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Some Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs
My circle of friends tends to be entrepreneurs because of the events I go to, the struggles I face and the emotions I experience. I observe, get inspired by them and have also identified patterns on why they are who they are. My greatest respect belongs to those who failed and got back up.
These are the cold hard truth that people need to accept when embarking on the entrepreneurship journey. I hope it doesn’t scare people away from entrepreneurship but to be better prepared for the journey. For now, I don’t want to write an aspirational and encouraging piece. I’ll leave that to someone else.
This list is far from exhaustive. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, more important traits. If you want to defy all odds, if you want to have a shot at all, if you want it bad enough, you gotta stop aspiring and start doing and enduring.
Stop seeking validation
We’ve been taught to seek answers from authorities - whether a parent, a teacher, a manager, a respected role model or a friend that we so desperately want to have. While this may still be alright for a kid, most adults never grow out of it. The world is more clueless than most would expect and entrepreneurship is not something that has a recipe or formula for guaranteed success. Everyone’s path is going to be unique. Most strong entrepreneurs don’t make decisions for someone else’s appraisal but for markets to decide. They don’t need the constant ‘good job, good effort’ to relentlessly try, because if they do, they would give up even before the time is right. And at the end of the day, if you do become successful, people will only see your success and not the struggles you overcame. So, learn to celebrate even when no one’s around.
Don’t ask what to do; Figure out what to do
Being clueless just won’t cut it with entrepreneurship. There is zero formula for guaranteed success. You’ve got to find your path to wherever you want to go. And by finding I don’t mean 'find’, I mean to do it and learn from the experiences.
Why are we clueless sometimes? It’s not uncommon to either be taught to just follow the books or follow instructions and as a result, never practiced any ingenuity. Many times, people just aren’t passionate enough about what they do. You want to win? You got to learn to love what you do and figure out things even if you don’t know where to start.
Know the objective
Where do you start? The 80-20 Pareto principle applies to our work. 80% of our work is of low impact. Only 20% delivers a significant result. The challenge is 20% just isn’t enough. And the 80% is still important. Time waits for no man. And many times, it’s easy to get into the motion and not really know what we’re trying to accomplish with the tasks we’re performing. Doing the following steps frequently helps re-prioritize effort and optimize the use of time.
1. Evaluate what is the most important objective for your idea/project/organization (not yourself) right now
2. Think of things you can do to meet the objective
3. Discipline yourself to act
4. Your first action may not yield result, learn from it repeat the cycle.
Stop talking, Take action
Many individuals pride themselves with ideas but never ever take the step. Even great salespeople take conscious effort to place themselves to be at the 'right place, right time’ to talk to the 'right’ people, and this definitely means being at the wrong place, wrong moment most of the time. Even if you don’t know how to do it, you need to learn or find a way to get it done.
Emotionally mature. Embrace rejection and failures.
Managing emotions and being at your optimal psychological state is probably something hardest to do. You are only at the driver’s seat of your thoughts, actions, and effort. Rejection and failures are things you can’t avoid. If you don’t learn how to deal with them properly, it will lead to exhaustion and depression which obviously affects performance. Remember, denial is not a strategy. Many people don’t even realize they are denying the reality, so learn to retrospect, laugh off some of these negative experiences/emotions but still remember them and never belittle the damage they can do.
Be prepared for the long haul
Overnight success? There is no such thing. People are generally impatient for everything. We are impatient on the road, impatient with success, impatient with payday. Why have it later when we could have it now, right? Well, you can’t have it now. That’s the reality. So be prepared for the journey. It’s probably going to be longer than you would expect. Decades is what we should be looking at, not months, not years.
The Competition is Yourself
You want to win. Who doesn’t? But remember your competition isn’t really who you are competing against. It’s you. We are our own greatest enemy. Keep focusing on becoming better. Yes, celebrate when you beat a competitor but always remember, you can always be beaten if you don’t focus on being the best of yourself. You gotta be better even when you feel like you are better than everyone else.
Excited beyond the money
Money is an important incentive for entrepreneurship but it’s not sustainable.
One of the most important things to do as an entrepreneur is to disassociate effort and result for money. Have your parents offered you money to wash the car, mow the lawn or have you been offered money to get a certain job done? While not wrong, it cultivates an unhealthy idea of generating wealth. Most people fall into this trap and do things only if they are compensated. This leads to all sorts of missed opportunities.
The real reality of entrepreneurship is wondering why you’re still so poor after doing so much and yet still capable of pushing 100% at the goal.
The best substitute for that monetary reward in the short-medium term is a sense of purpose. And this sense of purpose can come from various sources. For me, it tends to come from an urge to share something I love. In the long term, you may or may not reap the financial reward, but the satisfaction from the sense of purpose will always be greater than whatever money you will ever earn. I’m as happy as I am when I ate food of other people’s leftover to when I’m able to afford more than just food because….
Don’t make excuses, admit shortcomings and find solutions
Nobody cares about your excuses, in fact, highly effective people hate hearing them. Understand that your excuses won’t suddenly propel you to success. So stop making them and start admitting shortcomings and overcome them or find ways to compensate for them as quickly as possible.
Retrospective
We’ve talked about being retrospective. It’s perhaps one of the most underrated traits. No one is born great at everything. Even great people suck at some things. Take time, put ego and pride away to truly reflect on what you did wrong and what you did right.
Relentless
Entrepreneurship isn’t a journey of checklists. Getting things done just isn’t enough. You gotta do, monitor, repeat even if you are still solving the same problem after 6 months of failing. The only thing that matters is the outcome, not your effort. You don’t get an A for effort. You stay wherever you are for not having outcomes.
Do things that are uncomfortable and unnatural
Most people shy away from things they are uncomfortable doing. Be it public speaking, computer programming, math, mundane tasks etc+. It’s natural. But it is not ok if you want to succeed. If you have to wash the toilet, you wash the toilet. If you have to get up on stage, you get up on stage. If you have to do math, you gotta do math. You don’t need to love them but you need to do them until you can afford to hire someone better than you at it.
Don’t be indecisive or flaky
People are flaky for many reasons. Uncertainty, disbelief, bla bla bla. The truth is, we go nowhere jumping from side-to-side. Average out your true distance, it’s ZERO.
Once you set a course, go all in wholeheartedly and do it until data keeps proving otherwise.
Leadership
If you want to go fast, go alone or with a small effective cohesive team. If you want to go big, be prepared to be a great leader. Entrepreneurship is not a single phase. When you start, speed and ferocity is everything. When you grow, leadership is everything. Most people are not born leaders. Well, you will have to make the call if you want to pay the price to be good at it.
Conclusion
Most entrepreneurs are successful because they want it bad enough, would take action and repeatedly reflect and improve. No one is ever ready. Naivety helps with getting started. So take everything said here with a pinch of salt. Coz at the end of the day, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot at whatever you want to do.
Just remember, your decisions and actions every step along the way can make a massive difference for you, your family, your communities and your stakeholders. Don’t procrastinate or fear the decisions and actions but make the best of them wherever you are at.
And finally, you don’t need to be an entrepreneur, a CEO or whatever to be successful. You can be a great dad, a great friend, a great writer, a great musician, they are all equally respectable. And the biggest respect is for you, yourself. And if you want to be rich, spend less and invest regardless of your profession.
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)

Hello, I'm Josh Teng!

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

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