a bystander's contribution

75f George(80 Photo)

Tue, 18 May 2021 13:25:35 -0700

75f George(80 Photo)

I'm moving on to Svbtle!

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 06:13:43 -0800

I migrated my blog posts from June 2013 onwards to Svbtle.

So far I really I like, and I will be blogging from there.

Pete Forde has a nice blog post on his experience moving from Tumblr to Svbtle.

Tumblr has been fantastic, and it will remain a repository for many of my writings.

You can find my new blog here: http://blog.raywu.co/

Still Waiting for IPO 2.0

Sun, 24 Nov 2013 20:26:03 -0800

Still Waiting for IPO 2.0:

continuations:

Facebook goes public and its stock declines. Commentators write that investors should have known it was overpriced. Twitter goes public and its stock pops. Commentators write that the company left money on the table. Not nearly enough people though remark on how crazy it is that companies still go…

3 Steps to Successful Cold Call in B2B Customer Development

Thu, 07 Nov 2013 06:00:00 -0800

I had two observations about B2B startups doing customer development via cold calls. When founders spoke passionately about their businesses and their products (features), they got silence treatment on the phone.

JFDI’s 2013B startups were mostly B2B. They were selling to large enterprises, F&B, construction firms, SMB, blog shops, eCommerce sites, pharmaceutical, pharmacies, and consumer brands. There were some founders that were good at cold calling and getting meetings, but others got complete shut down. I sat through some cold calls with the teams and took notes. I had also done a lot of calling when I was working in research (for investment funds).

I was most curious about these: a) what techniques were successful; b) what did founders teach themselves to become more successful?

Sell Value, not Features

This was a piece of advice from one of our mentors, Simon Dale from SAP. B2B founders really needed to sell the value and not the features. It was extremely important to help customers to start talking about their pain points, and sought advice from customers on how they solved the pain point.

As soon as founders started talking passionately about features and product, it became “selling.” Potential customer would try his best to get off the phone by offering an email address, but never responded.

Get Comfortable with Awkward Silence

Fear was the reason why one of our guys told me he didn’t want to call. He didn’t like the awkward silence—and therefore he kept yapping about his product features, until he incited some sort of response from the poor customer. He kept throwing jargons like “just in time,” “distance learning,” over the phone.

After calling for a few weeks straight, he got used to it. We had talked about getting really specific in the questions to encourage the customer to talk about actual pain points.

Conclusion: Three Steps

1) Establish Credibility

For example:

“I’ve been working with project managers/project engineers at firms like yours to understand pain points in the field and I wanted to see if I could get your advice on how you deal with _______”

2) Go Specific and Repeat Back What They Say

For example:

“when were you last doing _______;”
“how did you achieve _______;”
“who did you interact/send _______ to;”
“what part of the process did you have to do repeatedly,” etc.

And paraphrase what they told you back at them.

3) Follow Up or Referral: is this a potential early adopter?

For example:

“that’s very interesting, can I follow up with you/your colleague to _______;”
“do you have friends in the industry that may have this problem,too;”
“how can I help?”

And always follow up with a thank you note and a “how can I help?”

Ubiquity

Thu, 10 Oct 2013 04:25:00 -0700

A couple of months ago I was trying to make sense of the onslaught of iOS and Android as a threat to the telecom companies. The relationship here is not a balanced symbiosis. Platform vs Infrastructure has been a theme that we see repeatedly over time. I believe by understanding this particular trend will open the keys to a slew of [investment] opportunities.

Part of it was about establishing a standard on top of a new standard, and in doing so, replacing the previous standard.

In the case of telephony, a lot of companies got to work and laid down cables and wires. Once the Infrastructure and the network effect was released, ubiquitous Platforms started to emerge. Platforms took certain shape. On the one end, things like ACH payment (wire transfer) company established themselves (like Western Union) as a de facto money moving Platform on the wired world. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we saw a Platform (what started out as a Platform) turned itself into an Infrastructure—and in this scenario, the Intranet/Internet.

The more interesting part for me, was to take this into the account and make sense of today’s juncture between Infrastructure and the Platforms. As Internet matured as a new paradigm (Infrastructure), it faced direct competition from Android and iOS, and their attempts to replace the Internet world as the new ubiquitous Platform-turned-Infrastructure. As the battles between Internet and mobile OS had yet to play out completely, many entrepreneurs were building new “Platforms” within the confines of these Infrastructure/emerging Platform (read Internet/mobile OS respectively) and betting on either the long-tail or the new technology to win out. Given the same logic, a similar (but refreshing) struggle we would start to see was—other Platforms, like mobile browser, attempting to achieve ubiquity and replace the OS as the next standard.

A few weeks ago, I met Edith Yeung from Dolphin browser, who educated me a lot on mobile payments—not the NFC type—but actual Western Union/PayPal/Stripe style systems within mobile browsers. There were a lot of powerful companies at play here: Google, Apple, Facebook, Mozilla, telecom companies. If this was the emerging trend, perhaps we should consider mobile browsers as a real threat to compete as the next Infrastructure that housed a new generation of Platforms.

Payments changed things. Much like how ACH, PayPal, Google Play & App Store enabled commerce that empowered telephony, Internet, and mobile OS. The only way a Platform transcended to Infrastructure was when they attained ubiquity, and commerce was a good litmus test (validation).

Thanks to Smitty, Julia, and Zane for challenging me on this.

[Consultative selling] your product needs to fit your customer's vision

Tue, 08 Oct 2013 01:50:00 -0700

Kuo-Yi spoke with our founders about consultative selling today. In an early stage startup environment, what the founders needed to find, was the fit between their products and their customers’ visions.

Having won major contracts and signed on IBM as an system integrator for a USD $15mn governmental project, Kuo-Yi broke down his approach crossing that chasm. He shared three main pillars in closing a sale.

Who were you talking to

There were three types of people you needed to find in an organization: a) a decision maker/influencer; b) a coach; c) a champion.

Kuo-Yi pointed out that a decision maker was not defined by his or her title. It was the person that had the budget to make the decision. An influencer was not bad either; he or she could get other stakeholders’ interests aligned.

A coach was someone who could help you navigate the organization. This could be a sales person that sold into this particular business, an ex-employee who could help you see the structure, politics, and organizational planning cadences.

The champion was a person that bought into you and wanted to see you succeed, for whatever reason. This person had a vested interest to push through the deal.

Kuo-Yi recommended the Power Base Selling: how to build power within an organization.

Motivation

Why is this someone buying? It was crucial to understand his/her motivation. Whether it was for a personal win, to fulfill a key component in his/her legacy project, to squash an internal competitor, or for riches and fame.

The questions to ask in meetings to uncover these signals: are there programs in placed to achieve [insert goal], what is your main priority this year, your cadence of organization’s planning process.

The coach and the buyer himself should have the answers to help you navigate this part.

Their Budget

The final of the trio elements was understanding the budget.

Identify an allocated budget for your product and knowing when to back down was crucial. A good timing with the budget planning process could be the differentiator. This required some understanding of where you were in the sales cycle. In a large company, this may take 6 months; that was just part of educating the stakeholders.

The coach and the champion in this case could help you figure this segment out.

Conclusion

A few other great gems Kuo-Yi mentioned today: never ask for 1 hour meeting, 15-30 minutes was a much smaller barrier; ask for an internal proxy to help set up meetings with senior decision makers.

He also cautioned the founders to be thorough about the sales process. Kuo-Yi recalled a deal he lost because his team overlooked an backward compatibility detail, even though they had spent a year to get to know the client inside-out.

As a sales person: time is money. ABC!

[Asking for Introductions] Start Simple with the Ask

Mon, 07 Oct 2013 05:32:00 -0700

A lot of our teams needed to get in front of domain experts, customers, and mentors. Most of them asked me to put them in touch, but I went back most of the time to ask them to write a short, concise email to help me make the connection.

Write in 3 sentences

One of our founders, Arthur, was very used to writing long emails that opened with “thank you’s” and compliments. This was polite, but I found that most of the people just wanted to know what you needed.

I suggested to Arthur and Veronica (another founder) to reverse the entire content of the email. Instead of [opening thank you’s] to [what we do] to [what we need from you], I asked them to flip it around.

This way the recipient could decide whether he or she could help before reading more about you and the thank-you’s. And if you couldn’t summarize what you needed or what you were working on, it would be too burdensome to ask the reader to figure it out for you.

Call to Action

Sometimes founders wanted to keep the ask open-ended. Unless the recipient was really interested to help you out, he or she wasn’t going to go out of the way to provide time or offer introductions. If the goal was to get a short coffee or phone meeting, you needed to suggest two options for the date with a clear agenda instead of “this week at your convenience.”

Ask for advice on something specific and executable. If you couldn’t figure out what the ask was, maybe you shouldn’t be meeting the person. Remi, another founder, just told me that this suggestion made her experience so much better with the mentors instead of asking for general feedback.

Follow Up

This was one of the most important steps in connecting with people. There were so many times I missed an email because I read it too quickly and didn’t respond right away and it disappeared into the ether. I missed an important recommendation email for Ariff and I really wished he had just reminded me.

A quick line that said, “hey, I wanted to check in on the message, hope to connect when you have a moment” was sufficient.

Conclusion

People loved to help, but you needed to know how to ask for help and what to ask for. Asking for introductions wasn’t always the most natural thing, but you could start simple.

Don't forget common sense

Tue, 10 Sep 2013 01:32:00 -0700

Smitty is both technical and goal driven. He’s an all-star products person. At today’s mentoring session, he kicked off with a talk to helped JFDI teams focus on two things: 1) create an emotional connection with customers, and 2) make hard decisions early on.

Be funny

Most startups were battling the online noise vs signal problem. Smitty stressed the importance of striking up a relationship early on with the customers—as soon as they signed up.

He referenced Derek Sivers’s “most successful emails” and drew on his own experience building product at Spuul.com, where they crafted quirky characters to engage users. He recalled, immediately after applying this approach, their emails were inciting reactions, both good and bad from users. This made their product memorable.

This approach created a dialogue. He was also religious about getting back to each customer on every feedback. Screening Twitter, Facebook, Google Play, review sites, he made a point to respond to everyone—especially the ones that bad-mouthed the product.

Online anonymity empowered users to exaggerate in order to get attention. Smitty recalled, most users employed harsh tones only to get attention, and he often won them over in follow up conversations.

Cut, and take responsibility

Smitty was very upfront with the founders about not “caring” too much about metrics—they were the means to an end. Rather, he paid painstaking attention to the goals the team wanted to achieve.

The goals for his product were, to have increased acquisition, activation, and engagement. Metrics around those were fairly straightforward, and he watched the numbers carefully, retroactively. He did not lead any products decision based solely on the numbers.

As a product person, he had to take responsibility and owned up to cutting features that were not contributing to these goals. Everything that wasn’t directly impacting those goals was superfluous, and he had to be honest with himself and his team.

This was a great point—sometimes we tended to over think decisions by drawing on too many evidences. Entrepreneurs, taken into the account of the risks, needed to trust their instincts and make best educated guesses.

Conclusion

In my interaction with Lean advocates, Kevin Dewalt, Justin Wilcox, Tristan Kromer, this topic came up occasionally.

There were a lot of emphasis on listening to customers and making informed and evident based decisions, but Kevin, Justin, and Tristan would all agree that pragmatism and entrepreneurial instinct should also not be discounted. I agreed. This was what differentiated entrepreneurs.

Smitty also warned the startup teams, “don’t forget common sense.” He blogs at NoKPIs.com.

Google Trends: eCommerce in SE Asia

Thu, 05 Sep 2013 20:32:48 -0700

In light of Andrew Chen’s blog post on Google Trends, I was curious about the eCommerce players in Singapore vs the Region.

This puts the size of Singapore sort of in perspective. Not scientific—though the spenders are here—Singapore is still a speck. Zalora Malaysia and Indonesia rank higher on search trends.

Looks like Zalora also did a lot of PRs the last twelve months vs the other players (the Letters on the graph indicate news headlines).

It all started with knowing your customer!

Thu, 05 Sep 2013 10:31:00 -0700

Scott Bales stopped by JFDI to talk to the teams about Persona Development. His talk was by far one of the best I had seen on this topic—simple and loaded with anecdotal war stories.

It was great to hear him explain persona to the founders. Persona Development made sense, and sometimes was deemed trivial. Scott pointed this out, but also reassured the teams that it was extremely helpful when his team had painted 32 personas for Moven.com, a mobile bank he co-founded.

Focus on Behaviors

Scott emphasized this repeatedly—he reminded the founders to focus on behaviors of the target customers. In my experience working with teams on Persona Development, this was often the point where founders brushed over and missed. Often times entrepreneurs focused on facts (ie, demographic) over behaviors.

Behaviors were great assumptions to validate because they brought together a group of people that experienced the same pain and have the same goal. The goal of persona development was to hone in on the behaviors and recognize patterns. An added benefit was that genuine behaviors could not be faked, and it was important to understand and empathize with the target customers when they explained their stories (described their behaviors).

One example I gave a team tonight, was in what we asked them during the interview process for the accelerator program. We asked for the technical co-founder to explain his experience with the stack he used, as opposed to asking him a factual/binary question, whether he coded or not.

Be specific with every assumption

Another great tip from Scott today. Everything written was an assumption, and only specific assumptions and scenarios could be eliminated or validated.

This went against founders’ intuition because most entrepreneurs were told to find a sizable and addressable market—a group of people. A loosely defined range made identifying early adopters with specific traits and behaviors difficult—not falsifiable. Loose assumptions made it impossible to curate a cohort of the most passionate target customers to launch a product with. Let alone, solving a problem they all faced.

Another assumption we had when interviewing founders for the accelerator program was that a balanced teams with domain insight would succeed. This became our screening criteria and we looked for anecdotal evidences to back up the hypothesis.

Listen and iterate

The persona would change over time after you interviewed ten, twenty, fifty customers, Scott warned.

Part of going through this exercise was to refine and validate. This was where the instinct of the entrepreneurs really mattered, and derive from customers the important themes that repeatedly came up, and differentiate noise from signal.

It was easy to spot a good melon after you had seen a few dozens. The JFDI team also got better at pattern recognition over hundreds of interviews and knew what type of founders and startup teams we could work with. Most of the time, the individuals on our team held the same opinion about a team we interviewed.

Conclusion

Mark Organ (Influitive), a JFDI mentor, was a big fan of dominating a niche. He built an $870 mn company (Eloqua’s exit to Oracle) by establishing its prowess from niche to niche.

Tom Clayton (Bubbly), also a JFDI mentor, who had led businesses in both B2B and B2C, stressed the importance of obsessing over specific users, and curating an original user base.

It all started with knowing your customer!

Growth Sourcing: hacking Early Stage startups pipeline

Tue, 03 Sep 2013 10:45:00 -0700

Today was Day 7 of the JFDI.2013B Bootcamp. The last two months our team worked our butts off—but we did it! Ten awesome teams joined our family on August 29th.

The past 8 weeks I slept very little. My eyes were glued to the monitors, responding to hundreds of emails, checking on our funnel metrics, and working around the clock interviewing teams. The recruitment exercises we went through taught me a lot. We made some great strides, and some mistakes: there were also some humbling surprises. Here are the numbers and our journey.

Sourcing for teams

For an accelerator program like JFDI, we served a few groups. Startup founders were our customers—one side of the puzzle. We targeted balanced teams with solid domain knowledge. About 1000+ founders registered on our landing page, with 320 teams completed the application. Compared to other landing pages, I thought this activation rate was pretty good, at about 32.0%.

From the 1000+ that registered their interest, about 280 were people who pre-registered before our application opened, and 740 after the application went live on July 1st.

While the application was live in July (July 1st—31st), we were able to acquire about 5.2% of the eyeballs that landed on the landing page. This number alone, didn’t tell the entire story. But more below.

Channels

There were several channels we relied on to reach startup founders: social media, local tech blogs, co-working spaces, Meetups, mailing lists, AngelList, direct marketing, etc. We also used Facebook ads half way through—but that particular strategy had mixed results.

Conversion rates: establishing benchmark

In the first half of our recruitment in July, we were acquiring about 9.4% of the founders that landed on our page. We achieved this with the help of a lot of our friends on the ground. Announcements they made got founders from all over the region excited. About 34.7% of these founders, who registered, filled out the application—including some from the pre-registered founders (280 we mentioned earlier).

Conversion rates: with Facebook Ads

Half way through July, we switched on a few very targeted campaigns on Facebook. In terms of CTR, they performed superbly well. At the end of the campaign, we sent an average of 5-15% of eyeballs to our landing page via 13 ads.

Thanks to these ads, our visitor volume shot up six-fold after the ads went live. However, only 4.6% of the visits converted into registrations, which was a fifty percent drop in acquisition compared to the benchmark. The volume definitely made up for it. Ultimately, 38.3% of the registrants filled out the application—but if we took out the “rush” towards the deadline, that activation rate was 25.5%. More on this in a bit.

Facebook did bring us a lot of traffic (that we paid for). I would not have felt comfortable without running the ads—but I wasn’t sure of how effective it really was. It did result in a lot of Facebook Likes and a sizable mailing list for our community.

Long vs short application

We originally built upon our application questions from the previous recruitment season—we had 87 questions. Compared to TechStars application, they had 56. We thought this imposed a huge tariff on the completion rate of the registrants and decided to change that.

Shrinking the application did improve the conversion rate slightly. I discounted the last two days before the deadline, and the completion rates differed by 8% (∂ of 31.9% to 39.3%).

The rush: deadline

68.9% of all the applications finalized on the last two days before deadline (11:59pm, July 31st).

Direct outreach

We also recruited from teams through direct outreach; two of the teams that came onto the program were founders we got to know from previous interviews. There were also other teams we accepted either through referrals or discovery via AngelList. Good old sourcing couldn’t be ignored.

Conclusion

Early stage recruitment was tough, but the good news was: there were some really good teams in Asia. The hard part was in getting in front of the right teams (read: “customers”) at the right time (read: “stage”) and place (read: “market & geography”).

The process also provided a lot of insight for me on the power shift in negotiations. It was an entrepreneurs’ market—there were a lot of great programs for teams ready for growth.

I also had the opportunity to draw correlations on where to look for good teams. Leveraging our personal and JFDI’s network was a key, and some institutions and companies produced great entrepreneurs in Asia.

30-day recruitment period was a really short timeframe. Kudos to the founders for all making it to the start of the bootcamp within one month.

All of the above soundbites would be stand-alone blog topics. I planned to explore each of these further.

The Gong Show: Why Do You Grow

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 11:36:44 -0700

The Gong Show: Why Do You Grow:

thegongshow:

Knowing how a web service grows is just as important as the growth itself. And, it informs how to measure your growth.

Most companies show growth in both gross numbers and also as a % of the total growth to date. So, if you’re focused on growing revenue, you’ll often see growth presented as gross…

Andrew Parker put growth rate in perspective. It needs to be put in the context of your salesforce, user base population, etc.

Catching the Wave: Early Adopter to Early Majority

Mon, 29 Jul 2013 05:35:00 -0700

In the midst of NSA and back-lash towards Cloud (I didn’t really pay too much attention), I still believed that Cloud is the governing trend in this generation of computing.

Recently, I was trying to nail down some personal investment theses. One of the trends Meng and I debated about surrounded Cloud. More specifically, we both agreed that the “last mile” was where some startups, especially BYOD, B2B and B2SMB, could make significant impact.

In other words, startups that focused on taking an early adopter technology and packaging it for early majority (in certain cases, in Asia, for Asia).

One of JFDI’s startups, Krake, obsessed itself with this trend. I recalled the very week the team read about Geoffrey Moore’s Bowling Pin strategy. While, technically, the theory was to identify the beachhead market and expanding from one segment to another, but by coupling with Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, Krake fit the thesis of riding the shift in PaaS trend (mostly an Early Majority market) and looking for an niche entry (Early Adopter beachhead). Putting it another way: Krake was targeting a group of customers (Early Majority) that were already familiar the PaaS market, and bringing another technology platform (web-scraping) to the mix (to Early Adopters within that group).

I still needed to think this one through, but it was a great exercise to write things down. Thanks to Andrew Parker and his transparent theses online to encourage my first dip at developing this.

TL;DR

The “last mile” is where some startups can still make significant impact. Capturing the transition from Early Adopters to Early Majority. (Geoffery Moore’s Crossing the Chasm)
In other words: startups that are taking an early adopter technology and packaging it for early majority (specifically for Asia in some cases)
Cloud is the governing trend: but we need to spot opportunities to cross the chasm for niche, secure Cloud offering for professional services

RSS has taught me everything

Mon, 15 Jul 2013 07:09:00 -0700

Since March 2009, I read 58,319 items on Google Reader. Instead of mourning about the death of Google Reader, I wanted to share my feeds. I had 310 RSS subscriptions, and really valued the VC blogs and numerous Lean Startup and Customer Development posts that helped me grow in the last 4 years.

When I first got interested in the VC and startup world, I read a lot of Brad Feld and Fred Wilson. They were prolific and amazing writers. They also held nothing back. Mark Suster was great at breaking down a topic from both an investor’s and entrepreneur’s point of view. Chris Dixon was always inspiring. Nivi and Naval’s Venture Hacks had far more information than I could possibly digest. Steve Blank and the early days of Eric Ries’s Startup Lessons Learned blog shaped the way I thought about building products and entrepreneurship.

More recently, I read slightly differentiated stuff. I am a lot more interested in Growth Hacking. I love Andrew Chen’s blog posts, anything put out by the KISSmetrics’ team, Neil Patel’s amazing hacks. For VC’s point of view, I absolutely love Andrew Parker’s The Gong Show, Bryce Roberts’s Bryce Dot VC, and Albert Wenger’s Continuations. Somewhere in the last few years I also started reading every essay Paul Graham published.

RSS has taught me everything. These awesome writers have opened their most inner thoughts to the world, and I am the beneficiary. Over the last few years, I’ve shared my RSS feeds with friends, who are interested in startups and the VC world to give them a jumping start. Today after cleaning up my feeds to six categories: Growth Hacking (14), VC Must Read (6), VC Personalities (57), Entrepreneurs (48), Lean Startup (24), Main News (3), I’ve hosted it on Dropbox to share with people who want to read more about startups.

You can import it into Digg Reader by signing in and selecting “OPML import.” I hope the feeds come in handy.

Download the RSS feeds here: http://raywu.co/raywurss

Ps. Today is the last day Google Reader lets you export Google Reader data through Takeout.

Barcamp Saigon was Fantastic!

Tue, 09 Jul 2013 01:41:00 -0700

I went to Barcamp Saigon this past weekend. There were at least a thousand people in attendance. The last unconference I went to had merely 100 people. I was super impressed by Minh Do and his team. The event was gracefully organized.

The event took place at RMIT University, at a really nice, less congested part of Ho Chi Minh City. It took about twenty minutes from District 1 in a cab. When I walked in right before 9am, the place was packed with people. I didn’t know any startup event that began at 8am and managed to attract attendees!

Besides a great setup, the Barcamp Saigon did a fantastic job communicating with us attendees beforehand. I read every email they sent, because they were spare and to the point. The emails were in both English and Vietnamese, and didn’t take more than 30 seconds to get the gist.

The team’s leadership also reflected in both the massive unconference schedule they put on display, and syncing the updates with Google Spreadsheet and the mobile app designed for the conference. The talks were labeled as given in English or Vietnamese. For a foreigner like me, I had no problem navigating to the correct rooms for the talks. The Barcamp team even shared how the app was developed in one of the sessions.

It was a fantastic experience, and extremely cool when people came up and recognized me because of my beard. Vietnamese startup folks made me feel super at home!

Be A Fool

Tue, 25 Jun 2013 05:22:00 -0700

Hitting home runs are hard. Being confident is very different from being right.

Yesterday, I was talking to an entrepreneur and he told me his passion, but also his financial conundrum. He wanted to change direction to work on something more monetizable, but ultimately more limiting as a product. I couldn’t help but tell him to pursue his passion, and go all the way. In fact, why be an entrepreneur otherwise?

His concerns were real — cash running out was imminent — he had two months’ runway. We were debating. He drew from his personal experience from the past; similar situation. I shouted, “but that was different,” and quickly realized it was hard for me to counter him without any way to back up my claim.

Only this morning, did I come to realize what had bothered me, and what I should have stated clearer.

Fear of failure was a logical thing. In the next two months, if he didn’t make his company sustainable, he’d be out of business. Naturally, there wouldn’t be any more pursuing of passion left at that point.

The journey, and the things you would discover along the way, was the unpredictable part that would make or break you. I only just started reading Fooled by Randomness, but I bought the idea of a Black Swan. We never knew what was going to make our venture successful. Being confident was different from being right.

In truth, there was no way of telling which venture was more limiting or more risky — but we could tell which was the passion, and which was not.

Be a fool.

Pitching an emotional story

Fri, 21 Jun 2013 01:22:00 -0700

Pitching is super hard; I’ve heard a lot of pitches at events, and have also work with many teams to help them articulate their businesses. Most of the time, the pitches that I hear leave me hanging and wanting for more because I am left with a bunch of questions.

I understand why it’s hard to pitch a business. The founders I work with are often engineers and product managers. After staring at the businesses on a micro-level, it is extremely hard to break away from that and articulate the businesses and visions in a way that other people can understand.

In the last three months, I worked with 9 teams to help them frame their businesses at our accelerator program, JFDI.Asia in Singapore. I was there with them every step. From nailing down the problem that is worth solving, to experimenting with solutions, to capturing tractions; their babies are my babies in many ways.

In the back of our head, we knew: we knew that everything we did in 100-day was to prepare us for Demo Day. All the evidences we collected will help us convince investors that we found a gold mine; and these were the right founders to get the project to product/market fit and beyond.

So, we spent a lot of time on learning how to work an investor pitch. There is a sequence that I really believe in. It’s about story telling.

You need to help people understand why you are doing what you are doing, and establish an emotional connection: Steve Jobs and Simon Sinek are great at doing this.

Here are the 10 things we focused on:

Opening
Start strong with an emotional & relatable opening
Problem
Twist the knife in the wound, help people understand the problem
Solution
Clarity sets in, mind blown
Traction
Investors: Oh, this actually has some meat
Market
Investors: This is credible, believable
Business Model
Investors: Shit, I need to talk to this guy
Team
Convince them why your expertise gives you an advantage
Vision
Your wildest dreams, where to take this in medium/long term
The Ask
Give them a reason to engage
Closing
Remind them of the 3 things you want them to remember

In closing, I’ll attempt to pitch one of our team’s idea:

Opening
In 2010, my dad retired. I gave him my savings and asked him to use the money for health checkups and fun. However, in 2012, I got a call and flew home; my dad had to undergo an open heart surgery.
Problem
When I got home, I learned that the money I asked him to use was sitting in a savings account under my name. I felt helpless being away from him because I couldn’t make sure that he looked after himself. I can send him money, but clearly that wasn’t working. A lot of Asian families have this problem we learned.
Solution
So instead of sending him more money, we decided to build OurHealthMate. Our solution allows expatriates to send money directly to doctors’ offices for booking appointments; we simply ask parents to show up for check ups already paid for. Doctors will also send feedback directly back to expatriates to give them a peace of mind.
Traction
In the last 8 weeks, we’ve signed up 50+ clinics in five cities in India at an 80% conversion rate. We also sold 30 health packages to expatriates and have already connected patients to doctors through checkups.
Market
This market is huge because Indian NRIs send on average 10BN dollars per year for the purpose of healthcare and education back home through traditional money transfer means.
Business Model
We capture this market by charging commissions for the bookings. On average, a booking is 20 bucks, and we make 10%.
Team
Everyone of our team is an expatriate with parents and family members back in India, and we also have online payment backgrounds.
Vision
We believe this problem isn’t just limited to India. Think about the Philippines, China.
The Ask
We’re looking for funding to help us grow to 40 cities in India by the end of the year, and allow us the foundation to start exploring markets abroad.
Closing
We are OurHealthMate. We are tackling a 10BN dollars market, have 80% conversion rates, and are already making money in five cities.

Obviously, Abhinav does a much better job:

3 Lessons Learned at JFDI.Asia 2013A

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 00:08:00 -0700

JFDI.Asia 2013A Demo Day ended a few weeks ago. I took a short break. Now we started to focus on the next batch (2013B), I finally got to thinking about what happened in the past six months.

I mostly worked with the teams everyday to set goals and review experiments of the week; I also curated all their meetings with mentors. The last month, I focused on working with each team on their pitches.

23 founders joined us on this social adventure over 100-day, with the help of more than 40 mentors, 7 companies finally pitched on Demo Day; in front of close to 200 people in the audience. I was also very proud of all the founders; more than half of the teams changed their ideas at some point during the program. A couple of founders didn’t make it through, but I also learned a lot from working with them.

In the end, I walked away with new understandings of how I worked, why I wanted to be part of running this program, and how we could improve the next batch.

Lesson 1: working with 26 personalities from all walks of life and culture was not an easy feat

Needed to learn how each person thought and talked

Our founders were all driven by different motivations. What bound us together, was that they all wanted to succeed. It was important to learn how to be supportive and yet cautionary, but not get in the way.
Transactional Analysis (Eric Berne)

This was an immediate reaction to a lot of stress I built up on myself. While I tried to be assertive and straightforward, it was hard for the founders and myself to not get defensive when things weren’t going as planned. I felt responsible for their experiments and that wasn’t healthy. I learned to check myself, and started to lead my meetings with the founders with the question “why.”
Asked “Why,” then “How.” Together we came up with “What”

Simon Sinek was always talked about at JFDI. The Golden Circle also worked in the weekly meeting I had with the teams. I learned to avoid getting into parent-child scenarios by getting to the root of the problem by asking “why.” This dramatically changed the working dynamics, and I felt that I grew up a lot from understanding and applying this.

Lesson 2: Lean Startup worked, but only to a certain extent: it was a game of inference

Needed a vision

It was particularly hard to pivot by the book or by mentor’s (conflicting) advices, and not by the passion. It was a bigger struggle for the vision-driven founders. We were asking them to let go and try something different. Some of our founders reverted back to their original vision after trying out a few different angles; however, they had learned something from the pivot, which contributed to their new-found momentum on the original conception.
You couldn’t steer a boat that was not moving

The biggest distraction was in getting stuck at a stalemate. I recalled it was tough to keep the morale up and encouraged the teams to continue experimenting when there were so many meetings going on, different goals to attain, conflicting beliefs. Trusting the data and the experiments was a crucial leap of faith.
Made the best educated guesses

When the founders had clarity on why they needed to run a specific experiment or what was needed to be proven, it was smooth-sailing. They were eager to come to check-in meetings because they owned up to the hypotheses we came up with. We discussed the results from both qualitative and quantitative point of views. We needed to be honest about the scope and the result of the experiments. With the vision in mind, and equipped with data, decisions were made knowingly, conscientiously. And we repeated this loop.

Lesson 3: stayed goal driven, and trusted your gut instincts & teammates

Being goal driven was a good motivation for the teams

Similar to the Golden Circle mentioned above, I learned to use the goal of the program as the main motivator. Everything we did in 100-day was to get the teams to the point where they could demonstrate traction and allow investors to see the world through their vision: namely, the gold mine the founders were harvesting. With that in mind, no mountain was too high, and no obstacle too far-fetched.
Not everyone was cut out to do this, and no one could do this alone

I didn’t have a thesis on why teams fell apart, but I felt that I became more attuned to the early signs of trouble. On the other hand, quite a few teams enjoyed amazing partnership between the duo founders. They challenged and trusted each other to lift the weight of their designated roles. Seeing other 20-odd founders struggled with similar problems, the 2013A class definitely grew stronger together. Most of them pulled through.
Teams had to be balanced

The good teams didn’t just share the load on product development, they also supported each other emotionally. Multiple teams fought and came back stronger, while a few founders wilted away. Perhaps the environment we were in, instigated this type of intensity, but I believed it was better that it happened earlier than later. 100-day really was not very long. Perhaps we needed to be more cognizant of this when we probed candidates for the next round.

It was fun and a lot of work. A friend of mine lived by the axiom that “best of friends were made through working on things together;” I made many good friends along this journey. The work didn’t just end here with Demo Day. It was only the beginning for these guys.

Reading Habits

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 23:35:00 -0700

Dan Shipper wrote a post on managing his reading habits. It’s very interesting to see his approach.

He used Evernote and some other tools to keep track of what he read and what to read next. I also talked to a few other people on how they kept track and retained what they learned.

Like Dan, I also recorded everything that I read in the last couple of years. From 2011-2013, I put the books I read in a spreadsheet.

Every year I would migrate the titles I didn’t get to, to the current year. Although the data set was not large (only over three years), I could see a pattern in the way I read.

I had a tendency to read through one author and related genre in clusters. I was way more fiction-oriented than non-fiction. These were not news to me, but I liked the anecdotal evidences to validate my hunch.

However, there was a limitation to this format. From looking at the spreadsheets, it helped me remember what I had read. The problem was, the specifics of the books sometimes became a blur.

Dan took notes on an A4 paper. My friend Patrick Haller wrote a blog post for every book he’s read (and he reads a lot!)

I took notes and made highlights on the tablet but never gotten to the habits of exporting them. To my knowledge there wasn’t really a easy way to do this through technology. I wonder if I should be keeping a book journal?

In the end, I loved reading. It was a sanctuary and a chance to get lost in a new world.

The Road Back

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:14:00 -0700

Making a come back from bad habits is super hard.

About 3 weeks ago, I stopped working out and writing daily because of how busy things got as JFDI was preparing for Demo Day.

It was not a conscientious decision. It was a natural progression as I didn’t have time to focus on other things. I started to neglect my body and mind.

In the days that followed Demo Day, a series of events in Singapore brought a lot of friends in town. I ended up drinking a lot.

I thought of how many of our founders must have gone through the same issues as we worked towards Demo Day. It was all work and no play; then we hit a cliff.

Work-Life balance was definitely one of the easiest to overlook. The last few weeks I oscillated from one extreme to the other. And then fatigue set in.

The road back to a routine really sucked. It was much harder than I had expected. It was both a mixture of guilt and pleasure of procrastination. Two extremely demoralizing factors.

My friend Joel Gascoigne recently tried a 7-day work schedule and decided to not continue with the experiment. It must have been hard to do at one extreme.

On the other hand, Joel’s co-founder, Leo Widrich, penned this a couple of months back:

I wear this close to heart. On my way back.