Whether you are running a business or a marketing campaign, ideally, you would prefer to target as many people as possible. Since by definition, most people are average (yes you are), the largest target market is the average consumer.
But, who is the average consumer? How do they make decisions and what are their preferences? Let’s take a look from the consumer's perspective.
Most would say entrepreneurs are job creators. Businesses and companies they build, employ workers and drive the economy. You could also say entrepreneurs are value creators. Their ventures create and deliver value to their customers.
In my mind, an entrepreneur is someone who is exceptionally good at identifying gaps in the market, fills it and captures the resulting value of this exchange.
If you could only improve one skill at this moment, choose to get better at communicating. Communication (listening, verbal and writing) is one of the most sought after skill in the workplace. It doesn’t matter if you are in a managerial position or not, being able to communicate effectively, provides tremendous value to the company.
A good communicator is not only someone who can listen, speak and write well. She also knows which channel to use to get her message across and chooses the right mode of communication to improve its effectiveness. To get the message across, you have to care more than the words you use.
Even if your toothbrush is newer, cleaner, fancier, more colorful, electrically powered or emits ultrasonic wave, I still prefer mine. After all, why would I want to use someone else’s toothbrush. Yuck!
This is fine if we are just talking about toothbrushes but in reality, we have the same concept towards other peoples’ ideas. We tend to prefer ideas we came up with rather than those from others. This is known as the Not-Invented-Here bias or the Toothbrush Theory.
At last year’s Team Retreat, while enjoying the breeze on Khao Lak Beach in Thailand, I told the rest of the team that I don’t care about people. We were playing Two Truths One Lie and there are times when I’m unsure if that statement was true or a lie.
Studies have shown that willpower is a limited mental resource. Every time you make a decision, it depletes that same energy resource your willpower uses and eventually you’ll give in to your desires. This is known as Ego Depletion.
On the first Tuesday of every month, for more than 3 years now, I have had the privilege of meeting some of the most talented and inspiring people in our city — Kota Kinabalu. All thanks to WebCamp KK.
WebCamp KK is a community of people from different backgrounds and industries who are passionate about what they do. These are the ones that inspire others into action. The ones who believe in sharing and helping each other improve our city.
What started as a simple gathering of like-minded people, has now turned into a movement that sparks connections, spawns communities and continues to be a source of inspiration for many.
Early this year, in an attempt to shape and define our company culture, my co-founder John and I came up with a set of guiding principles for the company.
We decided we want our team to have the heart to serve, to communicate well, to constantly adapt to change and to make each other better.
Most of us are quite familiar with the idea of setting goals. When you are younger, your teacher may have asked bout your ambition. What do you want to be when you grow up? When you attend your first job interview, the interviewer may ask: Where do you see yourself in next five years? And when you are in the workforce, your bosses and managers will ask for your annual goals.
Setting goals let us focus on what we want to achieve. It gives us motivation and a sense of purpose. It is also a way for us to measure our progress. Having a goal is like having a sense of where you want to go and a way to track your progress towards that direction.
The Lean Startup is one of those books that changes the way you approach, validate and build a product. It encourages an iterative process of experimentation and validation to learn more about customer needs and reduce risk and waste of resources.
In other words, it is about learning and getting as much feedback as you can from the user and use that to guide your product development process. Too often, startups spend their time building the product in isolation without any contact with users until release.
We have built quite a few apps over the years at Flexnode and Showtimes.my is one our favourites. It is also quite popular with around 200k hits monthly. Unfortunately, the 5 year old app broke and stop working recently, so John and I decided it is about time to rebuild it.
Since we are rebuilding the app, it is the perfect time to do some work on the dated design. Having used the app for years, we are quite familiar with the shortcomings. In this post, I'm going to walk you through some of our initial thought process we had when building the original app and what we are changing in the redesign.
