[Hacking 101] Time to get hands dirty!

A few months ago I decided I would start to learn code. This decision came from a few different places.  In August 2011 I landed my first full-time job at a tech startup in Hong Kong. It was the first time I experienced how awesome it is to build a world-changing product from scratch. More importantly it sparked an idea in the back of my mind. I love startup. I don’t mind spending more time to explore in the startup world or even being part of it. Why had I never considered building my own stuff as a career path?

I was thinking I could play a business co-founder role at the very beginning as I have been studying and doing marketing stuffs but after I came up a few ideas, I found it hard to validate them because I always needed to rely on a tech guy to tell me whether if it’s worth to do it in terms of development cost and development possibility. The lack of technical background really made feel a bit frustrated and most importantly dragged my progress slow even at such an early stage.

So, I decided to learn coding even though I’ve never thought of doing that. I’ve consulted a few of my colleagues from the technical team how I should start. Since my goal is to be able to write an Android application, I was recommended to give “Standford CS106a” a try. CS106a is an open-course which is totally free and available to the public. You can simply go on their YouTube channel to watch all 28 video lectures and all the assignments, handouts and notes are completely free for download. I didn’t hesitate and download everything from the school website and I’m proud to say I’ve finished the first 2 lectures and am working my way on the assignment #1!

[Hacking 101] “Hello World”

My dream is to own a product that I am passionate about.  The real satisfaction comes when you go through the whole process from generating the small idea all the way to building the actual thing based on your imagination and finally prove the concept by getting good feedback from your target audiences. I am looking for this kind of satisfaction while I am getting myself ready for the startup attempt. Today, it’s just the beginning and hopefully one day I’ll be able to taste a bit the real satisfaction by making my dream come true.

My “Hello World!” program is born even though I have no idea what I am coding. But my 1st attempt actually makes me surprisingly excited for some reasons. Let’s get our hands dirty.

Don’t underestimate your impact

How many times did you give up to do something because you thought the stuffs that you’re doing were meaningless. How many times did you fail to put your 120% on something because you thought there’s only little impact and no one cares about it or nobody is gonna see it anyway. We all do things aiming to get recognized. If you’re in the business world, you probably know what I mean. When everyone around you is talking about ROIs all the time, your dedication and working attitude will be easily driven by what and how much you’re gonna get from doing it. If you feel like you’re not making anything out of it, you might choose not to do it. If you have no choice, you’ll probably gonna take it easy and just try to get it over without putting much efforts because there’s zero impact and you don’t see the point for working hard on it. However, if you realize this is an unmissable chance to show off because you can kinda expect something good is gonna come to your side once you nail it, or you find it your hard works will become something meaningful to someone you care, you’ll just basically do everything you can do and try to bring it.

I have to admit that I have been following this kind of mindset since working full time a year and half ago. I really think it’s not about how hard you work but how smart you work as I keep growing and building my own career. And what I meant by “smart” was to take it easy on something unimportant and wisely spend time and put effort on something more important.  I’m sure 99% of the people will agree of doing things smarter and I’ve never thought and seen if there was any problem with it until I got this text message from my colleague who went to a high school career talk with me this afternoon.

Dear (My colleague’s name):

Hello, I am a Form 5 student who studies in XXX school. Even though I am not Junior Form, I am so delightful to grab the opportunity of attending the seminar.

Thanks for your inspiring and uplifting sharing. I have learnt a lot through your story and experience. Actually, I have downloaded both Hong Kong Movie and TalkBox. Those are really useful in everyday life. Apart from that, I really admire your attitude toward your career path.

I am not studying ICT right now. I have chosen ECON and History as my electives. Yet, at least I can know more about the industry these years. In fact, there are full of opportunities and challenges, right?

You know? I am a physically disabled student. However, up to now I don’t give up my dream. Once again, thanks for such impressive lesson.

Humbly Yours,
Simon

This message was originally sent by one of the students. He sent this message to my colleague through Facebook and showed his special thanks to us. It’s just so blessed our present did leave an impression for the younger generation. But at the same time, I started to feel so embarrassed after seeing his message over and over again. I’m embarrassed because I can feel the real appreciation from the student. He shows his respect to us by sending in a thank you note like this. He would have to remember our names, probably googled our names, and eventually found us on Facebook. He’s brave enough to send us a message from nowhere. We, as someone who came from a so-called “professional” background, were complaining the school arrangement while we’re on the way. We’re feeling like such a waste of time doing this because we thought those kids were too young to learn about career and they’re not interested in anything we said. So here was the deal, we got the job done asap, students could get off on time and everyone’s happy. We didn’t even made a few new slides for the students but just re-used what we’ve been using for our clients.

I really want to take this opportunity to apologize to all the students I met today. We’re not working hard enough this time because we thought it’s not worth it. But right now, I need to confess. It’s such a big pleasure to be there with you guys today and shared our experiences and passion with talented younger generation. Simon, thanks so much for reaching out. You really did make me think and reflect a lot on this one. I truly appreciate your kind words and I know that you won’t underestimate yourself and let yourself down because you’ve taught me how the “little” impact can be much more bigger than what people can imagine. Please keep fighting for your dream and I promise I will do the same from now on.

Photo credit: PosAbility

5 tips on how to build innovative culture

If you are in the tech or creative industry, innovation is basically your daily job to build and delivery something new and creative. However, sometimes you might just get stuck at some points where you can’t think of any new idea/ tired of thinking of new stuffs for your work especially when you are already used to what you have been doing on daily basis.

It is really a bad sign when you start turning your innovative works as a daily routine and you don’t enjoy bringing what you are working on to the next level. In the past year, our team has been thinking a lot about how to avoid falling into this trap and keep our motivation and creative mindset up. Finally we decided to do a little experiment within our team to see if we can break this out.

The Flexday

One day, our manager sent us an email with the subject “hey you wanna try an experiment?”. The headline was attractive enough to make us click and read her 2 paragraphs long email. The idea was simple. We pick one day every month and ditch all the works we have on hand. Then we pick one subject to work on but it can’t be related to work. By the end of the day, we meet at a café near our office and each one of us needs to present what we’ve done during the day. We enjoyed it a lot and here is why.

1. Choose what you love to work on

What’s better than choosing something you like and work on it for the entire day? You don’t have to stay in the office if you don’t like the office environment. Just grab your laptop and find a nice café to work on your stuffs. You can even go on field trip if you find something interesting in town such as exhibition and startup gathering event. Just keep 1 thing in mind, make sure you ship something by the end of the day.

2. Forget about work

We look forward to our Flexday because it’s just another fun and relax day for us. There is no deadline and pressure from boss. You just keep working hard on your stuffs and get ready to surprise your team.

3. It’s about fun time

Flexday is all about fun. You can build a simple game prototype and invite everyone in your company to try it. You can also make a short video film and joke about your boss. Just be creative and make it fun as long as you can present to your team.

4. Inspire your team

Even though the subject has to be unrelated to work but it might also inspire your team in some ways and make impact to your work eventually. I am a big fan of videography and I am really interested in what tools video makers use to communicate with client. So I spent my 1^st Flexday to research about how videomakers work with clients. I found a really good tool for videomarkers and designers to collect feedback from clients and prepared a short demo session for my team. After my demo, my boss suggested that we could try to use this tool to give feedback to our in house designers while working on our newsletter.

5. Build the trust

This is a really big one. We can feel a sense of trust from our boss as she gives us such a big flexibility to boost our creativity and take a break at the same time. And because of her trust, we don’t want to waste a single minute but to work even harder in order to surprise her and our team. This is the energy we are bringing it out as a team every month during Flexday.

How do you promote creativity at your company? How much do you focus on creating innovative culture? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Photo credit: Simon Ålander

7 reasons you should work for a startup before starting your own

You want to start your own business, don’t you? It is cool and attractive especially for those who are into the startup culture and working lifestyle. You get to 1000% focus on your own product and can really feel the impact of how your product or service changes people’s lives. Those are true and positive.You can even think of many other good things about starting your own thing without knowing much about startup. And the reality is starting a business can be much more complicated than you think. When I say “complicated”, I really mean to drill things into tiny details that can ruin your startup dream. Even though I can’t put a price on the value of the experience I’ve gained, I’d like to share my reasons why I think everyone should consider working at a startup before setting out to start a company of their own.

1. Built the network
Working for a startup gives you a great chance to build up your personal network. You get to work with different people such as your teammates, partners, investors or even your customers. These people are important especially when you start your own business later. They can be your potential co-founder, potential investor or other people via their networks can be part of your startup in the future.

2. Build your name
In the startup world, your reputation is incredibly important. It will dictate who you can recruit for your team, who will be willing to be your advisors and investors and what doors your network may open. A reputation is not build overnight and so building your reputation can be easier while working at a startup through representing a product and interacting with thousands of people via different social media platforms. There are few things more powerful than members of your team and especially the founders attesting to your work ethic and character.

3. Learn the industry
You have the passion and skills (or even $$) to start your own business  but it doesn’t mean you understand the industry and market situation. Understanding some basics of the industry and market is crucial because it gives you a more complete picture on what to expect in the future. By working for a startup, you get to learn more about the industry by meeting different people within or outside the company. You get to join the local startup community and meet with different startup founders and hackers. You get to experience the market reaction and learn how to response. You also get to know about the local labor market in your industry by interviewing different candidates or speaking at school career talk. All these are valuable for you and give you a bigger picture on what you need to expect and experience in your own startup.

4. Play the VC game
I am sure this is the game that almost every founder needs to learn how to play. How to to do a VC pitch? How to write a investment proposal? How and which VC should I choose? Should I raise VC money now? You have no way to learn these things without actually experiencing in a real business environment. You may be able to experience and learn how to get in touch and deal with the investors by working for a startup. Even though sometimes the VC game doesn’t go so well, you still learn the lesson and will be able to apply them in your game.

5. See how a team operates
You might think that team dynamics would be easy. You might have done a lot of class projects and been in many groups before, during and after college. How hard could it be to operate and grow a team? In fact, it’s very hard. I’ve seen how team dynamics can change dramatically and how many curveballs life sends you; our team has celebrated life and faced death, which you’re really not prepared for until you experience it.

6. Learn to be CEO
One of the best thing about working for startup is that you get to well connected with the management team (I wrote another post on “6 reasons why I work for startup“). With less (or zero) levels of bureaucracy, everyone is closer to one another. You get to experience how your CEO leads you and the rest of the team towards the team direction. You get to see how a CEO interacts and motivates you and other team members. You also get to feel the pain your CEO has to deal with on daily basis.

7. See if this is really your thing
In the end, startups need a lot more employees than they need founders. There is nothing wrong with just loving working at startups versus actually founding a company. It’s an incredible amount of work to get a startup off the ground, gain traction, build a team, lead your team and deal with all the fires of a growing startup. The hours are long, and the expectations are high. Working for a startup can give you some clues about running a startup and most importantly allows you to stop and think whether if this is something that you are looking for.

Even though the startup experience can’t guarantee you for any future success, it definitely puts you to in the game and helps you to better expect what things are likely going to happen while starting your own.

Have you worked for a startup before you starting your own? Do you find the startup experience helpful for creating your own startup? What benefits do you see?

Photo credit: nextgenstn

3 steps to tell the startup story in a Ironman way

One of the greatest things about working for startup is that you are given plenty of the opportunities to explore and try new things (I wrote another post on “6 reasons why I work for startup“). It has been a year and half since I first joined the team back in summer last year. I was given lots of trust and opportunities to represent the team and speak at different events, conferences and career talks. Throughout the past year,  I have roughly given more than 10 presentations and spoken to hundreds of people. About a week ago, I was preparing my presentation slides for a guest lecture. I suddenly had a very strong feeling that I wanted to make this presentation a bit different from my previous ones. In fact, I never put much time on my slides maybe because I was always wait til the very last minute or I was just too lazy to create a new deck for every event. But this time, I wanna be different.

For this sharing session, I was responsible for sharing two of our products and what we have done for the past years. I decided to put up a theme on it and tell the story. When I was trying to put up a theme for this presentation, I was just randomly thought of things from nowhere until I thought of a fun conversation we had with our boss few months ago. During that conversation, we were trying to do a little test within our team and see how people in different generation would have different reaction on different topics. Our boss has asked us who would be our favorite super hero character? Superman, Spiderman, or Ironman? The result was interesting. My other teammates and I (we are all about the same age) immediately gave our sincere votes for Ironman and that’s why I decided to use Ironman as a story theme for the show.

Why Ironman?
The reason is simple. Ironman is really representing the new generation. He is the image of high tech. His gear, suits and laboratory are so damn cool. Unlike other super heros, Ironman is only human being without any super power. He was not very powerful in day 1 but getting stronger and stronger throughout the story. He wanted to be Ironman (part of the reason) because he thinks it is cool to be. All these Ironman factors can really represent our team in many ways. We’re craving for new and innovative technology. We are very young and small team but growing fast and getting better. We are also proud to be in the team because we are working on something cool. I just can’t think of a better way to introduce ourselves by putting the analogy on the coolest super hero on this planet.

When the Ironman meets the enemies
We are proud of TalkBox because it is one of the very few made-in-hk world class software products. The idea and concept has been proved by seeing that millions of people from all over the world love it and use it on daily basis. But at the same, competition has also been raised up once it caught a little bit attention at the international stage. After we just hit 3 millions users milestone, almost about 30 copycatssimilar products has appeared in the market. Some of them were even almost 80% the same as us in terms of layout design and color tone. No matter how hard we try to improve our product and fight back, we just cannot compete in terms of resources and development speed.

Game over?
Sound like a pretty bad failure? I was actually thinking that way at the first place especially when you see others are doing better and better. But now when I sit back and think, I would say it is more like a big progress for us. Because we were at the world class level, we gotta face the world class problems which we could never experience in the local market. We learned the importance of localization marketing approach and understand better different users from different countries. We learned our lesson on our backend for serving millions of users and understand the pros and cons about Amazon cloud service. We also learned more about different vertical markets and how push to talk can help them to solve real problems. We believe that all the lessons we learned can take us further and continue our journey.

The presentation went well. Audience’s feedback was positive. I did make some of them laughed during my presentation. I could tell they were also having fun with the Ironman story. Good thing was that my boss didn’t yell at me for my Ironman approach and even encouraged me to keep it up even though I know I need some more practices. But this is the way we work and why I love working with these open-minded people who promote creativity and drive team motivation on daily basis. Let’s start the new battle and change the world.

What is your favorite super hero? How do you like my Ironman story? Leave me a comment and share your hero story!

6 reasons why I work for a startup

After graduating last year in August, I landed my first, real full time job at TalkBox, the small tech startup in Hong Kong. When I say “small tech startup in Hong Kong”, people commonly will criticize/wonder right away and ask:

1) Is there tech startup in town?

2) Why don’t you work for HSBC or Morgan Stanley?

3) OK. If you like tech, why not Microsoft or Google?

Before you want to punch me in the face, let me share how insanely lucky I am. I got the job the old-fashioned way by sending in my résumé via email, and I made one good decision: I chose to apply to a small, startup.

1) More influence

With a smaller team, each person at a startup has more say. You should have more opportunity to voice your opinion and influence key decisions. And you want that, right?

2) More ownership

You might not be the founder, but you’re darn close. A sense of ownership, is a wonderful thing; they’ll give you one more reason to work better and harder.

3) More learning

Startup environments are tough courses in business and life. You may struggle and face a lots of HOWs and WHYs and no one will really tell you what to do, but YOU will be the one to think, evaluate and execute. You’ll learn more in 6 months at a startup than you will in 4 years at university…

4) More connectivity

With less (or zero) levels of bureaucracy, everyone is closer to one another. You should be well connected to your CEO as well as the international end users, vendors, VCs, friends, etc. that surround the startup.

5) More emotion

Working at a startup isn’t a constant high. Far from it. But it is intense, and the emotional charge you’ll get on a regular basis is a worthwhile learning experience.

6) More fun

The working environment, the atmosphere and the people are just way too much fun. Don’t think you can take a funny picture like this during office hour @HSBC HK

Don’t think you can do exercise in the office @Morgan Stanley..um or even have time to exercise if you are in the investment banking industry..booo

Are you working for startup? Are you ready to “start-it-up”? Leave me a comment and share your experience.

[photo credit: mortimer]

Stop saying crap but start to ship

Just had a wonderful talk with my “potential” co-founder buddy tonight. We had a little recap on what we have been doing for the past months and joked about all the things that we did. We started this non-regular meet up almost 4 months ago to keep each other update on our research progress. It is a practice for both of us to think, explore and share what problem we find recently in our daily life or any interesting problem we wanna tackle. During the table conversation, we kind of came up a very strong like-mind giving us a clear direction on how we should proceed things in the future.

4 months to ship the version 1

About 4 months ago I first got my buddy on board to dream about our start up fantasy. We had our first meet up and tried to kick something off by brainstorming different ideas and connecting like-minds. The whole process was totally fun as we gotta bring our top 10 favorite ideas on the table and tried to convince each other. We (especially me) enjoyed rejecting the other’s ideas and keep challenging whether if the ideas were really going to work. We struggled quite a while because we always think that the idea was not good enough or just ridiculously stupid. About a months later, we finally came up a so-called “doable”  idea and ready to gave it a try. It took us about 2 weeks to build our MVP, a 1 page landing site, and finally got it up and running. So there were almost 4 months in total to ship our MVP from scratch.

Stop saying crap but start to ship

We spent all 4 months to ship our 1st version and obviously the result was not even close to what we expected. We got a little bit traffic on our landing page but we also found that less than 1 % of our visitors will sign up their emails after seeing our feature list and pricing. So it didn’t work. We thought we should think carefully and eliminate as many “stupid” ideas as we can upfront so it can take us to the destination faster. It took us almost 3 and a half month to come up a “doable” idea and only took us 2 weeks to build a MVP. If we could compromise our 1st idea 4 months ago, we might have already validated 3 other ideas and built a few more MVPs throughout the past 4 months. But now, we only got 1 failed idea and 1 MVP without much traction.

I totally understand that it is not about how many idea you have validated or how many MVP you have built. I also understand that we definitely need to find an idea that works and turn it into a profitable business. I am also not saying that you should just start working on any random idea with zero consideration. But the lesson I learned from this experience is that  you cannot really tell whether if the idea is going to work or simply a stupid one until you ship it to the market. There is no the best idea and timing because it is really about try and error. The sooner you start to ship, the more you get to learn.

Are you working on a startup project? Have you experienced the same thing as we did? Leave me a comment and let me know how you feel!

(photo credit: vaughnfender)

How do you brainstorm for new startup idea?

Many would think startup journey starts when you have already come up with a great idea to solve a real problem. For me, startup is all about fun time. You might just wake up one day and feel sick of working for a 9-5 pointless job and say, “Why can’t I have my own product and work on what I am passionate about?”. Your startup journey starts right at the moment that you decide to get another step forward and start figuring out what you’re going to do.  It starts getting fun because you get to throw ideas around, you get to dream, and nothing feels like work. However, brainstorming can be painful because you are really trying to come up something from nothing. You have no direction of what you should build and what problem you should tackle. If you are a professional dreamer, you might even come up with 50 ideas in one day but don’t even know which one you should start with. While throwing around ideas in an early stage, it is important to keep few things in mind so you can keep motivated and focused.

1. Solve your own problem

Sure you know you are here to solve problem. But it is stupid if you are not aiming to solve a problem that you care or randomly pick an idea and start your business just because you hate your job and want to be a CEO. The idea doesn’t have to be rocket science. It can be some small problems you deal with every single day or some inconvenience in your life. But the keyword here is “yours”. Even though you might be able to come up with more possible ideas by thinking of what problem other people are facing when it comes to business opportunity and market scale, I still prefer to start by tackling the problems I am facing. The reason is simple. You are trying to validate your idea and solve your problem so if unfortunately your idea doesn’t work out (which very likely to happen for the first few tries) or no one buys in your idea, at least you understand yourself a bit more and your life is getting a little better and easier. You are also passionate about what you are doing because you are helping yourself to solve your own problem rather than working extremely hard to help other people to solve their problems. I am not saying that solving other’s problem is pointless and in fact, it definitely can be a great accomplishment. But what is better than having your own problem solved? Let yourself be the first loyal user and solving your problem. (here is a great post on “Finding and developing an Idea” by Susan Jones)

2. Don’t let the fire die

Brainstorming takes time but shouldn’t take too long. I agree that you should spend time to sit down and think what your business is going to be. But then it is very easy to get discouraged when you don’t see yourself moving any forward by letting the endless brainstorming session going on and on without a clear do or not do conclusion.  To move things forward, it is important to keep the brainstorming discussion within certain period of time so everyone who participates in the brainstorming session understands that it is not an everlasting discussion and they have to be prepared beforehand. Brainstorming is also about throwing out random idea and getting immediate feedback without thinking too much in details. The involvement of participant to give feedback becomes a huge part of the brainstorming discussion. Participant is responsible for voicing out what they think once they first hear about the idea in order to keep the conversation continue and fire up others.

3. Organize you idea

You might come up a super creative idea when you hear a stupid joke from your friends or when you are watching a TV shows. However, ideas and inspiration always come and go and you really need to grab it by its tail. There is nothing high tech here but instead, you will just have to pick up a pen and a piece of paper and write/ draw it down. After getting more and more ideas or diagrams on paper, it is essential to organize everything you got into something readable and understandable. I like putting things into different category columns like problems, solutions, and reference case so I can better clear my mind by identifying the chemistry between the “unmet need” and “disruptive new technology and helping me to focus on the actual problem and eliminating many unrealistic ideas.

4. Pitch your friends, your mum and more people

Now you have your idealist nice and organized. It is time to tell the story. The reason why I think it is good to start “pitching” so early is because it is a good way to build up your confidence and get yourself passionate and enthusiastic to the idea. If you don’t feel like sharing your idea to other people because you are afraid of other people laughing at your idea, only 2 possible reasons I can think of, 1) your idea really sucks which there is no need to share at all or 2) you can’t take on failure even before you build anything which means you should really go back to your 9-5 pointless job because you cannot avoid risks and failure during the startup journey. Some people might think it is risky to share your brilliant idea with so many people who will possibly steal it and claim for their own.  One of my favorite bloggers and founders from Bufferapp, Joel, has written a post on this and it pretty much covered everything I want to say on this point.

New post: "Tell Everyone Your Startup Idea" softwarebyrob.com/2012/07/31/tel…

—
Joel Gascoigne (@joelgascoigne) July 31, 2012

“Here is his post and feel free to reply and follow him from here”

so who to pitch? Your mum is definitely a good starting point. Because she is probably the only one who is always available to listen to you (Especially if you brainstorm at your homeoffice!) and most of the mums do not have much technical background so you will have to explain your idea in a very simple context in order to get her engaged. Even though you are not really pitching your mum like you pitch VCs, it is very important to be able to describe your idea in 1 simple sentence with understandable USP.

Are you thinking to build something to make your life easier? How do you brainstorm idea? What are your tips?

Photo credit: CubaGallery

The beauty of startup

Time really flies. It has already been almost a year since I came back to Hong Kong for good last summer. I have gone through some basic steps like drafting a job/ company wish list, getting my cover letter and resume ready, interviewing couple times with some smart and many boring people and finally landing my first full-time job. Instead of starting off my career at some BIGs as I thought I would, I began my journey at TalkBox, a small tech startup in my home town Hong Kong and I gotta say I am lucky I am in and I am loving it.

Make yourself a part of it

I like working for startup because of the open and flexible working environment that allows me to get involved in the development of the business. I can feel that my input matters and that I am helping build something. The good side is, because it’s just a small team, you get to touch on so many things that you won’t even get to see and experience if I work for a big company. But on the flip side, you really need some sort of self-learning attitude and mentality to drive yourself to touch and learn something you might not be super interested in or you are not very comfortable with. For my case, I played a marketing role in the team and started with some basic customer service works to engage with our end users via social networking platforms without knowing much about social media. I really had to learn from scratch by googling terms like “retweet”, and “hashtag”. I forced myself to sign up a personal Twitter account even though I wanted to keep my social life only in Facebook because I wanted to get myself familiar with the platform and functionalities (I gotta say I love Twitter better than any other social media platforms now). Once I got the basics, I had to move forward and drilled into something advanced like tweet analytics, followers’ behavior and profile, click through rate on link for each tweet and etc… in order to understand our users better and maximize the power of social media. And now I treat Twitter as one of my main and effective channel to reach out to app reviewers, tech editors or app communities for spreading out the words about our product and new release. Throughout this self-learning process, you will realize you learn much more than before because you are the one, who find out problems or questions, explore for possible solutions and finally execute and drive for results. This sense of accomplishment is a big part of startup and the reason behind why I enjoy my job on daily basis (I wrote another post for my company to explain why I think startup is a good move “Are you ready to “start-it-up”).

Get to know yourself more and get better

A great part about working for startup is that you get to try new things all the time. You might not know what exactly you are looking for, but once you find your interests or something you are good at it, you will get to know more about your characteristics and the career direction that you are willing to dedicate to. However, sometimes you might take a little longer to figure out your expertise. You might fail a lot or even get frustrated because you are working on something you are not comfortable with or you are not interested in. After 3 months I first joined TalkBox, I was involved in analyzing app analytics exercise and was responsible for creating weekly app performance report. All the numbers and data totally drove me crazy and I just didn’t have that much patience to deal with those numbers. From this exercise, I realized myself a little more and found so much I needed to improve. Impatience, carelessness, and lack of focus were my weaknesses that I needed to work on. I felt good even though I struggled a bit when dealing with those analytic reports because I got to know myself more and found a way to get better. Being sure of who you are does not only help you for your career but also for your life in general. It allows you to build up your skillset and confidence so that you know which place you should be in and what direction you should be heading to. This is the startup lesson I am learning on daily basis and I am happy to know myself a little bit more and see more room to be a better me.

The beauty of startup is that no one is going to tell you what to do next but there is nothing to hold you back from not doing it at the same time. You need some guts to TRY something you don’t even know if it is going to work but you still believe it and give it a try. You also need a humble heart to prepare for the failure because you will make bad move for sure but…who cares? We are right at the stage that allows us to make mistakes because we just have nothing to lose.

[photo credit: iwantcover.com]