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!

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!