A serial entrepreneur shares his 10 years of entrepreneurship experience in 8 minutes

Photo credit: Redd Angelo

My earliest recollection of dabbling in something remotely entrepreneurial was when I was 15. I’d picked up programming for about 2 years by then, and created a couple of random apps that I made and tried to sell online. One of these apps was the Wicked’s Developers’ Suite that contained a html text editor, a search engine scraping tool and a game of tic-tac-toe. I tried to sell it for $5.

It didn’t go well.

I had no distribution channel, my app looked like shit, and I had no go-to-market strategy. My app didn’t have a clearly defined target market, and there was nothing special about it. The fact that it was named “Wicked” didn’t help.

At just 15 years old, I’d basically made every single startup mistake known to man.

I continued to make more startup mistakes when I launched SGShoppin, the second or third blogshop directory to launch in Singapore. I ran into scaleability issues, as the key value proposition was that our expert team (my girlfriend) would manually review every single blog shop submitted to our directory. We counted 2,000 blog shops at our peak.

I also launched SgZap, a URL shortening service (as if there weren’t already enough of these!). The inclusion of “Sg” in the name also didn’t make sense and no one wanted another URL shortening service with fewer features compared to similar apps in the market.

I also launched The Wicked, an online puzzle game inspired by the famous Notpron. Despite the lack of features and the horrendous design, it took off. I apparently did something right in assuming that my alma mater, The Chinese High School (now Hwa Chong Institution) was the best place to seed my game. Intellectuals like to play ‘intellectual’ games.

 I was ‘growth hacking’ even before the term was invented.

This time, naming it “Wicked” served to improve the game’s value proposition, not take away from it. I seeded discussion forums where techies gathered, including SPUG (Singapore Palm User Group), Vr-Zone and Hardwarezone. I also seeded the popular content directory at that time, Ping.SG, and added my game to a Wikipedia list of prominent online puzzle games. In a nutshell, I was ‘growth hacking’ even before the term was invented. I even got featured on The Straits Times’ Digital Life section!

Opportunities came knocking afterwards, and I realized that I sucked at doing business. I licensed my game to STOMP and M1 for a 3 digit sum. Real profitable. I ran Google Ads on The Wicked, but my account was banned due to fraudulent clicks. For a game site that enjoyed as much traffic as XiaXue’s blog at that time, I earned a grand total of only slightly more than one grand.

I realized that I can build and bring stuff to market, but I still can’t continue to do what I love — creating things — if I didn’t know how to make money.

So I went to Singapore Management University, the “business” university, to learn how to make money.

On my first week there, I noticed that students were buying and selling pre-owned textbooks because the cost of new ones were way too high.

There was an existing textbook marketplace, called “SgTextBook” by the founder of Vodien. I felt that the marketplace sucked, because the search box was way too small.

So I created one overnight. My textbook marketplace, BookINBookOUT, had a giant textbook on the front page that allowed users to buy or sell books just by typing in its title. I sold BookINBookOUT in my second year at SMU for an undisclosed (aka super low) sum.

In Oompr, we made a ridiculous number of mistakes that we could never have made and learnt from otherwise.