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Running Lean is one of the best book that will maximize your chance of startup success through lean startup methodology, in a practical step-by-step manner

Published by admin on October 8, 2012 | Leave a response

There are many great books related to these subjects. Lean Startup, Customer Development…. These books written by experts and successful entrepreneurs themselves include The Lean Startup, The Startup Owner’s Manual Those are great books by people who succeeded themselves! The book ‘The lean startup’ will give you a good idea of what it is and will attempt […]

Being Paralyzed by Ideas

Published by admin on October 6, 2012 | Leave a response

For the past 2 years, I’ve started 2 startups that ultimately failed. During the in between times when I don’t actually have a startup, I wasted most of my time idling or planning. And this is very frustrating. During the idea-problem discovery phase, I tend to think of many ideas that I believe is worth […]

My take on owning a home as an entrepreneur for aspiring entrepreneurs and young working adults

Published by admin on September 29, 2012 | Leave a response

Being in Asia, property investment is one of the hottest topic among young working adults. With the sort of return we’re looking over the past couple of years, everyone wants a piece of it, everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon. The reality is, yes, it’s a got great rate of return and, yes, if […]

Flawed Beliefs that Many Entrepreneurs Have

Published by admin on September 27, 2012 | Leave a response

More features = More customers <as opposed to> Right features = Most customers Startups are small versions of large companies with various departments <as opposed to> Startups are an integrated team of people doing customer development with various skill set for a common goal. Startups need comprehensive plans and projections <as opposed to> Startups are institutions or bodies […]

Dear entrepreneurs, help yourself succeed

Published by admin on September 25, 2012 | Leave a response

I just came back from another startup event (ideas.inc by NTU) at Singapore. Over the course of my entrepreneurship journey this past 2 years, I’ve learned so much. I’ve grew so much as an entrepreneur. My once blinded and naive optimism is now much more realistic. But I’m not one bit less optimistic and delusional. […]

(Untitled)

Published by admin on July 13, 2012 | Leave a response

Relentless Execution without knowing what to execute is a crime…

Published by admin on July 13, 2012 | Leave a response

True story.. Over the years of being an engineer, I’ve become more of an engineer.. what do I mean? Well, I find myself having ideas every now and then. It feels like a spark, a great moment of brilliance. “I’ve got this darn awesome idea that I think will solve lots of problem and will […]

It has arrived!!!!

Published by admin on July 7, 2012 | Leave a response

Startup Bible.

Published by admin on July 7, 2012 | Leave a response

Entrepreneurs should try not to be trapped in an echo chamber or follow any ideology to religiously. But there at certain things that we can learn from others who have traveled the journey almost similar to ours. It will always be a struggle to be able to read and still be original and creative. Whether […]

SO easy to get free hosting with Heroku without your dyno spinning down!

Published by admin on July 7, 2012 | Leave a response

Now that New Relic is a happy camper with Heroku, it’s super easy to keep your website running free on 1 dyno without it spinning down causing a long start-up time! How to do it? 1. Setup a pings controller with any action name you want (and modify your config/routes to ‘get’ this action) 2. […]

We build a landing page that looks like this in one day

We best guess the message that will work for our demographic. (we tried our best to put ourselves in the shoes of our target demographic and read the messages and either said hell yeah or hell no to each). Put any of the hell yeahs as your message. (if you are more diligent, A/B test that shit out of your messages to see which converts best. We didn’t do that. We should have.)

Give people 2 choices and they will choose 1

Notice the buttons. We made our visitors feel like an idiot if they chose to not carry on with our sign up funnel. Humans are psychological creatures. Back when I did sales, my mentor gave me some great advice. He said “Don’t ask your lukewarm prospect when is she free to meet. Instead, give her 2 timeslots and ask her which works better for her.” There’s no shame in selling your vision. That golden piece of advice opened doors for me and increased my prospect conversion rate by more than 10 folds. So, I decided let’s bring that online. Give them 2 choices and they are more likely to choose at least 1. But there’s more, we decided to make the second choice a really dumb choice. (Not everyone will bite it, but dude, it’s good enough if most will). There are counter arguments (what doesn’t?) against this like giving your users an option to opt-out is a bad idea. I don’t know about that. We never got to test it. Important to remember. Different strategies work differently for different people. Do your homework. Implement metrics!

Invite-only, Queue, Referrals

After our visitors signed up, we created a queue (OMG! is this an incrementing random number generator? or did we actually got to 13k sign ups?) and made the early version of our product an invite only thing. It’s one of those jedi tricks that kinda works. Well, not always. It depends on your product and demographic. But it worked for us. We got some referrals though just a handful (I’m embarrassed to share the number). But hey free traffic is very much appreciated. I love that. Thank you very much.

Ads to drive some traffic

Building a product doesn’t automagically gets users. Once we got the landing page up within a day, we started doing Facebook ads. Here’s the tricky bit. Facebook ads are easy to put up. It’s easy to get likes and clicks that won’t convert. Our lesson learned, be as specific as we can be. Don’t be sloppy. Don’t just target the entire country or city. Do some research. Find out what your ideal demographic likes. What kinda pages they like or companies they are associated with. Target towns not cities. Target languages if applicable and not to mention a smaller age group. Don’t be greedy, it’s only counter-effective. A whole blog post can be written on Facebook ad targeting. But here’s a gist of it. Try it out for yourself. Don’t be stingy and expect users. We spent SGD300 on our campaigns. That puts as at SGD0.30 user acquisition cost. We can do better. But guess what! At least we got initial traction without breaking the bank! Or better still, we launched our product with users ready.

Hello, I'm Josh Teng!

web & mobile development, startup, innovation, and some random things

admin

Running Lean is one of the best book that will maximize your chance of startup success through lean startup methodology, in a practical step-by-step manner

Being Paralyzed by Ideas

My take on owning a home as an entrepreneur for aspiring entrepreneurs and young working adults

Flawed Beliefs that Many Entrepreneurs Have

Dear entrepreneurs, help yourself succeed

(Untitled)

Relentless Execution without knowing what to execute is a crime…

It has arrived!!!!

Startup Bible.

SO easy to get free hosting with Heroku without your dyno spinning down!