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.

Eric Ries is in London! If you don’t know who he is, he is the author of The Lean Startup book. Read my previous post on why there’s so much hype about this guy and why I subscribe really strongly to his principles in building up a company. This is the #1 must-read book for all entrepreneur.

Anyway it was great listening to him giving a talk at LSE yesterday although most of the things that he talked about (~85%) are material from his book. Managed to asked him the last question during Q&A and snatched another quick question when he was signing my book.

Here’s my question and Eric’s answers (not verbatim but rephrased to the best way that I understood his answers):

Q: What happens when you create an MVP and launch it but nobody uses your product. Do you blame the marketing division responsible because there is not enough traffic?

A: In startup, there is no such thing as a marketing division. Everyone is involved in marketing the product. Thinking of marketing as a separate division is an old management way of thinking about business. The idea is to position the product properly. Eric basically talked about customer acquisition method. He went on to describe how as CTO of IMVU he was also VP Marketing and had a daily marketing budget of US$5.00 to spend on Google AdWords and he had to try different keywords to get traffic to the site and get people to use his company’s product (which is basically an instant messaging software with 3D avatars). This story is well documented in his book.

Q: How do we apply The Lean Startup method in multi-sided markets businesses.

A: Focus on a niche where there is a ready small subset of ready buyers and sellers. For example, Facebook started out focusing only on Harvard students and slowly branched out to other universities. The same is eBay in auctions. Test out the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) using this method for this multi-sided markets business.

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Eric stressed many times in his talk that at this day and age, we have all the technology that we want to produce almost any web app that is conceivable. The constraint is the idea. Heck, we can build a social network for dogs if we want to. The question that entrepreneurs should ask at the beginning is…

not whether a product can be built, but whether it should be build.

TechCrunch recently ran an article on Moo.com having complete integration with Facebook’s new Timeline and automates the creation of Facebook namecards. Articles links are here and here.

I had been wanting to print namecards for some time but they are quite expensive especially on Moo.com but once I read the article I immediately converted my Facebook to the new Timeline, edited it completely and signed up for my free 50 namecards.

They are giving out the name cards to the first 200,000 users but are capping it at 5,000 users per day and are giving them out from about 12pm London time. It will take roughly 40 days to give out all the cards so go get yours now!

The namecards look incredible! Loving them to bits. And even more so when it is FREE! Thank you moo.com

Is Facebook helping productivity or a distraction towards work? Some companies think it is a distraction and has banned the social media site from office networks. I believe this is the wrong approach especially in dealing with the new generation of young employees. There is an increasingly blurred-line between work and leisure and companies that try to separate the two are doing themselves a disfavour by not leveraging on the power of social media.

I am big advocate of Facebook as a productivity tool. Our current startup at ChallegeJam uses Facebook extensively in communicating with team members and segregating information especially since we are all students with different schedules and do not have an office space to work together any single day. We use the messaging tool to have individual discussions on issues and make very strong use of the group to have discussions among the 6 members of the team (or the separate functional team – Marketing and Development)

Above is a screenshot of the Facebook group which I use with my society members in SIFE UCL. We are a social entrepreneurship society and our project this year is to help a charity – Heritage Without Border (HWB) develop a revenue stream. We made great use of the Document feature in the group and has created to date 14 documents on various proposals for HWB. Each document can be edited by other members and discussions are ongoing on the content.

No doubt the document feature is very limited and is only good for typing out words and is not full-featured like Google Docs but it really helps collaboration since each member receives a notification on Facebook and can easily check the updates anytime. This beats any other productivity tool because young people spend so much time on Facebook, much more than on email and are more comfortable with Facebook usage.

On our ChallengeJam groups, we use it to share links, updates on progress, images of logos and screenshots of designs. It is definitely a way that work for us as a startup. If you are a student reading this you may want to try it out on your society committee members or with your startup founders.

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
― Jim Rohn