Singapore Entrepreneurs

As usual, I was invited to listen to postgraduates presenting their business plans yesterday. This time round, a few interesting surprises came up and this provided me to discuss the lessons learned from being a judge to the presentations. One interesting presentation which I heard yesterday is about a product in a niche market. The judges have an interesting discussion about investing in such markets. So, what is a niche market? If you are an entrepreneur in Singapore (where your market is small), is it really worth going into a niche market? We will explore some of these questions in this blog entry. [ Read More ]

We hear the success stories of YouTube and HardwareZone recently in the mainstream media. It also raises the debate on whether Singaporeans are capable of creating our own YouTube. Our resident contributor, Der Shing will examine three key pertinent features that are required for building a successful, innovative and sustainable company like YouTube. [ Read More ]

Once you have stablized the first phase of your startup, you will need to look for a proper office. Our resident contributor, Der Shing draws his experience about moving the company office from place to place and shares his thoughts about the value of matching office environment to company growth. [ Read More ]

Of course, we heard about the acquisition of Hardwarezone by SPH. To those who are involved in the internet industry, it is believed that the price is too low for acquisition, consider the customer base and other strong internet indicators such as Alexa rank. Our mysterious resident contributor, Cobalt Paladin shares his perspective on this recent acquisition and another tale about another entrepreneur with their goals and aims for another internet startup. [ Read More ]

Always thought and found those extremely thick documents that companies produce for an IPO a waste of time? Didn’t know where to obtain them? Or if you have never entertained the thought of reading a prospectus, resident contributor Wannapreneur here gives us a few benefits of doing so. Find out his 5 reasons and see if you agree! [ Read More ]

Of course, the IMF/World Bank meeting is putting Singapore in the spotlight, for both good and bad reasons. Recently, we reported about Singapore being the 2nd easiest place to start a business. That was last year’s report. We are now formally promoted to the 1st for ease in starting a business. You can read this in the World Bank’s report “Doing Business in 2007″. Of course, one should dissect this report with some caution and skeptism. Here is what we are going to do in this short commentary. [ Read More ]

As our resident contributor, DT, learns…never forget even the most mundane! Here, he shares with us the not-so-cheery side of his iPoor t-shirt business - the part that most entrepreneurs dread: the actual logistics! [ Read More ]

Creating a wonderful product based on a novel idea and which now sells like hotcakes has to have some sort of management system with which the products are sold. Following the success of his iPoor t-shirts, DT here addresses a small but important issue for ecommerce - how he makes the best of PayPal, and what you can learn from it. [ Read More ]

So you congratulate yourself when you manage to get your team to reach your target goal - a task that had seemed almost impossible at the beginning, but you’ve finally done it. You get admiring and congratulatory emails from business partners asking you how you did it. You smile smugly and feel on cloud nine. But did you lose your team members emotionally along while doing so? As an entrepreneurial leader, is the end result your only goal or does the journey matter more? [ Read More ]

Last Sunday, our Prime Minister delivered his rally speech for the workyear of 2006. He discussed our current progress and a possible roadmap on the Singapore economy. While spending the last two days reading, listening and thinking over the main points of the speech, I realized that something that was amiss in his speech. The keywords “entrepreneurship”, “enterprise” and “entrepreneurs” did not appear anywhere at all in the speech. In this commentary, I shall deconstruct the portions regarding the economy from his speech and discuss the implications from the revival of the Singapore Inc to entrepreneurship. [ Read More ]