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Rethink your entrepreneurial journey

I wanted to think over my entrepreneurial journey and share it with you, fellow entrepreneur. Once a year, I reflect upon the year that has passed. It feels as if in 2017, startup entrepreneurship has become part of the larger rat-race of society. What began as defiance against a society built on neatly parcelled careers and raises, became a successful, popular subculture, and in doing so, re-merged into the rat race.

Just ask yourself if you, like me, have felt anything like the following:

1. You are comfortable with the idea that if your startup does not work out, you will get a job at a tech company thanks to the strength of your startup experience. There is confidence, and then there’s complacency. I won’t lie. It’s been creeping in.
2. You view the outsourced projects that you are working on as more pressing and important than the success of your startup. Airbnb had their Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s. The lessons is that sugar is sweet, but if you have that instead of a whole meal, it will kill you with time.
3. You worry that decisions you make as a startup founder may not look good on your CV. Many factors can motivate a worry that a badly viewed mistake can affect your public image. None of those worries will help you make the right decision, though.
4. You worry about offending potential partners or acquirers more than the customers that you are missing out on. Especially true if you have a personal relationship with someone in the offended organisation. It takes a mental shift to be ok with the idea that you will have professional rivals, and on purpose, so that you can succeed.
5. You unconsciously benchmark your startup’s growth against your peers in the same or adjacent industries. This really can’t be helped when they appear in the news as much as you do. However, paying attention to it is another way of getting into a rat race. Besides, startup growth comes in spurts. Smooth growth charts are a lie.

Also Read: Growth is a dangerous vanity metric; Here’s what your ideal launch plan should be

6. You unconsciously seek out meetings with corporate leaders more than you seek out new customers. High-powered meetings are exciting! Powerful figures also have the means to lend you a hand. If you found that you met more executives than customers in 2016 though, you may need a rethink.
7. You find yourself thinking a lot about the occasional job offer that comes your way through LinkedIn. I’m pretty confident that a lot of startup founders and senior employees get offers through InMail because I received a few. Thinking about them makes me aware that I’m wondering which will get me ahead furthest in the rat race. I learned to view them as an opportunity to reverse-pitch what I’m working on instead. Try it.
8. You see a conference speaking opportunity as a profile-building exercise. By this I mean a personal profile. A good way to know if you are victim is to ask yourself how many slides about your background did you have at your last presentation? It ought to be zero, with incredibly few exceptions.
9. You have to be the highest paid person at the company since you are the founder. Though it’s common to be the highest paid person at the company, sometimes an opportunity to hire someone amazing will present itself, and for a lot of money. I don’t know if I could do it, but a founder who is ok being paid less than some of his team is saintly, and outside of the rat race.
10. You secretly wish that your larger competitor would just buy you already. Everyone wishes for an exit. However if it occupies a lot of your thoughts, perhaps you are in it for the wrong reasons.
11. You opt not to explore a new overseas market because the temporary relocation would really cramp your lifestyle. Moving someplace where the quality of life is lower is a step backwards for those keeping score.
12. You find yourself talking exclusively about growth and revenue in interviews. Aside from being poor presentation, it reflects a focus on score-keeping again. Besides, metrics ought to support an argument, not be the argument.
13. Your friends all work in startups but not one of them is also a founder. Nobody ought to be told how to live their lives or pick their friends. That said, the rest of us draw our lessons from how you live your life and pick your friends.
14. You think that the coming downturn in your space will affect you and the old-school incumbent equally. This is a problem because you see yourself in competition with established, old-school incumbents. You aren’t. Aside from the different scales that both operate at, seeing yourself in competition with them draws you into a destructive race against them.
15. You think that the massive growth in your space represents a great growth opportunity for you and the old-school incumbent equally. Explosive growth also explodes problems. It can entrench bad practices in the name of profit, and turn your company into another corporate treadmill. You can win the rat race, and still lose the spark of defiance that led you to choose entrepreneurship in the first place.

Also Read: 8  startup lessons I learnt from sailing in Yangon’s Inya Lake

16. You don’t understand why other entrepreneurs won’t just chill out more. Being out of the rat race is hard work. A race has an objective and rules. Entrepreneurs reject those rules in favour of creating our own. That’s twice as hard as just playing along.
17. You invest your savings the same way that your peers in corporate jobs do. Do you see your life turning out the same way as your peers in corporate jobs? I didn’t think so. But perhaps subconsciously you do. Why else would you take on the investment risk profile of a corporate employee when you aren’t one?
18. You want to get an MBA to further your career (even though you are the founder). I find this baffling. People don’t use most of what they learned in school at work, regardless of the job or level of education. So an MBA won’t make you a better entrepreneur. I can only guess that subconsciously some entrepreneurs expect to be back in a job where an MBA matters.
19. You tell people about the terrific things that you have achieved, not what your team has achieved. Being self-centred is awful in many ways, and one of them is as a way to grow a personal profile instead of a company profile. It shows a focus on self-aggrandizement, and corporate CEOs that we love to loathe.
20. You believe that if there’s no authoritative blog post written about how to do something, it probably isn’t worth doing. There is an unbelievable amount of material written about every aspect of a startup’s operations. A rat race player has no time to wonder about creative solutions to problems. Do you fall victim to this? By doing so, are you stifling your own creativity in service of efficiency and KPIs?

Also Read: How to be a great boss: Lessons for startup founders

I have a minor confession to make. There are a fair few mistakes on this list that I have made. 2017 seems as good a time as any to try something different, like writing for it’s own sake, and not just content marketing. More sharing and less measuring. Being a startup entrepreneur is something special, and I’m going to remember that.

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Wei Leen is head of marketing at WeAreSpaces. Check out our new coworking MVP SeekSpaces.

The views expressed here are of the author’s, and e27 may not necessarily subscribe to them. e27 invites members from Asia’s tech industry and startup community to share their honest opinions and expert knowledge with our readers. If you are interested in sharing your point of view, submit your post here.

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CoAssets expects to increase its user base in China by 300,000 within six months of its investment in Da Xian Bing

Australian Stock Exchange (ASX)-listed startup CoAssets today announced that it has made a RMB1 million (US$145,000) strategic investment in Fujian-based crowdfunding startup Da Xian Bing, for 10 per cent of the company, with 60 per cent to be recouped from CoAssets’ joint venture partner Fujian Yaosheng.

Some of the key terms of the investment includes additional performance-based consideration of up to RMB4 million (US$582,000), linked to reveue and user base hurdles. CoAssets will also appoint one of four directors to the board of Da Xian Bing.

According to a press statement by the company, CoAssets is looking forward to increase its China user base by 300,000 within six months of the investment in Da Xian Bing.

Da Xian Bing itself operates in the space of product crowdfunding, instead of investment crowdfunding like CoAssets, but the company believes that there is good potential and synergy for the overlap between users.

Also Read:

“We will be rolling out a series of marketing initiatives to engage Da Xian Bing users and we hope to convert most, if not all, of them to become registered investors of our CoAssets China platform,” explained CoAssets CTO and Co-Founder Dr. Seh Huan Kiat.

“With the 70,000 registered investors that we already have, we expect to see more than 370,000 registered investors by mid-2017 and potentially exceed the 400,000 registered investors market by end 2017. If we are able to maintain our investor conversion rate and investment amount at the average of about two per cent and S$10,000 (US$7,000) respectively, the amount of crowdfunding projects we can undertake will significantly increase,” he added.

Prior to this investment, CoAssets has already have its own operation in China, via a 40 per cent joint venture with Fujian Yaosheng.

It began listing at the ASX on September 2016.

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This deal appears to be a win for all. Investors made money, Down sold its profitable company and Paktor strengthens its foothold in the US

The Singaporean dating app Paktor has acquired Down, a San Francisco-based online dating company that brought sex to the forefront of its sales pitch, according to a report in TechCrunch on Friday.

The deal is reportedly worth “several million” and would be considered a win for investors as Down only raised US$1 million in total funding. Great Oaks Venture Capital and Tim Draper were the investors.

According to the article, Down (and its sister app Sweet) will continue to operate and the company’s CEO Colin Hodge will join Paktor as the head of Paktor Labs. Paktor Labs is a department with the mandate to develop new ideas and acquire other companies.

Down made its debut as ‘Bang With Friends’ and almost immediately was surrounded by controversy. It’s logo was two people having sex in the doggy-style position and many people were turned off by its obvious play towards casual sex.

Also Read: Alibaba Cloud, NUS and EZ-Link tie-up for big data initiative in Singapore

The idea behind the app was to build a web of friends and when the urge struck, reach out to the network for sex.

The company eventually grew the network to include friends-of-friends, which broadened the possible matches and mitigated the awkwardness of propositioning a friend or acquaintance for a casual night together.

Bang With Friends, launched in 2013, wanted to reject the supposed ‘true love’ sales pitch of dating apps and be honest about what many people use dating apps for — sex.

This theory is not necessarily true. In many parts of the world, online dating apps have become a mandatory accessory for the modern dating environment and sex is very often not the end goal.

In October 2013, Bang With Friends was forced to change its name to ‘Down’ after settling a copyright infringement suit with the online gaming company Zynga (who owns the Scrabble-like game ‘Words with Friends’).

Also Read: Singapore’s Marvelstone Group positions itself for rise of Smart Cities

For Paktor, the dating app already has a presence in the US and a major part of its US$32.5 million funding round was to spur international expansion. Paktor has raised a total of US$57.5 million and has grown into the leading online dating app in Southeast Asia.

In December, the company acquired a controlling stake in 17 media, a Taiwanese live-streaming app. That acquisition diversified Paktor’s offerings by bringing digital entertainment into the fold. The acquisition of Down is more in-line with Paktor’s traditional business model.

One final note, Down was profitable at the time of the Paktor acquisition.

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Tech in Asia then and now.

Willis Wee, founder and CEO of Tech in Asia (then Penn Olson), secured his first investment in 2011 without a business plan. Still a college student and new to the startup world, he nonetheless came up with one in three hours.

It was raw, but convincing enough.

View and download this document on Slideshare. Here’s the spreadsheet of the financial projections.

By 2012, Willis had built a core team of 11, and tripled the site’s monthly pageviews. To grow further, he had to raise another round of funding.

This time around, his slide deck wouldn’t look out of place in today’s startup world.

View and download this document on Slideshare.

Glimpse of the future

Investor pitch decks are about promoting not just the company’s current strengths, but also what it can become. They sell the beautiful story of the constant upward climb into rapid user growth and abundant moolah.

Real life is far more complicated though, and you can see this when you compare where Tech in Asia is today with what was pitched in those presentations.

Many of our plans died. Our expansion into China failed as we couldn’t find product-market fit.

We tried building a wiki of startups and investors, but were let down by an outsourcing firm we engaged. Willis eventually ditched the idea as he felt building a product wasn’t his cup of tea.

The lack of a startup database also meant that the idea for a jobs board couldn’t take off.

A lot of people complained that the ads were very annoying. So we decided not to do it.

Another idea that was pitched in both presentations was that we’d monetize through advertising. Willis pulled the plug even though he was seeing much-needed revenue from it. He made S$3,000 (US$2,100) a month from advertising before any external funding came in.

“I didn’t know how to build products but I cared about our users. A lot of people complained that the ads were very annoying. So we decided not to do it,” he says.

A big regret that Willis has – and perhaps his biggest mistake so far – was not investing in product and engineering fast enough.

“We became more product- and engineering-focused only much later,” he adds.

What went right

It’s still heartening to see, though, how many of the ideas pitched since 2011 have come to life today.

Our conferences now span four countries. We have a solid product and engineering team. We finally have a database of startups and investors, as well as a jobs board.

We’ve found an advertising model in branded content that promises a superior user experience over banner ads.

Against this backdrop, it’s amusing to see Willis get embarrassed over the mistakes in the first business plan as we look at it together.

What he isn’t embarrassed about, however, is what Tech in Asia has achieved.

“I feel happy I surpassed these numbers,” he says. “Whatever I promised investors, they tended to be close to what I achieved in the end.”

Got a cool slide deck you want to share? Send them to editors@techinasia.com! We’re looking for investor pitch decks, as well as any insightful presentations on any tech-related topics you may have given recently. We’ll promote the best ones with the Tech in Asia community!

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If you are studying in Japan this semester and want a little bit of help, these are some of the best options for when you’re stuck in traffic on a Tokyo tram

There are plentiful options for translation when it comes to the big European dialects. Virtually every major company with a hope of breaking into new markets immediately tries to localize its English websites into Spanish, French, German, and Italian.

But the Asian languages are just as important for business growth and worth study. Far fewer students, however, take the plunge and despite the massive importance of Mandarin, Korean, and Cantonese, that lower demand has held back some of the options available online for quick translation.

While Mandarin Chinese’s large speaking population has ameliorated the situation for students of the language, it might surprise some that there are still some limits to major languages like Japanese.

Here are a few of the options available to you when you need to get some fast help.

Yomiwa

Strengths: Strong advanced content, works offline, great Kanji recognition power
Weaknesses: Not best for beginners

Yomiwa is an object-character recognition app (OCR) that opens directly from your image gallery. Reviews give it good scores on Kanji recognition, though some report it can be wonky from time to time on certain characters.

Also Read: 3 reasons why businesses should put the ‘help’ back in helpdesks

“Good app for those with their basics down. Not for those completely new to the language,” remarked Marc Anthony Corla in a review on Google Play. “Don’t expect instant literal translations for media such as books or manga. But it’s a great help for those who want to polish up their kana skills and are having trouble with them pesky kanji. Great app overall. Can be a bit wonky with character recognition at times. Still bought the feature though lol.”

Jsho – Japanese Dictionary (4.6 in Play Store)

Strengths: Analyzes every element of a full phrase for better insight
Weaknesses: Absurd ad placement

When you set out to make a dictionary for the student of a new language, you need to balance skill level and practicality. Jsho apparently has an extremely strong vocabulary database, covering things as far flung as deep science-related terms.

“It’s useful in helping you find words, and if you’re trying to understand a sentence without Google Translate, you can input the sentence in this app and it will tell you what each word means, allowing you to understand it in your own way,” Aish Halter wrote on February 3, 2016.

While all apps need to sustain themselves, the way Jsho situates its apps solicits visceral irritation from some users to the point it drops their app ratings from five down to three stars.

“It’s effing hard to concentrate when there’s a man walking underneath your eye line or a tank driving just below you. Makes looking at this dictionary almost impossible. Kill the ads, charge a £1 for this app and I’ll buy it,” wrote Ashley Cowan in his review from June 10, 2016.

Japanese English Translator by GreenLife Apps (4.4 in Play Store)

Strengths: Word of the day feature, phonetic option, very quick access
Weaknesses: Some archaic translations of Kanji, some errors in Romaji spelling/pronunciation correspondence, no offline option

Complaints seem to be nit picky, like the inability to highlight a translation and copy it rather than using the app’s sharing function. It has over 5,400 five-star recommendations out of just more than 8,600 reviews. There might be some concern that the translations are a bit too archaic or formal.

“It’s a good app, some of the translation is a little off,” wrote Victoria Apolinar in a review. “Kanji Japanese people don’t use anymore but its close enough if your [sic] lost and alone someone could help you.”

Japanese Kanji Study (4.8 in the Play Store)

Strengths: Can make your own study lists, gives feedback, includes study targets
Weaknesses: It’s not free?

This app lets you draw Kanji symbols on your screen. Developed by Chase Colburn, it has a 4.8 score with over 500,000 downloads. More than 7,300 of its 8,500 reviews give it five stars. A common thread in the reviews is it’s a quick app to use to kill time and practice, making good use of a spare five minutes. The most recent non-five-star review comes from a user complaining some of the app’s features aren’t free when he was under the impression they would be.

Also Read: Growth is a dangerous vanity metric; Here’s what your ideal launch plan should be

“This is a fun way to practice kanji and my favorite app for studying stroke order and accuracy,” wrote user E Leaf in a recent review. “I was hesitant to pay for a study app but this one was well worth it. Some time ago I wrote the developer with a suggestion they replied right away. So they value your input!”

“Now this app is convenient to refresh ur kanji knowledge during daily commutes, while chilling in bed, on the toilet…” wrote Chris Lang in a review on January 13, a review he probably didn’t expect to get quoted in a tech publication. “Really quite hyped atm.”

Learn Japanese Free (4.6 in the Play Store)

Strengths: Good for teaching critical phrases in Japanese
Weaknesses: Annoying notifications even when the app isn’t open, some bugs with font size

While it’s not going to teach you the basics, it hits on an often neglected element of language learning: phrases and expressions. The name doesn’t inform users of this, but that has not hurt its score all that much with a 4.6 rating and over 100,000 downloads (4,400 five-star reviews out of 6,200).

A good review that covers the pluses and minuses can be found with Valerie Meiss, who wrote hers at the beginning of December.

“At first this app annoyed me, it kept telling me random phrases and I couldn’t figure out how to get it to turn off. I still can’t, but now I enjoy the subtle new sentences, and while I’m not memorizing all of them, I know they are there for me to look up when needed. I’ll be in Japan in less than a month, and this has been a confidence booster!”

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Copyright: klenova / 123RF Stock Photo

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Make service an organisational philosophy and mission — it affects the way products are developed, shipped, and delivered

No product or service is ever perfect. This means brands and businesses would have their fair share of customer issues and complaints. Unfortunately, it may seem that helpdesks can contribute to those frustrations.

Customer support often becomes the butt of jokes. People typically make fun of the process – being routed to a different continent and having some offshore support agent with a funny accent deal with their frustrations, for example.

Some of us in Southeast Asia may take offence since millions of those support agent jobs are based on our shores. However, we get to acknowledge the simple truth that, even with local companies serving local clients, customer service can be quite disappointing.

All businesses seem to face an uphill battle to overcome the stigma of their helpdesks not being helpful.

1 – Helpdesk technology has evolved

The interesting thing is helpdesk technologies and the support industry have improved over the years, and there seems to be no excuse to have dissatisfied customers. Support software has already seen a great deal of innovation, incorporating best practices and psychology into workflows and user experiences.

Also Read: From Archives: 9 ways social media can help you deliver exceptional customer service

These systems have become so much more than just ticketing and response systems. There’s multichannel support, which often turns into more of a community than just a support mechanism. Think of businesses that use social media to manage customer complaints. There are also self-help and knowledgebase features.

Going beyond just reaching out and responding to customers, more sophisticated solutions like SysAid’s helpdesk, for one, provides more than just a customer service channel, but also analytics and business intelligence to help business perform better.

Even the free and open source solutions have automation and escalation features, such as OSticket, for instance.

And, thanks to cloud computing, investing in a helpdesk system has become more affordable, and implementation is now quick and easy. So why are there still all of these problems with support?

2 – Customers appreciate a ‘helping’ mindset

It’s in the actual practice where we see the gap. Support departments are highly stressful environments. Support agents bear the brunt of irate customers, and many of these customers can be quite harsh.

Thus, agents have little choice but take the abuse. However, genuine enthusiasm, positivity, and a genuine desire to help can be infectious and can shine through to appease angry customers and resolve issues.

Support departments should, therefore, be passionate about providing a genuine service to customers. All support services should be founded on the following pillars:

• Accessibility – Aim for various channels (chat, email, phone, social media) that suit customer behaviour.
• Human touch – Let people deal with people. Support personnel should be polite and understanding and should display enthusiasm about the product. Empathise with the customer.
• Know-how – Support people, should know the product and service, the issues, and how to solve them.
• Proactivity – Support teams should towards resolving problems in a timely and satisfactory manner.

Because of social media, noisy and dissatisfied customers can stunt growth for any business. On the inverse, satisfied customers are inclined to refer friends and colleagues. One very happy customer can bring in 9 more. Smaller ventures should even have scale on their side and should be able to respond even quicker than bigger counterparts.

3 – Businesses should be proactive

One can argue that automation can take away the personal touch in customer interaction. But anyone who has used or implemented helpdesk systems would agree that having them in place is so much better than not having one at all. Technology is there for work to be easy, but if the people using them do not have the proper mindset, then the tools become moot.

Also Read: 6 user experience lessons every founder should know

It’s also unfair to put all the blame regarding customer dissatisfaction solely on support departments. They are more of the ‘pound of cure’ than the ‘ounce of prevention’. Take the case of Samsung’s exploding batteries. Samsung’s support took a heavy pummelling because of that. However, design and manufacturing defects aren’t the fault of the support department.

It also isn’t rare for large enterprises to outsource support to smaller contractors. In cases like in the Philippines, there seems to be a dearth in talent servicing locals, since the best support agents work for offshore accounts.

Service is a mission

So the key idea here is for organisations as a whole should step up and adapt a customer-focused mindset. Making service an organisational philosophy and mission often affects the way products are developed, shipped, and delivered. The more care businesses put into what they do, the more satisfied customers they will get. It may also be time to bring back customer support in-house to minimise the gap between mindset and practice. Bring back ‘help’ to the helpdesk.

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The views expressed here are of the author’s, and e27 may not necessarily subscribe to them. e27 invites members from Asia’s tech industry and startup community to share their honest opinions and expert knowledge with our readers. If you are interested in sharing your point of view, submit your post here.

Featured Image Copyright: chrisdorney / 123RF Stock Photo

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Here’s our newest round-up of the featured startups on our site this week. If you have startup tips or story suggestions, feel free to email us. Enjoy this week’s list!

1. The Artling | Singapore (Startup Profile)

Art and luxury item marketplace The Artling operates TheArtling.com, an online art gallery that offers curated works of art for sale, and the more recently launched Luxglove, a marketplace for luxury and collectible items, including pre-owned jewelry, watches, artworks, and even classic cars and old whiskey.

2. Cocociti | India (Startup Profile)

Cocociti is a social network through which people can post their wishes and grant them through their connections. People are supposed to leverage their networks to help them reach their goals. The startup will also offer suggestions to “add value” to a wish.

3. AppsFlyer | Israel (Startup Profile)

AppsFlyer is a marketing analytics startup that specializes in extracting insights from mobile app installs and usage. It’s tools are integrated into most popular mobile apps and systems to monitor their use. This helps marketers target their campaigns with greater accuracy and measure their effectiveness and the return on their investment.

4. Medaino | India (Startup Profile)

Health monitoring startup Medaino Healthcare’s device H.O.M.E. can non-invasively measure ECG, blood pressure, respiratory rate, air quality, hemoglobin, blood oximetry, and heart rate. The device maintains a data trail, analyzes the information, and makes suggestions for health goals or warns a doctor’s care is needed. Users get routine reports with insights into their daily lives.

5. ParkingRhino | India (Startup Profile)

Bangalore-based startup ParkingRhino helps people book parking spots through an app. Meanwhile, parking lot owners using pen and paper to keep track of their parking spots can use the app instead, as well as process payments without cash.

6. Ezi Drive | India

Launched in 2008, Ezi Drive helps people with cars stuck at various places in the city. The company now has 85,000 users and 750 drivers on board and it’s clocking just under 1000 bookings across its services each day.

7. Dragonera | Israel

Dragonera wants to help founders bring their product to life faster and more efficiently. It’s an AI-driven platform that’s automating the entire software development process. The startup also aims at boosting innovation in existing firms by trialing new products and services.

Startup lists

8 – 12: 5 rising startups in Japan

13 – 21: These 9 Chinese startups are poised to grab 2017 by the horns

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Like RSS? There’s always our Asia startups RSS feed!

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A month ago, I was meeting some friends for lunch. It was a weekend, and food orders somehow quickly morphed into beer orders. I had taken my car, so I was quietly focusing on my starters, when a friend caught on and offered a suggestion.

“If you are not drinking because you are worried about the car, why don’t you book an EziDrive?”

Gingerly, I fired up the website on my phone, and was given a confirmed booking within minutes. Whatever apprehensions I had were swept away when the driver personally called to confirm that he was coming, even apologizing for a potential 15 minute delay due to traffic. If you’re in an Indian city, you’ll know that a delay of 15 minutes is not considered a delay by almost anybody, and rarely have I seen anyone ever apologize for it.

The value proposition is different from an Uber, or Ola.

The driver came on time and found me inside the restaurant we were at. He confirmed we were the right booking, showed me his driver ID, took the car keys, drove us back home, parked the car, and then left with the US$4 I owed him.

That experience was so smooth, I tried EziDrive again a few days later, and got an even smoother driving experience.

Bangalore-based EziDrive was launched in 2008 to help people with cars stuck at various places in the city, founder and managing director Ram Prasath tells me. Like with me, its user base is almost exclusively generated by word-of-mouth publicity.

Photo credit: damedeeso / 123RF.

Ram is an anomaly in the world of tech startups today. He has an MBA degree, but no school pedigree to boast of. He doesn’t have VC backing either. The seed money came from his own savings.

“I was going through the same requirements that I serve today. I had to travel a lot and I didn’t always want to hire a car. Sometimes my family had to travel, and we needed a driver,” he says.

“So I launched the company as a hobby. Then as it started gaining grounds, I put IT systems and processes in place, formalized driver requirements and built a team,” says Ram.

The company now has 85,000 users and 750 drivers on board. This year, EziDrive is expecting to make US$293,621 in revenue. At the core is a twenty-member team that works from Bangalore. So far, EziDrive has booked about 1.5 million rides, says Ram.

The company has 85,000 users and 750 drivers on board.

“We are operationally profitable, but we don’t make much in net profits because whatever excess cash flow we generate is now being reinvested for software upgrades,” he says.

But if the barrier for entry was low for him, what is stopping others from replicating the business?

Two things. Firstly, the low barrier in 2008 isn’t necessarily low anymore, given how times have changed. “Everything we have done, our IT upgrades, have been a reflection of customer demands. Now I know exactly what my customer wants. For anyone to build this system now, they have to spend that much time to do it right,” Ram says.

Secondly, training drivers who aren’t officially employees of the company, and ensuring they keep standards from falling is a major effort that makes a lot of startups (and VCs) think a people-driven business is too risky.

Uber, Ola, and barriers

Ram’s company doesn’t employ drivers. Instead, it partners with them. Drivers pay the company anything between US$22 to US$30 each month as commission.

On average, EziDrive’s clocking just under 1000 bookings across its services each day, he said. In 2014, the company launched cab hiring services, but that accounts for less than 20 percent of the business.

But isn’t it hard to keep this business up in a world that has tasted Uber?

“The value proposition is different,” Ram says. “Uber and Ola are fighting against each other over costs. Each one is trying to be the cheapest, and that’s how they are building their customer base. We don’t do cheapest. Our customers come to us because they like our service, we don’t even spend money on marketing, simply because we don’t have that money to spend.”

The EziDrive team. founder Ram is fourth from right. Photo credit: EziDrive.

Customers who need to make multiple stops – like a mom who wants to go shopping for the day – hire EziDrive, he explains. Those who need regular pickups and drop-offs to the office and airport will also opt for the startup’s service.

When Ram thought of the company, on-demand taxis were not popular, and his business didn’t have a high barrier to entry. At the time, Ram says all he needed was a few dependable drivers and a person to man the phone line.

But as demand started growing, so did needs. In 2010, the company set up a system to track customer details, as well as driver details for safety and convenience. EziDrive started taking on more drivers via registration.

“Satisfaction was high, and the same customers started calling us again and again. Which means we had to share their numbers with our drivers,” Ram explains.

From there, the company went on to launch an app for its driver partners. The customer app is in beta, to be rolled out by February. After the app it functional, Ram wants to expand business to Delhi and Hyderabad. EziDrive launched in Chennai in 2012.

The training rigor

Not unaware of the challenges of running a people-based startup, Ram says the EziDrive team has put in numerous checks in place.

“The biggest problem we see is that we as a company need to have a hold on the driver – something that ensures reliability. When it’s a small company, maybe no one bothers. But now people have come to trust us, and that is the biggest challenge, to make sure each and every driver we deploy is well-mannered, and holds himself to the quality standards that we promise to our customers,” he says.

Photo credit: Central Western Daily

EziDrive says it takes in drivers who have at least three years of experience, runs background checks on them, and asks them to submit various documents with the company.

If the background checks don’t work out, the driver is not recruited. If it does, the driver is then asked to go through an induction, where trainers and videos walk them through the most granular aspects of customer service.

“For example, we start with something as basic as saying, ‘you have to have a shower and wear clean clothes when you start your shift,’ ‘don’t talk on the phone,’ and ‘don’t chat with a customer unless spoken to.’ The last one is to ensure busy customers, say someone who is working, is not bothered by an overly chatty driver,” Ram says.

The company also allows for something called a “recurring driver” for someone who wants regular pick-ups and drops from say the office, or other places. A lot of customers end up asking for the same driver. But if a customer tags a driver “non preferred,” they are not matched with the same person again.

“For all new drivers that come into the system, we call up our customers to get feedback. We call up their first three customers. If anyone complains, we call in the driver to discuss what happened. Sometimes we retrain them, and make sure they understand what the issue was before he takes another job with us. Then we monitor him,” he says.

EziDrive charges about US$4 for a three hour round trip (even if you only ask for a one way drop), while an outstation gig starts at US$12. It also offers full weekend packages.

What about future plans? Won’t expanding into Delhi and other cities require more money?

“We are open to funding, but the value proposition should be ok for us,” Ram says.

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Photo credit: Pixabay.

Sociolla, an ecommerce site for all kinds of cosmetics and beauty products just freshened up with a new round of financing.

Istyle plans to expand its business to Indonesia through this partnership.

The startup’s series B comes from Istyle, a Tokyo stock exchange-listed fashion company that operates, among other things, popular beauty website @cosme in Japan. East Ventures also participated in the round. The terms weren’t disclosed.

Istyle plans to expand its business operations to Indonesia through its partnership with Sociolla. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand will follow later this year, Sociolla said in a statement.

The Jakarta-based startup was co-founded by Christopher Madiam, John Rasjid, and Chrisanti Indiana in March 2015. Sociolla claims it offers 140 local and foreign beauty brands. It competes with names like Luxola, a Singapore-based beauty ecommerce firm that covers most of Southeast Asia and was acquired by LVMH back in July 2015.

Its series A in November 2015 was a seven-figure round led by Venturra Capital. East Ventures also invested then, along with angel investor Steve Christian of Indonesian online portal KapanLagi Network.

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Don’t be afraid to fail to grow

Growth is the goal each startup aspires towards. The team dreams about the hockey-stick shaped graph, growing exponentially and becoming successful startup founders/employees. Which is why it isn’t surprising that growth immediately becomes the KEY goal for every startup. They almost always set growth targets/milestones pre-launch.

Growth targets at early stage startups are arbitrary, farcical and even dangerous.

Firstly, they are a vanity metric.

Secondly, they have a dangerous effect of demoralising the entire team when they “fail to grow”  —  because they are almost always going to fail to grow.

Also Read: The 5 customer happiness metrics you should be tracking

Here’s the likely scenario for a typical startup launch :

• Startup sets a date for launch and gears all its efforts toward meeting it.
• Launch day arrives and the team gets all their friends to share on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
• The team starts seeing some signups and gets excited and pumped up.
• This picks up steam as the network effort spreads and more and more friend/family sends traffic and signups to the startup to ‘support’ the team.
• Some early adopters that are genuinely interested in the product hear about it through this effect or some rudimentary marketing efforts and sign up.
• The startup is meeting its growth forecasts and goals so far — everyone in the team feels good.
• This effect starts to wear off and the startup looks for more boosters — PR & CPC for example — two quick ways to get traffic.
• If the startup is even remotely interesting and the team puts in some effort, eventually a tech blog (TechCrunch/TechinAsia/e27) will cover them at some point.
• This sets traffic soaring, signups increase as the startup gets more early adopters.
• The team is riding on a high and they meet growth goals again, posting strong numbers. Again, everyone on the team is motivated and happy.
• Eventually they become yesterday’s news and the novelty wears off. The startup may not be ROI positive in their CPC efforts.
• Traffic numbers start to drop and ‘growth’ flattens out.
• The startup tries various marketing channels trying to replicate their explosive start out of the gate to no avail.
• Eventually the team becomes demoralised as they miss growth targets consistently, growth stagnates and the team officially runs out of marketing ideas on how to “sell” the startup. They fall into the trough of sorrow.

Vanity metrics

Growth is a vanity metric, because growth doesn’t matter at the early stage.

At launch, the startup believes that a group of users are suffering from a certain problem. It has an offering that it thinks solves a problem for them. It also thinks that these users are willing to pay a price for this product. BUT these are just hypotheses and must be tested. Only after these hypotheses are validated does growth matter.

Also Read: Infographic: 3 key metrics for measuring marketplace success

A startup’s focus should be on validating product/market fit as soon as possible through customer development. Growth numbers at this point is just noise.

The trough of sorrow

The trough of sorrow is a tough place to be. I’ve been there with a startup I was working with  —  feeling completely tapped out of ideas and no way to get things moving. Coming into work was depressing and everyday left us in the team feeling unfulfilled with the work we’d done. We sailed along for a bit with some ups and downs. Mostly downs. We finally did reach the promised land.

We got there by running one experiment that proved a hypothesis. It resulted in a customer segment pivot and a minor product pivot. This process took nine months. That’s a lot of runway to burn for an early stage startup. I believe that we could have gotten to that stage in three months.

The trough of sorrow is extremely demoralising on the team and has an adverse effect on company culture overall. It and excessive burnt runway can be avoided by avoiding the initiation and by abolishing growth goals.

Ideal launch plan

An ideal launch plan involves removing as much noise as possible from the process of validating our hypotheses and proving product/market fit.

This means avoiding the friends-and-family support injection, which IS NOT going to be the boost you need to jumpstart your growth to 1 million users. It is a false spike of numbers that has no added value to the startup’s mission.

The startup should focus on getting its product in front of relevant target customers, obtaining customer feedback and validating their hypotheses. Iterations may occur or even pivots- but the team will not feel demoralised as they know that they are making progress learning about their users/market/product. They are meeting their goals of learning.

Once product/market fit is achieved, PR and friends & families may be welcome boosts of traffic, converting at a higher rate. With a post PMF product, word of mouth may automatically become a marketing channel as well.

As we learnt early on in life with the story of the Tortoise and the Hare — slow and steady wins the race.

I’ve decided to write in greater detail about the ‘ideal launch’ — the growth mindset and the processes that go into navigating a startup to product market fit and my next few essays will be about this — growing from 0 to 1,000 users. Subscribe to updates at startupmarketing.today.

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The views expressed here are of the author’s, and e27 may not necessarily subscribe to them. e27 invites members from Asia’s tech industry and startup community to share their honest opinions and expert knowledge with our readers. If you are interested in sharing your point of view, submit your post here.

Featured Image Copyright: bwylezich / 123RF Stock Photo

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