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For a Better Future in Malaysia
I fear for the future of Malaysia. I live on the cutting edge of technology and I take deep interest in global trade.
The truth of the matter is that we may not have competitive advantage in the future. Technology companies are changing the way the world works. People know it but don’t fully internalize what it means for all of us 5, 10, 20 years down the road.
It simply means we become redundant. No jobs, but with bills to pay and lifestyle expectations to meet.
Believe it or not, we are at an extremely good standing in relation to many other parts of the world today.
Our nation’s founding fathers, past and current leaders as well as the people have largely worked hard to build Malaysia to a point where we are easily enjoying a life that is better than half, if not three quarters, of the world.
The question is where will we be in the next decades to come?
Let’s take an example. My ATM card expired a week back and I thought I had to go to Maybank during business hours to get it replaced. Guess what? Turns out, all I had to do was put in my old ATM card in a machine and a new one just came out within seconds. I spoke to no human beings and I could have gotten it done anytime of the day. It was cool. The geek in me was fascinated and excited. But I inevitably couldn’t help thinking about the person who’d lost his/her job because of this.
The future is harsh for the millions of individuals who will be irrelevant. This is true not just for Malaysia but even for advanced countries like the United States.
And from a nationalistic point of view, it’s hard to see Malaysia being competitive in manufacturing. It’s hard to confidently say that oil will continue to be in demand with renewable energy becoming more affordable. It’s hard to say that our agriculture will remain competitive with every other nation competing with better crops at cheaper prices because of agriculture technology. It’s hard to say that our service industry will continue to supply jobs because of automation. It’s hard to say people will need rubber or wood because of 3D printing.
So where do we stand?
Technology companies are becoming bigger and bigger. Technology is not an industry that stands on its own. The very purpose of technology is to change how things work and that means changing how banks operate, how governments rule, how farmers harvest, how athletes train, how investment analysts pick stocks, how customer service is handled, how cars are driven or not driven. Every industry is and will be disrupted.
To continue to prosper as a nation, we need such companies to be based out of or have offices in Malaysia to create high paying jobs and propel us to becoming a high income nation. Whether it’s a European company or a Chinese company or an American company or our very own local companies, we need them here to create jobs for the millions of parents who wants a good future for their kids, for the young ambitious individual to have hope of success and for all of us to repay our parents for their sacrifices.
The solution is simple. Look at China. They are a formidable superpower in the world not just because of their population but because of the talent that exists. Talent is the answer to a better future for all of us as a whole.
I’m speaking with hope. I’ve spent years in the U.S. and I recognize the brilliance that we all possess. The disparity may exist in Malaysia, but there is no reason for us to fail.
I urge the government to focus their efforts on developing talent for key areas such as software and data. I acknowledge and am proud that our government has the foresight to have already began investing in that. MDEC has become an agency I truly respect. However, for this to work, all ministries and departments will need to work more closely on this as the ultimate national agenda. The ministry of education should re-examine budget allocations to give key focus on updating curriculum, relevancy and teachers. The ministry of trade should attract tech companies from across the globe to Malaysia. The ministry of youth and sports should encourage youth to explore careers in technology and careers in modern companies, not just traditional MNCs where our youth ends up being the accountant that may be replaced. The ministry of human resource can allocate an even greater proportion of funding to human capital development in technology.
I may be stating what our ministries are already doing. This brings me to another point, majority of my generation don’t watch budget speeches or read newspapers. Most people only care about the tax that they save. I happen to know some of the effort our government has already started. But how about everyone else? Being on social media alone isn’t the answer. How can it be better? Or maybe, our government websites just simply needs to be of higher quality.
The second effort our government can do is to attract and incentivize our fellow accomplished Malaysians living abroad to come back to start profitable companies and mentor the young. We have engineers at Facebook, Google, Uber and more. You name it, there is a Malaysian there. How will we bring them back? Give them hope, show them a path and incentivize them. Malaysia is a land full of opportunities. That is why I left U.S. to be here. I’m a first class citizen here, primed, to pursue my ambitions with hope. How can we make TalentCorp an even greater success?
Thirdly, for this to work, the people of Malaysia need to recognize that we are in control of our own destiny. Regardless of political view, we need to work hard and to voice out (not merely complain) what we need to make things happen to our government. Participate in dialogues with the government and tweet the ministers with actionable ideas.
We should no longer wait. Yes, outcome from change may take time to realize. But if we unite as a nation we can soar faster than we can ever imagine.
The Reasons For Being A Founder
The past 2 weeks were full of congratulations for our recent fundraised. I’m thankful for the wishes! We had no champaign popping.
I know nobody likes downers. But behind all the glitz and glamour of being an entrepreneur:
I work in 8 different departments in my company, Management, Finance, Legal, HR, Program, Marketing, Engineering, Customer Support. The bigger the company grows, the more paychecks depend on the company. Each decision becomes more exciting but also more scary.
I need 8 hours of sleep to function but only managed 5 lately. I get ulcers, lose KGs, lose friends.
I’m expected to remain calm in a sea of storm, to smile in the midst of a tragedy, to hustle even when I’m tired, to think big even when I’m paranoid.
Such is the reality of being a founder.
This post isn’t about ranting, though. It’s a reality check. Fighting challenges is becoming something I’m very good at. After all, there are bigger problems in the world.
At some point, entrepreneurs no longer do what they do for the money (at some point, most founders realize that there are way easier ways to make a lot of money at higher probabilities).
We do it because we want to do something big (the ambition), fix a problem (the passion), serve our customers well (the reason), and most importantly, give our team a fun, exciting, challenging and rewarding place to call work one of their hobbies (the commitment).
To everyone working in a startup, press on!
Checkout the best coding school in Southeast Asia https://www.nextacademy.com
How we got 1000 sign ups in 7 days with no real product in place
“Stop thinking too much and be willing to spend some money.”
So here’s the problem. You have an idea but you keep wondering how to get the word out. You spend time brainstorming strategies and listing them out. That’s great but I say forget that. I tried that countless time and all I ended up with are lists of to-dos. I don’t know about you but nothing is least exciting than that. The are no quick recipes for growth. But I believe the fundamentals to attempting growth is the same. It’s not just about the strategies themselves but the willingness of swift experimentations that works. A great marketer isn’t how brilliant he/she is but rather how quickly he/she is willing to try something out.
Ok. Screw the rhetorics, here’s how we did it.
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.
Takeaway
So here’s what you need to do. Build your landing page. And market it while you get back to building your product. Check back on metrics to see if you’re throwing money blindly.

Now, BE NICE and DOWNLOAD our app! http://wobb.my
Peace out. Still building a product people will love.
Was late this morning trying to figure out the code logic that powers this vacuum cleaner #thingswedoathackervilla (at HackerVilla)
Audrey Taught Me Some GO (GO vs Ruby)
GO is a fantastic language. It’s less resource intensive and has a pretty interesting concurrency model that makes scaling less expensive.

Over the weekend, we had Audrey, from Singapore come over to Kuala Lumpur to be a lightning talk speaker at our inaugural RailsGirls KL event. On Sunday, however, we decided to exchange knowledge in Ruby (me) and GO (Audrey). We decided to compare the languages in a very naive, unscientific way by counting the number of lines of code to do the same thing in both languages and here’s what we came up with (Ruby on the left, GO on the right):

Conclusion:

In this case, Ruby clearly wins in terms of being a concise language to get our defined job done.

From the look of this, I will tinker around with GO but will definitely stick with Ruby for my current production applications that can hardly be described as ‘high traffic’ .

Hello, I'm Josh Teng!

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

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