This is a highly recommended book even for those who are thinking about their own career strategic inflection points at this moment of time.

A strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can equate to an opportunity for a company to rise to new heights or tumble down to collapse. While it is obvious that strategic inflection points are likely to be caused by technological change, they can also be caused by competitors when they deliver more value or become more efficient.

A strategic inflection can be deadly when it is unattended. We have seen how big bookstores like Borders fell because they did not see the threat of the Amazon Kindle. A similar insight can also be applied to one’s career.

Though a very short book, Andy Grove drove home the point about changing rules and how leaders in companies have to find their way through uncharted waters.

He narrates the story of how Intel navigated through the changing computer industry brought about by the personal computer revolution in the 1980s. While the present generation may not recall the days of the 386, 486 to the Pentium chip, he explained how the industry has dramatically changed from 1970s to the early 1990s, with his thoughts on the Internet (at its nascent stage) in the 1990s.

Using those examples, he explained  how companies need to steer clear of strategic dissonance. Using data, he shows that the demographics of customers can change and how this could lead to a strategic inflection point.

He also reckons that the timing for a resources shift towards new technology has to be just right, not too early or too late. He also noted that the strategic change has to be clearly communicated to rest of the company.

The last chapter about managing an individual’s career strategic inflection points is an addition to the original book. Andy Grove, advocates having a mental fire drill that lets you spot incoming threats or red flags which might harm your industry, build the relationships around, find the right timing to make the transition, and get in shape for the change. It sounds simple, but given how most people prefer taking less risk and staying comfortable in their own domains, they probably would not see the problems arise until later.

Of course, this book is a good read and I do recall many successful entrepreneurs and investors in today’s world citing the title of the book as a lesson for them to be wary of their competitors, navigate into new territories and change the landscape of the industry.

Andy Grove is right: “Only the paranoid survive.”

The lessons on how to build a minimum viable product, iterate base on customer feedback and metrics and pivot when all else fails will guide the entrepreneur and hold them accountable in their attempt to change an industry.

In the vein of Peter Drucker, who wrote that entrepreneurship is risk management, Eric Ries began the book with the note that the lean startup method is for entrepreneurs and the people who hold them accountable. The five key principles which set up the entire book are:

1. Entrepreneurship is everywhere and isn’t limited to people who work in startups. In his definition, he broadened the definition to anyone who works within any human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty, which implies that the approach he is advocating works in a company of any size of any sector or industry, and that includes multi-national enterprises.

2. Entrepreneurship is management. This sets up the notion that the entrepreneur needs a different kind of management for an environment that is specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty.

3. Validated Learning. Eric Ries argued that startups exist to learn how to build a sustainable business and the learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow them to test and find out how the market reacts to their products. In fact, that approach pervades the book.

4. Build-Measure-Learn. This concept explains that a startup’s fundamental activity is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond and then learn whether to pivot or persevere, and how the lessons from all successful start-ups can be directed to grow the feedback loop.

5. Innovation accounting. Ries strongly believe that the survival of a startup can be better enhanced by focusing on the boring stuff: How to measure progress, set up milestones and prioritize work. It provides a possible way for how investors and entrepreneurs themselves can evaluate the progress of a start-up.

With the five principles in mind, the author takes the reader through the rest of the book in three parts: “Vision”, “Steer” and “Accelerate”. He buids his case with several interesting case studies including his time in IMVU.

For example, Intuit demonstrated with Snaptax that they can build a good product even though they are a big organization. They found their own way to break the Innovator’s dilemma. Snaptax was able to solve an interesting problem of allowing users to finish their entire tax returns on a mobile phone. Other stories included Zappos, Facebook and Path.

In “Vision”, the first part of the book, Ries builds the case for the discipline of entrepreneurial management. The author identifies who the entrepreneur is, the definition of a startup, and offers a new way for startups to gauge that they are making progress with a method called validated learning.

The key, according to Ries, is that start-ups need to devise scientific hypotheses on their product and find out how a sustainable business can be built in the process.

On “Steer”, the second part of the book, the author brings up the concept of building the minimum viable product to test the assumptions and an accounting system to evaluate whether entrepreneurs are making progress. He offers the a decision making method to help entrepreneurs to decide if they should pivot or persevere.

In “Accelerate”, Eric explore techniques that help lean startups accelerate through the build-measure-learn feedback loop as quickly as possible while the start-ups scale.

What’s interesting about the book is that Eric Ries presents an upfront and realistic picture of how life in a start-up can be. He says that entrepreneurs tend to dupe themselves into thinking that they have the perfect idea or product, not realizing that the market have disproved their own notions.

Probably, for any entrepreneur who reads this book, the best lesson to learn is to be able to admit that an idea failed and it is time to go back to the drawing board. Of course, like some other books I have reviewed, this is one title which will be kept on my bookshelf and iPad for referencing from time to time.

While browsing through the Kinokuniya bookstore on a Saturday, I came across this book “The Founder’s Dilemma” by Noam Wasserman, which has the extraordinary nature of combining scholarly research and practical advice on dealing with a couple of sensitive issues from founding team dilemmas to division of equity and other financial rewards among the founding team.

Highly recommended for those who plan to embark or are already living the entrepreneurial lifestyle, it can serve as a guide to very tough situations for founders to evaluate the best possible way out.

Here are a set of a common questions that I often get in my day-to-day communication with people who are thinking of starting up and people who have already started their own companies.

1. Pre-Founding Situation: ”I have a great career at company X, should I quit and launch a start-up?” or “I have done some research on the idea but I am not sure if the market is receptive to my idea or my perceived situation may be unfavourable to me.” Even with the data that might back the venture, you might be caught in a hesitant mode because of family reasons.

2. Founding Team Issues: Here’s one which I know that it might have implications for start-ups seeking funding: “Should I launch the business myself or try to attract co-founders?” or “Should I ask my friends, family, acquaintances, co-workers or strangers to be my co-founders?”

Even you manage to overcome that, the next question is the role of each co-founder and his or her area of responsibility which probably intersects each other early but will become more specialized when the company grows. Then the next problem is about how a team should make decisions in the midst of facing a tough call that might affect the company in the long run. Of course, the most sensitive enquiry I often get is how the team should divide equity and financial rewards among the founding team.

3. Beyond the Founding Team: This is the part which both the growth of the start-up and gaps in the founding team’s abilities or resources will require them to add non-co-founders and people who might be able to scale their company, which brings a few dilemmas on hiring, dealing with investors and founder-CEO succession.

What Wasserman did in the book is collect 10,000 case studies of founders from various industries, and help to decipher how some of them might have a great story to tell but made decisions that are very absurd or not logical during any of the three stages of the companies.

He broke the problem down in a similar way to how venture capitalist Brad Feld did in his book “Venture Deals”: Entrepreneur seeks to balance between wealth and control, two important aspects of the business. Put simply, do you want to have control over the business or make a lot of money? The follow-up question to that is what kind of trade-offs can you make in the process?

The way the author distills decisions into a matter of wealth and control is, in my opinion, brilliant. The principal case studies used by the author are: Tim Westergren with Pandora Radio, Evan Williams with Odeo & Twitter, Genevieve Thiers of Sittercity and other founders. In each chapter, Wasserman organizes each founder’s dilemma and set up a framework that helps the founder to find an answer with the issue involved.

The most contentious and sensitive chapter is in the reward dilemmas in the form of equity splits and cash compensation. One of the things the author showed in the book is that natural inclinations about equity splits are wrong and counter-productive.

How does one circumnavigate these difficult and tough calls? There is an inherent conflict to how the founders’ contributions (relative or absolute) can never be precisely defined or measured while their equity stakes & cash compensation are specific down to the decimal point.

The key is that founding teams need to avoid potential disastrous consequences of early and static equity split. They need to devise a good compensation plan that one, reflects each member’s past and expected contributions and motivating each co-founder without seeming unfairness to the others, including future employees.

For some, it may be hard to read every page of this book. My suggestion is that you should use this book as a reference and look at the section whenever you faced one of the founder’s dilemmas in the process of your entrepreneurial journey.

Author’s note: Check out the reviews of “The Founder’s Dilemma” by Brad Feld & Eric Ries.

Also watch this video from the Kauffman’s Foundation which summarizes this book really well:

Rocket Internet is a company that belongs to the Samwer Brothers. They are known for their amazing execution prowess and their ruthlessness in cloning successful US Internet companies. Of course, their tactics and methods have raised the ire of many, including pro-Silicon Valley reporters such as Sarah Lacy who mounted a campaign against them.

But is the company’s impact on the Southeast Asia digital market all bad? I’ll examine this issue in detail and argue that while it may have some impact on innovation, it isn’t bad for the industry as a whole.

Rocket Internet’s footprint in Southeast Asia: Attack of the Clones

In the past few months, Rocket Internet has launched five companies: Wimdu, Pinspire, Zalora, FoodPanda and Lazada, which are clones of various well-known Internet companies from Silicon Valley: AirBnB, Pinterest, Zappos, and Amazon. Using Singapore as their headquarters, they have spawned their units very quickly around Southeast Asia, with a major focus on Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia.

If you look carefully at their portfolio, you’ll notice they have two key areas of interest: e-commerce and currently sexy start-ups in Silicon Valley. While I applaud them for their aggressive hiring spree in Singapore which will help to service our economy with more jobs, I am aware of their ability to quell innovation within the region.

Everyone might be wondering: Why Southeast Asia of all places, after Europe (where their headquarters is in Germany)? First of all, Southeast Asia is as fragmented as Europe, with many diverse cultures, languages and nationality.

Unlike large single markets such as the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India & China) and United States, the user behaviour of mobile and web users are radically different but clustered into two blocs.

The more developed economies like Singapore and Malaysia favor mobile and web penetration almost equally while emerging economies such as Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia favor mobile over web by a ratio that ranges from 3 to 5.

ASEAN’s inability to form a single common market is also reminiscent of the European Union’s failure,  unfolding before our very own eyes. Given the way the Samwer Brothers operate, it’s therefore not surprising that they’re setting sights on Southeast Asia because of its economic similarities with Europe.

Southeast Asia often remains an after-thought to those who are seduced like butterflies to single markets like India and China and to some extent, Indonesia. With a lack of innovation and the US tech companies trying to put a square peg into a round hole with their templates, most local companies within each Southeast Asia country merely perform technology arbitrage and hence the whole mobile web industry suffers as a whole.

So, if the Samwer Brothers can somehow build a business structure that can address the fragmentation of Southeast Asia with a unifying mobile web theme such as e-commerce, you can see that the big companies might have no choice but to pay them “a ransom”, as Sarah puts it.

From a macro point of view, contrary to the tirades of Sarah Lacy, the view that Rocket Internet is bad for the entire industry is totally exaggerated.

Her only argument that it is detrimental to the industry (which we all agree) is that cloning is not the best way to encourage innovation. Like any technologist, I am against the concept of frugal innovation.

But while Sarah gives credit to Chinese Internet companies for innovating after they copy, there’s a big difference between the Samwer Brothers and companies like Baidu, Alibaba and Sina. Yes, they are all clones, but while the Samwer brothers are expanding their cloning prowess globally, the Chinese clones are protected by the Chinese government against external competition.

Sarah is exactly right about how US companies treat going global as an afterthought. The problem is that US technology companies see international expansion like Starbucks — maintaining a consistent look and feel everywhere in the world, but franchising a cafe brand is different from tailoring technologies to the needs of a specific economy.

That is why Paypal is having a rough ride in Southeast Asia, where they find it tough to convince small and medium businesses to use their payment service as compared to the local counterparts who offers lower rates.

But where PayPal and the others fail, the Samwer Brothers could succeed. And if they do, isn’t the ransom they collect well-deserved?

Who benefits from that? The consumers who are scouring for good deals and offers.

While many see Rocket Internet as a bane to an innovative start-up environment, they do not see that they are of equal threat to the medium and large Asian conglomerates.

In addition to that, one should really examine the business interests behind Rocket Internet. What do they really want? If you’ve looked at their track record, their intention is to get their portfolio of companies acquired, and make money.

Everyone might not be happy about them making money but they will do one thing that will most benefit the Southeast Asian market: Generating exits that will induce investors from all over the world to turn up and invest in this market.

So, market realities are not going to change in the Southeast Asia market. Sarah Lacy’s books and articles will not drive investors to Southeast Asia, but more acquisition activity towards Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet will.

If you are planning to clone a company like Pinterest, my advice is to avoid the Rocket Internet’s radar unless you have a team that can execute as fast as they do and have a lot of cash to hold the whole operation together.

Otherwise, you are a passing footnote, and it is important to note that the Groupon clones phenomenon is just a one-off thing. On the other hand, if you are really doing something innovative, you should avoid revealing too much of your success until you have enough money in the bank, a product and a team with such a competitive advantage that makes it ridiculously hard for them to replicate.

Either way, winter is already here.

Image Credits: Oliver Samwer from PandoDaily

Recently, I was invited by startup incubator JFDI.Asia to deliver a talk entitled “That Thing You (Forget to) Do” (inspired loosely from Tom Hanks’ movie “That Thing You Do”) on best practices of product development, management and marketing. In the last part, we focus on product management and how start-up teams should generate, organize and analyze data that comes with the rollout of the beta product (see part two).

Update on Post (3 May 2012): Video of the talk in JFDI Asia – credits to JFDI for recording it

Product management is probably the toughest of the trio, and that’s why I leave it to the last. The essential aspect of product management is to sew the threads of development and marketing with data measurement, customer feedback and team execution.

One of the most frequently asked questions from start-up founders is, “If there is conflict within the team on the direction of the product, how should we decide?” It’s actually not a tough question if the founders are analytical, logical and able to stomach their own egos and say, “Yes, this did not work and let’s try something else.”

Product management: The lean start-up and permanent beta

In the first article of the series, we stressed on the importance of planning and execution. We built on the existing framework of Eric Rees’ “The Lean Start-up” model, where we create a product using the agile methodology, gathering user data and feedback, and iterating to the next version of the product.

If we find that the feature of the product does not deliver, then we pivot to something else. The concept is intrinsically simple because the product is permanently beta and constantly evolving to the point where it can address almost 99% of customer needs. What people often don’t figure out is the actual implementation in practice.

I want to point out some challenges that founders face with their employees in Asia as compared to Silicon Valley. The first problem is attitude. Everyone has heard of the ideal Silicon Valley employee: Passionate, always ready to give and execute on ideas and put in 150% because his future is tied to the company.

In reality, many employees are far from that ideal.

Some engineers are afraid to speak up and even upon being encouraged to do so, got scared when being challenged. The worst part is that they have an employee attitude in that they only work from 9am to 6pm. Most people are aware of these problems and have encountered them. You probably can’t change their attitudes overnight, but everyone can take a step to nudge them in the right direction.

This problem has everything to do with product management because the project is affected when founders can’t convey their vision and mission to the employees and excite them to do something that means everything.

Here’s a way to induce agile development slowly in a typical Asian setup. First, let the engineers plan a small feature that they are going to build. Be the critic and bring up different issues that might affect the feature. Remember that the product managers has to oversee every aspect of the product, and dealing with loose ends is pretty important.

In fact, one understated problem I’ve observed that is frequently encountered by software engineers is the backend infrastructure which often does not scale with the growth of the product. Usually, costs and time is the issue. Most technology people do not convey the technical debt or express the latent business costs that comes later.

As a result, these issues get ignored by the management (and the same problem happens in a lot for big Asian companies too). It will spiral into bigger problems and the technical guy telling the business guy (be it founder or employees), “I told you so.”

Second, in an agile framework, the developers of the product: Software engineers, frontend developers and builders are sprinting while the product manager is running a marathon. What usually happens is that people want to do this too quickly.

It takes a team at least four to five cycles of development to really have the kind of intuition and insight about infrastructure. Hence anyone thinking that agile development behaviour can be learnt within two to three cycles are dreaming.

To build a good hacker culture requires time and space. It reminds of something that I often ask myself: Why can I achieve a high level of productivity in the Sanger Institute (which is my ideal workplace) more easily than compared to Singapore?

My answer is culture and people. If there is no empowerment in the culture, the company’s burden will only be shared by the two founders even in a 20-person team. If you make the environment horrible for your employees, you should not complain when things are not moving.

One other thing you might want to do is to constantly find interesting things you see from other companies out there, and ask how they can be done if it’s your company. It might allow you to take best practices and also understand the thinking processes of your team.

Constructing the Killer Metrics from Data

Product managers need to find metrics from the data they measured. There are two types of metrics and most product managers in Asia do the first but not the second.

The first metric is a vanity metric, which comes in the form of user downloads, user registrations, and users inviting friends to the app or web service. The second is the killer metric, which centers on how users are constantly using your app or web service, and how they might evolve new social practices.

It’s easier to illustrate with an example. The retweet feature in Twitter started off as a social practice, where influencers and tastemakers share insights from people they think are interesting. Eventually, it is used to measure how influential a Twitter user is.

A killer metric should lead to two things: (a) how viral your web service or app can be and (b) how you might convert a social practice into a feature to increase user engagement with the product. There are differences in consumer-facing and enterprises apps but both converge in terms of usage patterns and analytics you can derive from user behaviour.

If your service seems to work with one group of people and not another, you might want to figure out why that is the case. Someone asked me, “How many people should you gather feedback from?” The answer is as many as you can get.

But do you listen to all customer feedback? The answer varies.

Managing customer feedback can be challenging, but the way to do it is to break their feedback into three types: (a) Useful and informative and you can see immediate ways to merge their feedback with a small tweak in your product features, (b) a small nuance that provides you some ideas for the future but not now, (c) blue sky and totally irrelevant.

Here’s something I have noticed when a start-up goes to an organization to do product demos. They are two groups of people: (a) the ones who wants to champion your technology and help to grow your product and (b) the ones who will shoot you down and think that they are smarter than you in developing the product.

The key to deciding which feedback to adopt is to classify internally with the team what is sensible and what is not. In fact, only in start-ups, the sales people are much more connected to the technology team than in bigger organizations but the problem often lies in communication.

Bringing it together: The roadmap, media plan and data analysis

If you are a product manager, take a spreadsheet and draw up a plan that integrates the product features, content and help roadmap (managed by software engineers and designers), the product marketing (manage by sales, marketing and business development people), and the data analysis (which is likely to be the founder).

Then share the plan with everyone with explicit timeline and milestones. You should get some feedback to see if the deadlines are realistic, and spend a day reviewing this with every team. With this process, your life will be so much easier when you press the execution button. Everything will be set in motion.

Of course, no product manager is perfect, and we often learn from our mistakes. The last thing I want to emphasize is that a successful product involves people and resources. While in Asia, given the cheaper costs that comes with technology arbitrage, we don’t deem people to be important.

However, growing people to be part of the company is important to achieve real success. Whether you are going to build the best product or not, depends upon planning and team execution. Both processes requires people.

If there are days where you feel like nothing is working, you should probably ask the question, “Once upon a time, the most successful companies of today started like us, why did they scale and why aren’t we doing the same?”

References:
[1] BetaShop: Behind the scenes: How FAB raised $40 million with a lot of data & not much pain.
[2] FrameThink: The Four Viral App Objectives (a.k.a., “Social network application virality 101?).
[3] Eric Rees, Startup Lessons Learned.

Meanwhile, you can look at the slides for reference:

Image credit: LladyYas

Recently, I was invited by the incubator JFDI.Asia to deliver a talk entitled “That Thing You (Forget to) Do” (inspired loosely from Tom Hanks’ movie “That Thing You Do”) on best practices of product development, management & marketing. Following up from part one, this article focuses on two fundamental aspects of product marketing: distribution and public relations.

Update on Post (3 May 2012): Video of the talk in JFDI Asia – credits to JFDI for recording it

How start-ups should view product marketing

There are two important questions to answer, whether you are a founder or an employee of a start-up. What’s the mission and vision of the start-up? How do we communicate the product to the customers so that they know that we are solving their problem or fulfilling a latent or present need in their daily lives? The questions are fundamental because it focused on the why and not the how of products.

So, in order for a product to go to market, it needs to overcome two barriers:

How will your customers hear about your product?

This is the awareness problem in product marketing. To solve this problem, you can either engage mainstream or social media, build a story around your start-up and then get the message out in the market. A lot of times, most people conflate this with the distribution, which is in fact the next question:

How do your customers access or buy your product?

This is the distribution problem in product marketing which the team within the start-up have more control. It involves the team working out what sales channels and distribution centers your product should go on. For example, the iTunes app store or Android market is a distribution channel for mobile app developers to sell their apps to customers.

The same can be said of software as a service (SaaS) platforms where a team selling web services can harness as a possible distribution point for their web products. Another aspect of the distribution problem is the strategic partnerships your startup build with a large multi-national company which are usually not within your control and depends on how much the big company really needs you.

Product Marketing: PR and Awareness

The first rule to doing product marketing is that you should never associate public relations with vanity. Whether it is a social or mainstream media site, the objective is to associate the message you want to propagate about your business to the potential customers. Everything else is immaterial.

Hence it is not sensible to do a machine gun approach to send out press releases to bloggers or journalists and expect them to cover you. It is essential for start-ups to work out a media plan that goes concurrently with the product development process. For example, you might want to do a soft launch of your mobile app in order to acquire feedback for improvement from early adopters.

The objective is to grow users, and hence the article must provide a link for potential users to download your app. The message should be about how the app from your start-up solves either a problem or need from customers.

Why should you stop there? You should continue to match the roadmap of your product development to your media engagement plan. So, every press release must fulfill a business objective about the product. Once you understand the process, you should also construct a list of the media you want to engage.

By the way, do not wait till the product is launched and then engage the press expecting them to want to cover you. Everyone in the press is busy but they want new stories. So you should build relationships before that. Where do you meet these people? Usually, you meet them during conferences and networking events.

Usually, people from the media are friendly and you should build rapport with them. Do not expect them to paint you in a fantastic light, and sometimes you need to provide the angle for them to cover you. Work with the people who understand your start-up, and don’t be offended if they don’t respond to you immediately. One important rule is target who you might want to cover you from a publication. For example, in SGE, you can contact our editor directly to let us know about a story.

The difference between Asian and US press is that the former is more friendly and does not attempt to be edgy when they ask you questions. Usually, Asian start-ups can get shaken with aggressive questions from the western press.

You should just answer what you can and politely decline if the questions are too controversial or an attempt to push you to provide confidential information. You don’t need a media trainer but make sure you have a FAQ made for the entire team whenever the press tries to probe about the start-ups.

The next thing is to build up your social media assets and used them to propagate your message. Having Facebook and Google Plus pages, as well as a Twitter account and a LinkedIn page will suffice (read: Minimum social media assets businesses should have). If your business is location sensitive, have a FourSquare location page will be vital as well. Sometimes being cheeky and creating an image that propagates an internet meme might help to draw customers to your website.

Some advice on engaging the press. You should use your discretion in how much you want them to know. If they are trustworthy, you might want to let them know certain confidential stuff but with the understanding that they are off-the-record.

Finally, just remember, PR is building awareness. There are cases where a company gets heavily featured in both mainstream and new media but it saw no conversions to customers coming to your site to buy the products. So, you need to make sure that you are engaging the correct channel to find your customers.

If you are building an app for people who like extreme sports, getting tech blogs to write about you will not get you the customers. You might want to find the influencers or tastemakers of extreme sports to help you spread the word.

Product Marketing: Distribution

Distribution is the other part of product marketing which most start-ups in Asia do really badly. The reason is that they often conflate press to bringing customers to the site or download the app. Hence, from now onwards, you should make sure that these two issues are separate. Here are the few things which you need to ask yourself in working out your distribution channels:

What is the platform and delivery process that allows you to distribute your product among users in a quick and robust way?

If your native mobile application is a paid app and requires a lot of downloads with a good payment mechanism, you should look at the apps store platform where most of the apps are making the most money.

If you are distributing the app for free, you might want to make sure that you get an app store platform that can reach out to many users quickly. You might want to figure out how to get to the stage where your app is on the featured list of that apps store.

The same rule applies to web services. You can distribute your product through web service providers. If you have a fantastic web service that complements a web browser, the question becomes, “should you write a browser extension such that you can distribute your service through this browser?”

Accessibility is an important rule when figuring out distribution. If you are using a payment platform, you should try to do within 2-3 frames so that the user can easily purchase your web service or download your app. Similarly, working with strategic partners (larger MNCs) will be similar. You should find out how they can add value to you before becoming part of their offerings.

It’s great PR to work with big companies but if they are half-hearted in delivering their services, you might want to reconsider because getting a strategic partner requires you to fulfill tough and stringent service-level agreements (SLAs).

One more thing I want to share about distribution is the firehose strategy: Should you create an API to allow 3rd party developers to help you distribute your service quickly? It really depends on the nature of the businesses.

You should create an API to market your presence and increase user growth, as well as to avoid spending time and effort to maintain something that does not solve your business objective. But do avoid the mistakes pointed out by this article when building APIs for 3rd party developers.

Product marketing helps your company to build up the awareness and distribution of your product to users. As for how to measure the metrics, iterate and manage the product, we will leave it to the last installment of the series to discuss that. Meanwhile, you can look at the slides for reference:

Image credit: LladyYas

In the modern world, in whatever business you are running, social media presence has become part and parcel of life. Most start-ups and some major corporations that have experimented with social media and now reaping benefits in customers engagement, management of PR crisis and announcing new initiatives.

So if you want to enter the new world of social media, what are the social media assets you really need?

The good news is that most of these assets are free and setting up is relatively easy, the real challenge is the management of these assets.

In this post, I will provide a list of minimum viable social media assets you can’t do without.

Twitter accounts & lists

A Twitter account is good for conveying announcements and news about your company. Some companie,s like Starhub, deploy Twitter for customer engagement. Whenever you have major announcements, you should be able to tweet and get friends, evangelists and champions of your company to help you spread the word.

Customer engagement is a slightly trickier and requires the person who handles the account to be able to make tactful comments and be empathetic to the needs of the customer. With social media, it’s easy to get into controversy.

In the case of some businesses that are location or offers specific, you should probably create two twitter accounts: one for announcements, news and offers and the other for customer engagement. Do remember that Twitter does not allow user names (or handles) to be more than 14 characters.

Some companies use their Twitter accounts to create Twitter lists of their employees and seperate them into different departments. It is not a bad idea and allows customers, potential strategic partners or employees within the organization to communicate in real time.

Of course, if you want to do that, make sure that you have a clear policy for your employees on how they should conduct themselves on the social network.

Facebook Pages

With 800M+ members on Facebook, Facebook Pages are now essential for companies and brands for engagement. Facebook Pages have allows you to post updates of your companies (similar to Twitter), put up thoughts and opinions about products to drive customer engagement, poll your Page fans to do some market research and receive feedback from them.

Some organizations have built Facebook apps that integrate with Facebook Pages easily to allow more interactivity between their fans and the brand or organization. The good thing about Facebook Pages is that you can allow multiple admins. You can also interact with the Page while taking on the identity of the brand.

Google Plus Business Pages

If you have a Facebook Page, you should probably have a Google Plus Business Page as well. Why is it important? Google Plus is the default social network for Google now and your Google Plus company and brand page will ensure that you are not left out of the powerful Google search engine.

The Google Plus Pages works similarly to the Facebook counterpart. In addition, you can create Google Hangouts, which are live group video chat sessions, for your community as a means of engaging them.

LinkedIn Groups and Pages

LinkedIn is probably the best tool for corporate recruitment, but what’s the easiest entry step?

First, create a company group and page and get people to follow the latest updates of your companies. In a LinkedIn company page, you can post potential job opportunities and also announcements of your latest product launches, news about your company and also providing some industry updates as a means to engage professionals within the same industry.

In the case of LinkedIn groups, you can use it to conduct discussions with professionals and people around your industry and also share some recent news within the industry. Nevertheless, depending on how you control the group permissions, you act as a facilitator for members within the same group to build relationships with each other and set up potential business opportunities.

Top Image: Denis Dervisevic

Finally, I found a book that echoed exactly the same view. “The Start-up of You” by Reid Hoffman (Co-founder of LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha describes in detail on how one can map the lessons of successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley into their own careers in an uncertain global economy out there. It might be interesting to draw out some of the important ideas sketched out in the book.

“All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed … finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where human history began. As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became “labor” because they stamped us, “You are labor.” We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.” –Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Prize winner.

The theme of the book is simple: your future success whether in career or any project you undertake, depends on understanding several entrepreneurial strategies. Society can flourish when people start to think entrepreneurially.

The book illustrated on how globalization and technology have changed the way individuals can progress in their careers. Globalization allows corporations to distribute your jobs to cheaper labour out there, for example, outsourcing American manufacturing to China. Technology has been able to simplify workflow in order to utilize less labour in jobs that used to need more people.

After the book sets the stage, it introduces us to a few interesting case studies of successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and mapped out the best practices and lessons that individuals can adopt to manage their own career in the same way.

Most notably, they described a “permanent beta” mindset where all of us have “bugs”. Constant upgrade and development of our skill sets with optimism will allow us to go through a life marked with new challenges and opportunities.

In the chapters which followed, the authors lay out the lessons with case studies of various successful entrepreneurs and corporate executives, for example, the entrepreneurs who founded AirBnB, Paypal and LinkedIn and Sheryl Sandberg who transitioned to a corporate career with successful stints in Google and Facebook.

In each part of the book, the authors give some practical exercises for the individual to work out an action plan. Like entrepreneurs who have to deal with uncertainties, changes and constraints in their own careers, we have to take stock of our assets, aspirations and market realities to develop a competitive advantage.

“Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are. Similarly, it doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked or how passionate you are about an aspiration: If someone won’t pay you for your services in the career marketplace, it’s going to be a very hard slog. You aren’t entitled to everything” – Marc Andreessen

Next, the authors recommend the following strategies for your career which is analogous to building a start-up.

First develop a competitive advantage based on your assets, aspirations and values while adapt to the market realities, then work out a plan A, B all the way to Z and pivot if your initial plan did not work. Then build an extensive network where you build genuine relationships and maintain the relationships you build with the people within the network.

Finally, pursue breakout opportunities and take intelligent risks, and in the end you will be able to navigate your way and build a career.

Sounds simple, but most of us are often stuck in our day jobs, focusing on the details rather than taking a step back to see the big picture. Someone once told me that an entrepreneur needs to understand that everyone works for themselves, and their objective as entrepreneurs is to facilitate employees that the objective of working for yourself and the company stays the same.

Whether you are an entrepreneur or not, you should invest in yourself, and the start-up is you.

Recently, I was invited by the incubator JFDI.Asia to deliver a talk entitled “That Thing You (Forget to) Do” (inspired loosely from Tom Hanks’ movie “That Thing You Do”) on best practices of product development, management & marketing. In this article, I will focus on product development and what lessons & best practices I have drawn from my own experiences.

Update on Post (3 May 2012): Video of the talk in JFDI Asia – credits to JFDI for recording it

How Start-ups build & develop products

Everyone thinks that a start-up is just about building one product. But it is more than that. Founders of a company cannot just build a product and expect people to use it. The entire theme of the article is to focus on what things most people tend to forget to do in their start-up. The entire product process requires three intersecting themes: development, management and marketing. These three aspects will involve both the business and engineering co-founders and employees, and how teams scale up depends on how they communicate between themselves and execute to the timeline to the day of the product launch.

Product development is only one part of the product cycle. That’s the part I will focus on this article. Managing the product from feedback of users and marketing the product are also tied to build up the start-up as a sustainable business but we will talk about that later. How shall a team of co-founders start in their product development cycle? The answer is a product roadmap from the very start with a clear vision and mission of the company in how it solves the one important problem from the user.

The team should not build immediately, but instead formulate a plan where the three aspects are stacked together in a simple operating plan with the timeline and milestones properly defined for the entire team. Everyone signs on with the plan and then execution.

The problem with most people in Asia is that they avoid the question, “Why are we doing this?” Hence having a vision and mission for the product will enforce the founders of the company to come up with a plan. Planning without Execution is a pipe dream. Execution without Planning is waste of effort & time.. Looking at the aspect of product development, I believe that the agile development strategy is ideal for start-ups with two to four members.

Hence I have broken down into three important pieces that sums up on how the start-up can build the product with resource constraints but achieve the maximum impact such that they can test the product with customers and iterate upon the feedback:

1. Feature building (Engineering and Design): Most start-ups, whether they are in Asia or Silicon Valley, should be able to build the features conceived by the founders and the employees of a start-up. It is important to take a big whiteboard, and clearly lay out the wireframes and components on how the technology works. In the case of the website, we look at the how the user navigate within using different buttons that have clear defined actions.

What most people forget to do in Asia, is to focus on one business objective, and make sure that they use analytics to measure the success on how a user actually performs the action on the site. The same can be said about mobile development, where the layout of the mobile screens and the user experience can be drawn to show how the user navigate across the phones. Even if the users may be accessing different mobile platforms (iOS, Android or WP7), a good whiteboard that lay out the components and wireframes of the mobile screens will allow the developers to find common features to build and then enhance others which might take advantage of that one particular platform.

I have included a list of things that most people should think about when it comes to design and build the technology product and in this case, I specialize it for websites and native mobile apps.

Two important lessons that I have learned from building features: first, less is more – focus on one business objective and leverage all the functions within the website or mobile app to nudge the user towards the action which will fulfill the business objective. For example, if your business objective is to grow users by getting tastemakers or influencers to invite more people, you should focus on what kind of incentives that you can entice them to invite more users; second: alignment with how users perceive that you are solving their problem.

For example, if you are building an app where it measures the heartbeat of the user, you must ensure that the feature can be easily utilized by the user to perform that action.

2. Content: In Asia, most software engineers and product managers seem to forget about the need to include strong content such that the users will continue to look forward to new updates and changes. Content is not an engineering feature but it requires constant updates.

For example, it’s easy to extract or scrap data from sources. The key is that content should be dynamic and not static. If you are building a platform which is consumer-facing, the content you provide has to be constantly updated. Most Asian apps fail the mark because they think that the content is a one-time process. It’s more a social practice problem than a technology problem.

While in Asia, most engineers embrace the web 2.0 vision but they seem to forget that dynamic rather than static content is important to drive user traction and growth. That comes to my next point.

3. Help (or educating) the user: Most software engineers in Asia derive ideas from Silicon Valley, and in the process, some assume that a normal and average user will be able to figure out the app. One thing that most founders of start-ups doing consumer-facing websites or apps forget to do is to educate the user. We cannot assume the user knows how to use the website or the app unless we prompted them to.

In fact, most successful websites and native mobile apps flourish because they are able to guide user towards one simple process (made up of 3-4 steps) and the action which they want the user to do, is clear and concise rather than having too many options all over the place. Putting instructions within the app or website serve to guide the user better and at the same time, allow you to add value to their user experience.

References that you should read on building good products:

• Smashing Magazine: This website accumulates the best practices and experiences from many web designers and developers in developing websites and native mobile apps. They usually provide case studies on font colors, color and shape of buttons and how to enhance user experience in different types of sites, for example, e-commerce sites.
• Look at Mobile UI Patterns or Pttrns for good mobile design and interfaces.
• Choice of the right Color Palettes for your website or mobile apps.
• Concepts of Agile Software Development and Kano Model

We will follow up with the next two aspects of product management and product marketing next. You can look at the presentation slides here:

Image credit: LladyYas

Malaysia's digital economy is similar to Singapore and Brunei.

Recently, I was invited to speak on entrepreneurship and consumer Internet trends in a private event hosted by Penn Olson during Startups in Asia, which happened from 2nd to 4th February.

In this article, I will highlight additional perspectives to shed greater light on the ideas presented during my talk, which gave the audience a better grasp on the consumer internet space in Southeast Asia.

Two clusters of economies in Southeast Asia, based on mobile and Internet penetration rates

Glancing at the mobile and internet penetration rates in ASEAN countries, we see two prevailing trends (see slide 4 of the presentation provided below).

But before that, it’s important to note that the internet penetration rate is constructed based on the number of broadband internet subscribers divided by the total population, while the mobile penetration rate is calculated using the number of mobile subscribers (mobile phones are not distinguished as either featured/WAP phones or smartphones). As a result, mobile penetration rates are usually more than 100 percent, which just means that most users own more than one phone.

Taking into consideration the ratio of mobile and internet penetration rates, we see two clusters forming: The digital economies of Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia share very similar behaviour where smartphone ownership is becoming significant in the cities, while the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam represent emerging digital economies where smartphone penetration are relatively low but the consumers uses social media with low mobile rates without knowing that they are accessing the Internet.

Looking at Cambodia, which may represent a potential digital economy of 53 million people, one can conjecture that it is heading in a similar direction as Vietnam or Thailand. As for Myanmar, the infrastructure must be built first before a digital economy can arise.

Missing elements in the Southeast Asia Ecosystem

I have indicated in my talk that there are at least three missing elements (and they may be more). Let’s start from the first issue: the lack of series A funding in the region of US$0.5M to US$2M. The reason why most investors avoid this funding range is because it’s a risky stage where a company can grow into a proper and sustainable entity or go south if they cannot find sustainable revenue streams.

As a result, most companies which can potentially grow will not be considered by investors. However, seed funding is readily available because the quantum of investment is low. To get a better chance of obtaining funding in this range I talked about, the company has to leapfrog and generate significant revenues quickly, otherwise it is very tough to move forward.

The second issue is the dearth of talent to scale the company. If we match founders from Southeast Asia to Silicon Valley, the difference is not that wide apart. The real difference is in the management team with people who are formerly from big companies that can help to scale the company. We read often from tech blogs about the movement of people from one big tech company to another, but this phenomenon is very rare in Southeast Asia. The reason is that most start-ups cannot afford the lifestyle of these executives and the opportunity of exits are very minimal.

The last issue relates to most VCs in Southeast Asia: A lot of them are former financiers and not really business operators by experience. We cannot fault them for their backgrounds, but it does have an impact on how they assess companies.

To be blunt, a former banker constructs a company’s valuation by profit and loss. If Facebook was started in Southeast Asia, they can never survive. The reason is that they did not generate any revenue or profit until their pre-IPO investment round. Of course, Facebook was a bit bet and the odds of finding companies like it are really small.

But I am seeing good signs in Singapore where we have people like Meng Weng Wong (co-founder of JFDI Asia) and Batara Eto from East Ventures who are former entrepreneurs running venture incubators and are investors as well.

Photo: WhizKris