One of the main challenges surrounding me in building a business is marketing the product to the target customers. If we look at Alex Osterwalder’s business model canvas, this refers to the channel box – How do we reach our target customers?

Of course most people simply fill in this box with social media, Facbook, Google Adwords, Facebook Ads etc. I do the same thinking anything I share on Facebook will get easy traction on my Facebook list since I have a huge Facebook friends base (>1200) with over half UK based.

But really, when I actually sit down to implement the channel aspect, I find it exceptionally hard. Especially so when there is close to or almost no marketing budget (since we have yet to raise any funding). Trying to get people to share your product on Facebook is simply not an easy task. In short, most people simply don’t care.

I made a big error in making a video with SexyFoodie spending considerable amount of time and effort with Cathrine only to see it not having much view or impact. Simply sharing product website links is not effective either nor is it asking people to Like the Facebook page. All these doesn’t work. The call to action via a simple status update is simply ignored by most people.

And it doesn’t help that Facebook News Feed no longer displays all updates anymore. Timing of status updates is also quite important.

I wanted to find out what makes people share things over on social media. Articles I have read pointed to short and simple things that matters to the target customers that are easy to share and are funny. I thought an infographic with a short link to ChallengeJam‘s website would be a useful way to drive some good traffic over. Thus here comes the first infographic that I ever designed in my life. This is an entrepreneurship journey and I will soon learn how effective this short infographic is in generating traffic.

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend Leancamp in London. One sentence to summarise this event – LEANCAMP LONDON 2 WAS AWESOME!!!

I put in a lot of effort to obtain a ticket to attend this event. Basically the event was sold out. Even before it was sold out, tickets were quite expensive for my standards: £75 and £125 (for last minute tickets). Since this event was held in UCL, I really wanted to get hold of a free or heavily subsidised ticket, especially so because Eric Ries and Alex Osterwalder were here. Asking around, I found out the UCL Enterprise Society had 10 volunteer tickets. I managed to get hold of a volunteer ticket in the really last minute to attend Leancamp.

It was quite a useful event especially in better understanding lean methods. The biggest lesson I took from this event was a Skype session from Hong Kong by Joel Gascoigne from Buffer in explaining how he built an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) for Buffer. His MVP was as minimal as simply putting his idea into a webpage to see if anyone wanted to download the app and clicking on the Pricing page. Read this blog post by Joel which summarises how he designed his MVP.

The other big name present during this event was Alex Osterwalder from the Business Model Canvas. I find his canvas quite useful in plotting up the business model of any businesses and to also explore other possible methods of bringing in revenue. I have used his business model canvas in drawing up ChallengeJam’s business model and reading about his business model made me aware that ChallengeJam is actually in a multi-sided market and the challenges of making this business work is even harder.

And of course the highlight of this event is Eric Ries’ keynote address where he took questions and offered some really useful insights into better implementing his lean startup methods.

It was a long day. More than 12 hours spent with all the extra hours of volunteer work put in before, during and after the event. Immediately after the event, I went back home and together with our developers we put in finishing touches to launch ChallengeJam the very next afternoon. Now for the long road towards making ChallengeJam work…

Watch the above video on how our education system really works. I do not like the education system we are in although I benefited extremely well from the current system with standardised testing. I have always felt disillusioned for the past 7 years or so going through the education ‘assembly line’ and is almost at the completion stages. Despite that, I have somehow stuck to it and persisted in this education factory. Most of the knowledge I was fed throughout the years will be thrown out of the window right after the final exams. Most of the knowledge which I use are self-learnt and I believe that will be the case for the rest of my life. So why bother with school?

I have blogged previously about how I track my mood almost everyday with this app called MercuryApp. Here’s a screenshot of my mood for the past month or so. I’ve been stagnating at a pretty happy mode since the start of the year. Life is almost perfect.

I was browsing through Twitter and the web yesterday and I found myself at the blog of Garry Tan, a venture partner in Y Combinator. He has some pretty interesting posts there. One of the most interesting posts there is a video of AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia’s speech in a conference about how AirBnB came about to what it is today. Thanks for the great post.