrepreneurship

I’ve been a long distance runner for about 12 years now. It started with the 5km and 10km distances. Then 21km. Then the full marathon (42.195km).

Saturday mornings are usually for the long slow distance runs. I would typically be doing 32-36km this time of the year for marathon training. But today I can only manage 4-5km at a time. An unexpected thigh muscle strain causes a sharp pain in my knee and reduces me to a sad limping person if I go any further than that.

But that doesn’t deter me.

I aim to increase my distance by 1-2km at a time, and hopefully the gradual improvement will put me back in the game of marathon running again next year.

Reflecting on this I see many similarities with entrepreneurship. As entrepreneurs we put in the hard work and we keep grinding, hustling, selling and whatnot. And just when everything seems to be going in order, some unexpected ‘thigh muscle strain’ will hit you and all you can do is go back to the drawing board and start from scratch again.

But entrepreneurs don’t get deterred. They keep going and going and going.

And that is how they succeed.

#smallwins (and the unexpected success of Bosslee Coffee)

This process has happened to me many times over the last 5 years:
1) A group of my friends say something like “hey we should turn this into a business”
2) Everyone gets excited and starts making plans on how to execute
3) We all talk about how awesome it’s going to be and how we’re going to be so rich
4) Nothing happens

And I’m sure many of you reading this have experienced it before. But I’m glad Bosslee Coffee didn’t turn out to be another one of those “we should really have just done it” stories.

So what was different?

For one, I think it was something that all 3 of us were passionate about and that was drinking coffee (and more). We drink it for enjoyment and we also drink it for the caffeine kick it gives us to allow us to build kickass startups. And more importantly I think we never really put any pressure on ourselves to “meet milestones”, “acquire market share”, “hit double digit growth rates” or “raise our seed round”. It was something we did for fun and somehow that worked for us.

So what did we do?

We cranked out a bare minimum list of things we needed:
1) Good coffee beans (not hard to find in Singapore)
2) Mini coffee beans grinder (this was the largest expense and only because our hands that are only used to mouse clicks and keyboard typing could not handle such brutal cranking)
3) Bottles to store our cold brew coffee (One word: ikea)
3) A name and logo (Took us 2 seconds to come up with a name and 30 minutes for the logo)
4) A website to take orders (Combined we might have made more than 10 websites before so this was a piece of cake)
5) A way to collect money (Decided on DBS Paylah since we are only operating in Singapore)
6) At least one social media account (in this case it was an Instagram account)

It’s been just slightly more than a month and considering this is just a side business, I have to say I am pretty pleased to report on how it’s turned out so far:
1) Hit break even point after one month
2) Didn’t spend a single cent on marketing
3) Somehow Timeout Magazine found us and asked for a sample and an interview. We obliged of course.
4) Got an offer to buy out (not sure how serious he was though)
5) Gained the interest of investors
6) In discussions with The Coca Cola Company on how we can possibly work together

So okay so here’s where I try to make some sense out of everything and reflect on what I’ve learnt:
1) I wrote about Google Trends before and since then I’ve also read/heard this from someone/somewhere: “In a typhoon, even pigs can fly”. If you check out cold brew coffee on Google Trends you’d see a really nice exponential growth rate over the last six months. So perhaps there’s really nothing special about what we are doing. If you started a cold brew coffee now you’d probably achieve the same traction we have received.
2) Sometimes the only tech you need is when tech is used as an enabler for business innovation. You do not need to base your entire startup off a technology that may never be commercialized.

And that’s about it for now! To follow us:
www.bossleecoffee.com
@bossleecoffee

Get Out of The Building!

By now, most of you who are in the start-up scene must have realized that Steve Blank, the godfather of the lean start-up movement from Silicon Valley, was here a couple of days ago. To be extremely honest, I did not know who this guy was before I started my internship with NUS Enterprise and I was kind of puzzled what the big hoo-hah was about him. But after going through Lean Launchpad for 12 weeks as a coordinator AND a participant; AND also meeting Steve in person, I can safely say that this guy is one of the most down-to-earth, intelligent, wise, and easy person to get along with.

As a conclusion to the Lean Launchpad Program (I see it more as a reward), we at NUS Enterprise organized “An evening with Steve Blank: Insights to building a successful start-up”. It’s been video recorded and should start circulating soon so do keep a lookout for it!

(The Lean Launchpad participants for their final presentation. Standing is Jerome Engel)

Steve is famous, amongst many other things, for his catch phrase ‘Get out of the building!’. Now I’m not a great reporter (or a writer) so I’m going to skip writing about all the standard entrepreneurial stuff every other start-up/tech blogger in the auditorium that night would be writing about. Instead I’ll go along the line of catch phrases and let you know some of the more interesting ones I heard.

(Steve Blank from Standford University and Prof. Wong Poh Kam from NUS Enterprise)

“You have too much advice today”

In today’s world of the internet and social media and ‘expert blogs’ and whatnot, it is easy to get a whole ton of opinions on one single matter. What you need to do is develop your own internal compass because if you don’t, you are going to be pulled around in circles by multiple authorities. You need your own filter or if not at the end of the day, it’s the last person with the loudest voice that’s going to make the greatest impact on you.

“You know you’ve got your first customer when they’ve paid for it”

This might sound like common sense but it’s actually something that many people neglect. How many times have you heard someone say “oh yes I did a survey of 500 people and 400 of them said they like it and will buy it”. But have these 400 people actually come up with the cash and given it to you? If the answer is no, you don’t know for sure if you have a first customer and if your idea is validated.

“You’ve got to be able to watch their pupils dilate”

This phrase was said with regards to the customer discovery process. Steve’s idea is that you HAVE to do face-to-face interviews because there is so much a person can say non-verbally through body actions (like dilating pupils). You can see if the interviewee is bored or excited, and you can adjust your interview accordingly to get the most out of them. This is unlike an internet survey or an email/phone call where you just get back an answer without knowing that much more about your product and customer.

“You’ve got somewhat of a competitive advantage if you come from a dysfunctional family”

This is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say this but I thought it made sense. It’s found that in the United States, there is a disproportionately large percentage of successful entrepreneurs that come from dysfunctional families. Steve’s hypothesis is that if you grew up in a dysfunctional family as a sane, normal person, you are a survivor and have been able to create order out of chaos as a way to survive into the world. People like this see things differently and would be able to create order out of chaos as an entrepreneur as well.

The Promised Land

“Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.” – Richard Branson

With this quote, I announce that I am officially going to transit from being an entrepreneur to being an employee.

In simpler words, I am trading in my shorts and flip flop days for shirt, pants and leather shoes.

The decision to make such a move started approximately 4 months ago. In all honesty, I was very happy being an entrepreneur, I felt that I had reached the promise land where I found a good trade off between freedom, profit, and value-add to myself and the community.

But it hit me one morning that perhaps I was destined for bigger things. I did yearn to do more than just sell nail polish for the rest of my life, not that there was anything wrong with that, but I just have so many more dreams and goals and aspirations that I wanted to achieve.

I wanted to work on Project A, B, C and D all at once. I wanted to form more business partnerships, write more business plans, pitch more business ideas; and I could have done it! Except that I decided that I was not ready for it and that I would like to learn more from others and develop myself further.

To all entrepreneurs, there is no shame in deciding to stop running your business to work for someone else. I have to admit I did have this sense of failure when I decided to find a job. There was this nagging feeling that everyone’s going to be thinking ‘oh his business failed and that’s why he has to find a job’.

Well, if we live our lives according to what we want people to think, then we wouldn’t be really living will we?

So I’m moving on to new pastures and like what one of my favourite entrepreneurs says – ‘there’s always another business opportunity coming’; and until then, I will be preparing myself for the promised land.

P.S. I will be embarking on an internship with NUS Enterprise – a company that provides mentorship, funding, and infrastructure to all aspiring and current entrepreneurs. I will be involved in a program called Lean Launchpad, which was adapated from Stanford University. I believe there will be plenty of knowledge, skills and experience to be gained and I will, to the best of my abilities, share my journey with you through this platform!

Systems & Processes

This post is a build on to another post I did a couple of weeks back called A Day In The Life Of A Startup where I recounted my experience working in a startup for a day and also shared my learning points of startups – one of which was ‘Systems and Processes’.

A couple of months back I attended a seminar by Mr Boyd Au, the ex-CEO and executive chairman, and co-founder of ENZER. He is worth listening to because he tells the typical (or rather, not so typical) rags-to-riches story and listed his company in 2001, boasting sales turnover close to S$80million.

During the seminar, he shared with us about his business and one thing that really struck me was this line he said.

“You must know the processes of running a business. If you know the process, profits will automatically come in.”

This struck me because it made me reflect upon my business and whether I had the right processes in place. It also made me recall something else one of my ex-bosses said to me once when I was interning in his company back in 2011 when I was still fresh to the world of entrepreneurship.

He knew I was interested in going down this path and one day he asked me if I knew what a business was; to which my answer was that it was an entity that generates profit by creating value. He then asked me another question which I then could not answer (I’m guessing most of you probably would know this but I really didn’t back then!). He asked me what was the difference between a business and a sole-proprietorship. I was stumped because by my definition of a business, a sole-proprietorship was the exact same thing as a business!

I was enlightened when he told me his answer:

A business is something that has a system and runs on its own. If the founder/CEO/boss is not around, the business will continue running on its own, generating revenue and profit for the business.

A sole-proprietorship is something that ceases to operate if the founder/CEO/boss is sick and does not turn up for work. An example is a doctor who runs his own clinic. If he does not turn up for work, the patients cannot be treated and the sole-proprietorship does not generate any profit.

So with this in mind, I urge all aspiring and current entrepreneurs to think about creating systems and processes from Day 1. In fact, if you have not started a business, think about it now before starting. A few things to take note of are:

1) How will you plan for your business to function without you? (How can you make it earn passive income for you?)

2) It can be easy to start a sole-proprietorship and put all your effort into building up your product or business, but do think about how you will plan to get more people to come on board to work for/with you. (Internet startups allow you to scale internationally but if you want to build your company, essentially you are going to need people to believe in you and your business to really scale it.)

3) Find a balance between having a system and being flexible. Forming strong systems and processes are great for the business but sometimes you have to be flexible enough to make changes or seize opportunities when it arises. Facebook’s ‘Move Fast Break Things’ is definitely something to consider greatly about too.

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!=)

Using Your Skills & Knowledge

As a strong advocator of Starting Small Starting Lean (you can read more about this here), one way to figure out a way to start a business is to, as simple as it sounds, use your skills and knowledge.

Let’s take a teacher as an example. You can safely say that his skill is in teaching; and perhaps, teaching young children or teens in particular. But in a job like that, he probably developed a skill for crowd control, conflict resolution, presenting to a group, making reports, interacting with people from all walks of life (during parent-teacher meetings) and many many more. These skills apply in a school, but they can also apply to other industries!

Likewise if you take an example of a salesman. He would probably have developed skills such as persuasive speaking, public speaking, personal grooming, networking, and more. With these skills, could this salesman start a school to teach others about confident public speaking? Probably! Coincidentally, one of the biggest fears for most people is public speaking. So this salesman already has a good outlook for his business!

I guess what brought me to this topic was really an interesting encounter this morning. I was sitting in a cafe reading a book and next to me were two people. One of them, a man in his fifties, was a travel concierge consultant, and the other, a woman in her thirties, was his client. The consultant had planned an entire travel itinerary for the client to have a holiday in Venice. He was very professional in his manner, he did his research well, and he definitely sounded like he was having fun.

So he’s a travel concierge consultant. Okay no big deal plenty of people do that. But what got me interested was that while I assumed that this man had been doing this as a job for many years due to his sound experience in handling the client, I was surprised to find out later on that this man was actually of the architect profession!

An architect teaching others about travelling in Venice? How did this come about!

Well it turns out that he was trained (and worked) in Venice as an architect. He probably lived there for many years and knew the city inside out. And when he left his architect career, voila, he made use of his knowledge of the city, which is not easily attained, to make a second career for himself! Now that’s a solid entrepreneur right there!

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

Unique Pricing Decisions

I watched this video on TED that talks about whether we are really in control of all the decisions we make in our life. I watched it purely out of interest but in it I found a really interesting example the speaker gave that I feel can be applied to many businesses in real life because it is regarding a very important component of any business – pricing decisions.

Pricing is a really tough component to tackle. Price it low and consumers might equate to low quality. Price it high and consumers might choose a cheaper alternative. Within a business’ different product lines, pricing is also an issue. Will one product cannibalize another product because of the wrong price? All this and more can keep many entrepreneurs up late at night.

Well there is an interesting portion of this video from 12.35min to 14.10min (I’m awesome right? Now you don’t have to watch the whole video).

For those of you who don’t want to watch it, this is a summary of the example:

The Economist offered 3 subscription plans for its magazines:

Option 1: Online Subscription $59

Option 2: Print Subscription $$125

Option 3: Online AND Print Subscription $125

As it turns out, through an experiment with some MIT students conducted by the speaker, 16% chose Option 1, and 84% chose Option 3 and none chose Option 2 (thankfully). You see when given these options, Option 3 sounds like a really value-for-money, bang-for-buck option!

The experiment was repeated again, this time with only the following two options:

Option 1: Online Subscription $59

Option 3: Online AND Print Subscription $125

I’m not sure if this will surprise you (it didn’t surprise me) but the results were quite the opposite now! 68% chose Option 1 (as opposed to 16% in the first experiment) and only 32% chose Option 3 (as opposed to 84% in the first experiment).

The key takeaway from the speaker was that although Option 2 seemed like a useless option to even have, it was useful in the sense that it helped customers figure out what they wanted!

So for all of you out there currently running your own business, perhaps you can try this little ‘trick’ out and I hope it helps to increase your sales!

(Any comments or thoughts? Do leave a comment!)

Overnight Success

Overnight success….is impossible to achieve.

If that disheartens you that I’ve got sad news for you – you’re probably not cut out to be an entrepreneur.

For the rest who are aspiring or current entrepreneurs, I’m sure you have wished many times that your business idea can somehow miraculously gain a million new likes on your Facebook page overnight, wake up in the morning to find out that some other big business is acqui-hiring your start-up for USD26 million, or even just have a thousand new orders for your product in a single day. Unfortunately for the vast majority of us, this is never ever going to happen.

Many companies that look like they have made it overnight were actually businesses that were almost on the verge of dying or giving up.

Everyone acknowledges the awesome phenomenal success of the seemingly simple and easy game of Angry Birds but many also do not realize that the company behind it was struggling for 8 years, was almost bankrupt, and had decided before hand that if Angry Birds did not make it, they would close down the company. And actually even when they first launched the game on the iTunes store, sales was pretty slow for the first 3 months.

But no other story is more inspiring (to me) than Wal-Mart.

Sam Walton, the founder and visionary behind Walmart has been hailed as one of the greatest entrepreneurs ever and it’s easy to assume that the idea of large scale discount retailing was just something he thought up one day and put into practice the next. The actual story couldn’t be further from that.

From the time Walton first started his journey in entrepreneurship to the day he started Walmart, it took approximately seventeen years. That’s 6205 nights that Walton had to sacrifice! 6205 nights that he had to worry about his business and think up of new strategies and find ways to be more competitive. But it was also a necessary process for him to eventually conceive and put into practice Walmart. So much for overnight success!

So if you are planning to embark on a journey of entrepreneurship, whether it’s a tech start-up or a physical brick and mortar shop, or even a manufacturing or transportation business, it’s always important to think in the long run. Question yourself if you can see yourself doing this for the next 5-10 years. If you can, then forge ahead! If you can’t, then I suggest you think of alternatives because nothing comes easy and nothing comes free. Success comes to those who have the perseverance, determination, and iron-will to pull through with what they have started!

(Have any thoughts on this post? Do comment and share it with me please! Thanks!)

Starting Small Starting Lean

I have always been a fan of starting up a company with as little financing as possible.

There are many pros and cons of this approach. Some argue that you need money to make money (some also believe in the saying “high risk high return”). There is validity in this statement but I feel that there are many other opportunities and means to start a business on the lean. I am one clear example (not meaning to brag but I’m just saying there ARE people who are able to start a business without or with very little money).

I started my nail polish retail push-cart business with absolutely zero dollars and starting making money from the very first day I opened my push-cart. How I did it will be another story for another day but for now I would like to talk about something that really helped to validate my decision to start small and start lean.

For Christmas last year I received a book from a family member. It was a book that had caught my eye while walking past a bookshop while on the way to my gate at the airport where my plane was soon departing so I didn’t have the time to browse through it. But caught my eye it did!

It’s called “The $100 Startup” by Chris Guillbeau.

As you can probably already guess, the book is about starting a business with $100 or less. It’s filled with cases of real life people who are more or less accidental entrepreneurs, as the author puts it.

Some start out because of pure passion; some start out because they realized they have a particular skill to do something that people are willing to pay them for; while others just notice a problem or gap in the market and decide that they can fill it.

I’ve read the book so I can safely say that none of the people mentioned are “superstar entrepreneurs” like Mark Zuckerberg, Sir Richard Branson, Larry Page, or even Henry Ford for the matter. They are just normal, everyday people very much like you and I, really. I don’t mean that as a bad thing; but rather I think it’s very very very inspiring for anyone and everyone who’s ever thought of quitting a job they hate, and doing something they love every single day. Oh and these entrepreneurs aren’t your struggling-to-make-ends-meet kind of entrepreneurs. These guys are earning at least $50,000 – $100,000 annually! (Some do it full time while others are doing it on the sides on top of a day job that they already love so there was no reason to leave the job in the first place).

So if you have been thinking about being an entrepreneur for a long time, I suggest you stop procrastinating and get on your feet just like these guys did!

(Have something to add on? Just leave a comment and I’ll be happy to read it! Thanks!)