Launching New Startups in Big Corporations

Many industries are being disrupted by new and innovative technologies and many more are awaiting to be disrupted in the next 5-10 years.

This anticipation has obviously resulted in many corporations attempting to create their own innovative products, so as not to be disrupted by a third party technology or a startup. It’s quite common these days to see Telcos, Banks and Insurance companies organizing hackathons, and trying to generate innovative ideas that could be used in their respective industries.

Generating new ideas is the easy part. But as discussed in my previous post, trying to develop totally new products in a corporate setting is very challenging to say the least.

startupvscorp

3 Corporate Hurdles that Kill New Initiatives

There are at least three main corporate hurdles for a successful new product incubation within a large corporate setting, these are corporate structure, approval processes and procurement processes. Oftentimes, corporations make a mistake of starting a new product without addressing any of these three pain points. Continue reading

Product Development in Startups vs Corporations

In my previous post I had discussed about how startups start small and evolve into bigger companies and this process of growth brings many challenges with it. In this post, I want to discuss about how Product Development differs between Corporations and Startups.

We all know, how compact the organizational structure of a startup is. And this compactness has many advantages and benefits. As you can see from the picture below, Startups usually consist of couple of teams only, they are usually Dev Team (which normally includes Designers, Testers and UX Professionals), Sales & Marketing usually bundled together and Support Team. I’m not going to discuss the advantages of a small team that has full focus on a particular idea/product. Rather, I will be discussing more on the disadvantages of a big corporation trying to launch a new “startup” within itself.
startup_prod_dev

Corporations can be huge. They could be divided into several Groups (eg; IT), each Group will have multiple Divisions (eg; Digital Technology) in them, and each Division will have multiple Departments (eg; Product Development) in them, and each Dept will have multiple Units (eg; Software Development) in them and some Units might have different Teams (eg; Product Based Teams) in them.

product_dev_corp

Above structure was an actual organizational structure in one of the corporations in Malaysia.
Continue reading

Which Social Media Metrics Really Matter

Josue of Engagebit.com has asked 55 experts the following question: “If you could measure social media success with only 3 metrics, which 3 would you choose?”

The result is a resounding consensus on the importance of Engagement, followed by Traffic and lastly Conversion. Engagement refers to the level of activity (i.e the comments, likes, retweets, shares etc.) that goes on on the social sites, websites or blogs of that particular brand, product or a campaign. Traffic is obvious, the more traffic the site receives the more awareness and revenue it’s going to generate. And lastly, for most product campaigns, it’s all about the bottom line – revenue. So obviously driving conversions will be the key, be it user registrations or sales.

socialmediamatters

You can read the individual answers from all 55 experts here. I was honored and humbled to be included in the list too, you can read my response here. Thanks to Josue for the great work!

 

Jack Ma’s Advice to Entrepreneurs

Summary, with some paraphrasing;

  • Before 20 years old – be a good student, gain experience. This is the time to take risks, fail and learn from your experiences.
  • Before 30 years old – follow somebody, go to small company. Choose a good boss and not chase after a good company. You will learn a lot of things from good boss.
  • Between 30 – 40 years – this is the time to be an entrepreneur and be your own boss.
  • Between 40 – 50 years – do the things that you are good at, don’t try to learn new stuff at this age. Focus on things that you are good at.
  • Between 50 – 60 years – work for the  young people, rely on them, invest in them. Because young people can do better than you.
  • After 60 years old – enjoy the life, spend time with yourself and family.

Jack Ma’s regrets are – that he worked too hard and didn’t spend enough time with his family. And that if he had another chance, he wouldn’t live his life the same.

Motivation, Ability & Attitude

All things being equal, from my observation success or failure of a startup boils down to three main characteristics of its staff: Motivation, Ability & Attitude. This of course, first and foremost applies to the founder, followed by his/her team that supports him/her behind.

  1. Motivation – is the founder motivated to make his startup-idea a success? Is this his own idea that he is passionate about? Or was he put in charge of this startup by someone else (board, investors..)?

    Level of motivation that a founder has for his startup-idea plays a major role in the success of his startup.

  2. Ability – is he capable, both as a leader and a manager? Does he have the expertise in the field that his startup is operating? How is his execution skills? Is he a doer? Does he have the required experience?

    Well-roundedness is the key characteristic of able people – people who get things done. They understand and appreciate the different complexities of running a company. From product development to HR to Operations etc. And they are able to navigate through the many challenges and still get the things done.

  3. Attitude – does he have the right attitude towards the idea, the startup, the way startups normally operate in a chaotic environment, agile methodology, continuous improvement, continuous customer feedback…? Or is he a 9am – 5pm, corporate type of guy?

    Having a right attitude will produce a right behavior and vice versa. (Definition of an attitude: a settled way of thinking or feeling about someone or something, typically one that is reflected in a person’s behavior.)

    It’s hard to change attitudes, and often times it’s impossible to change settled attitudes. Therefore, it’s absolutely critical to have the right person as the founder from the beginning. Same goes to the hiring of team members. Most hiring managers tend to pay more attention to CV credentials than an attitude of a person, which I think is a big mistake.

Often times, people have different combination of these three. I hope that your founder has the highest scores in all three, namely; high motivation, strong ability and the right attitude in order to achieve a fully connected cycle to run your startup smoothly.

full_cycle

But realistically, it’s difficult to find an individual that has a fully connected cycle. And it’s more difficult to build a team that has the full-cycle as well.

disconnected_cycle

Conclusion

This is not some sort of management theory from MBA books. It’s just my personal observation throughout the years. Being both as an entrepreneur myself and an employee of startups and big corporation. I, now can see these three characteristics that are needed in the founder & the team to get a good idea turn into a successful startup.

What do you think?

Review: Maybank2u Mobile App

Initially I just wanted to provide some feedbacks to @MyMaybank via twitter, but there were simply too many things to tell, so I thought it would be easier to write a blog post about it.

Native mobile apps that are extensions of existing web services are a great way to make your service more accessible and enjoyable for your customers. If done correctly, it can boost your customer satisfaction and increase your customer loyalty.

Today I will be reviewing Maybank’s mobile app for iOS and giving some constructive critique. I hope they will take feedbacks of mine with an open heart and improve their app further, so that it can be a better app for their customers in general.

A big no-no – placing an ad on app startup

m2u_startupOne of the big no-no’s in mobile app usability is to display an ad during the app startup. Because this slows down the process of user reaching to his objective (i.e main screen, where he wants to log into his account) thus increases his frustration. Because that’s what user wants to do, login to his account and do some transaction or check his account balance.

Well, Maybank thought that it would be a good idea to display a banner ad that lasts whole of 8 seconds (see screenshot to the left) until user sees the main screen of the app. These 8 seconds feels like 20 second for the user..

This is a typical problem in big corporations. Where different product managers who are in charge of different products (in this case Maybank Malaysia Open event) within the corporation are always fighting for eye balls and visibility on company’s website, mobile app, newsletters etc.

Suggestion: Get rid of the ad and make the app snappy, let it go straight to the main page. If startup image has to be placed, then it shouldn’t be longer than 1-3 seconds. Continue reading

Knowledge vs Experience

Self-explanatory.. knowledge_vs_experience

source: unknown

This is what Steve Jobs said in his popular Commencement Address in 2005 at Stanford University regarding “connecting dots“:

..you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Startups vs Corporations, and what happens in between

Why founders of startups get replaced by the board when a startup starts to grow fast? Why many startups fail to integrate into a parent company after an acquisition? And why big corporations struggle to launch a successful startup from within?

Concept of RPV

RPV stands for Resources, Processes and Values.

Resources

At the initial stage of a company, all you need are good and reliable people that can get the job done i.e resources. At this stage resources are crucial, if you have a web technology startup and happen to find a great coder and UX developer then you are in luck. On the other hand, if you happen to hire the wrong developer, you will have a tough time launching that MVP (minimum-viable-product) of yours. Similarly, if your lead developer leaves at this stage to a competitor, it can greatly affect your product and even your startup as a whole. But this is also the stage where it’s easiest to solve your company’s problems, because most of the problems will be related to resources and usually they can be settled by hiring a new person or firing an existing employee.

Processes

When your startup is at the stage where it has a product or service that has achieved a product-market-fit, and you start hiring a lot more people to grow both your company and its revenue, that’s where the processes come in. That’s because you want your operations, customer service, support, billing etc to be run efficiently. That’s when you start to setup company-wide processes, different processes for different teams and departments, KPIs (key-performance-indicators), SLAs (service-level-agreements), SOPs (standard-operating-procedures) etc. This is the stage when efficiency is most important to the company, because efficiency is directly related to company’s revenues.

rpv startup

Values

The final stage is when a particular startup has become an established corporation. At this stage “company values” are normally setup to guide employees in their daily work, dealings and most importantly in decision making. Values are guiding principles that dictate how the company is run in all walks of its life. At this stage, while still important, resources won’t be as important as they were at the “resources stage”. Hiring and firing happens quite often. Individual opinions within the company doesn’t really have any weight unless the person is a c-level. Continue reading

Competition is for Losers

Peter Thiel is no stranger to Startup World. He is the co-founder of PayPal and investor in Facebook, Quora, Artsy, PandoDaily, AdRoll, Reddit and many more.

He has an interesting viewpoint when it comes to Startups and how they should be managed, in order to be successful. For the past decade, methodologies like Customer Development and Lean Startup have been popular. The central idea in these methodologies are around customers, and that your idea (hypothesis) must be tested against potential customers in order to be successful, and based on customers’ feedback you should tweak your initial idea (pivot) to achieve a sustainable and repeatable business model that generates revenue.

Peter Thiel is sceptical about these methodologies. He says that customers might not always be right and listening to them to guide your business’ destiny might not be the right approach. He encourages entrepreneurs to start startups that do in order of magnitude better than the existing competitors, rather than doing incremental improvements as the Lean Startup methodology suggests. He also advises entrepreneurs to go for monopoly when starting a startup, doing something that dominates the market i.e avoiding competition and aiming for monopoly. He says “Competition is for losers”.

He also questions the education system in leading Universities that teach Entrepreneurship, he says that currently our education system instills and inculcates in future entrepreneurs to compete and to be a better competitor rather than doing something unique that makes competition irrelevant or difficult for others to compete with your startup.

Personally, what he puts forward is definitely something interesting and somewhat refreshing. It kind of reminds me of Steve Jobs’ beliefs. He was the type of person where he would say “customers do not know what they want.. etc”. But I think Customer Development and Lean Startup Methodologies are not mutually exclusive to what Peter Thiel is suggesting, in fact they can still be used to help reach product-market-fit.

Below is a video of him giving a lecture in Stanford in “Business Strategy and Monopoly Theory” where he expounds on the above mentioned ideas of his:

Note: If you are based in Malaysia, you can order his book from Bookurve with free shipping. I ordered mine already together with Eric Schmidt’s “How Google Works“, should be arriving next week.

Wikipedia’s Initial Idea and How it Evolved

Wikipedia as we know it today, with more than 3.7 million articles for english version alone, had a different idea and business model altogether in the beginning that many people may not know it now.

As the story goes.. In 1999, Jimmy Wales had an idea, he wanted to create a free encyclopedia to be written by experts and PhD holders, it was called Nupedia. He reasoned, only scholars, academics and experts in a particular field would be able to write such articles. It made sense, as scholarly articles needed a lot of referential data and research, not everyone would be able to write such articles. However, in its first year, his team of “experts” were able to write only a dozen articles. They were simply too slow. This was due to many reasons, most of the academics were too busy, it was difficult to convince them to write for Nupedia, research normally took few years..etc.

So, Jimmy Wales saw that it was not working, something had to be done. He came out with a new idea. He suggested to his team, why not make it in a way that anybody can create an article, others can edit it, etc… basically early years of crowdsourcing. But the editors of Nupedia and Advisory Board were not very supportive of the idea. For them it was the opposite of what they were doing at the moment. Non-academics, and uncontrolled editing and creation of articles, they thought, would jeopardize the credibility of the articles and company as a whole. They reasoned, there would be too much error in the articles, which would render the articles useless for any scholarly reference or research.

This new idea ended up separated into different project and was called “Wikipedia” (wiki – hawaiian for quick). Within a year, there were more than 20,000 articles in it. Clearly it was a success and it was working. As for the margin of error, it was 3.86% per article, compared to 2.92% for Encyclopedia Britannica according to 2005 research by journal Nature, which is acceptable. And usually these errors get corrected over time.

Eventually, Nupedia was shutdown in 2003, and it had only 23 articles at the time of closing. And as they say, the rest is a history…

Lesson to Startups and Entrepreneurs..

Sometimes the initial idea for your startup may not work out, and you might end up doing something totally different for your startup and its direction. And this phenomenon is actually very common in startups. As Jawed Karim of YouTube said in SVC2M event in Kuala Lumpur, their initial idea for youtube was “a dating site with videos“.

So, if your first version of your product (MVP) didn’t take off, don’t despair. Find out why it didn’t take off, get feedback from your potential customers/users on what they want, after that iterate and try again!

Note: If you want to read more about wikipedia story, check this Business Week article here

Please feel free to comment about your own experiences or of any companies that you know which changed their business model, direction, idea drastically from the original one.