What I learned about running a startup from serving in Singapore Armed Forces

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Like most Singaporean males, I did not know what to expect when it was time for me to enlist into the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) to serve my National Service (NS). But it was not until I had completed my two and a half years of service that I clearly saw how NS turned out to be one of the most important business schools I had attended.

The lessons I learned there have directly impacted the way I run my startup, Lobang King. Here are a few of them.

1. Keep working amid defeat

Perseverance is often mixed with stubbornness but the two are very different. Perseverance means to keep going in the face of adversity, with the ultimate aim of being successful. Stubbornness is a dogged refusal to change one’s direction or position, often leading to failure.

I remember my physical training sessions and how tough they were—waking up at 5 am, falling in with the rest of the platoon before the sun came up, and doing our five basic exercises. All of this was a preamble to the famous (notorious) physical fitness test, which was one of the benchmarks of performance during NS. Needless to say, I was not the fittest recruit and I failed my first fitness test.

Failing sucks, especially with 30 mates reminding you about the fact. It was easy to give up, especially with clouds of self-doubt closing in. However, through constant training, I got fitter and better and eventually passed the test.

Fast forward to August 2016 when the first iteration of my startup was just a couple of weeks away from its soft (beta) launch. We had already been working on the app for months, and one particular sticking point had been the way users could view lobangs (discounts) on a map on their phones. We wanted it so that wherever users are in Singapore, they could simply check their phone and see that in the shop next to them, they could get 50 percent off a milkshake or something. It had to be quick, smooth, and accurate.

Sounds easy, right? Wrong. In fact, due to various technical reasons, we had to completely redo the back end multiple times to get it working on both iPhone and Android. There were many late nights and some tears (mine, I’ll admit), and at least four years were shaved off my life expectancy. During some final testing, we found a flaw that forced us to, literally, go back to the drawing board.

It is not easy describing that feeling when you know you need to delay your launch, inform several colleagues, vendors, and stakeholders, and watch as your bank account drains for another few months. At that point, red-faced and embarrassed, I could have just stopped, go back to my day job, and put this down to a life experience. But giving up is the sort of thing that is drilled out of you during NS. So while we changed our direction slightly and reworked our designs and a few concepts, we carried on and finally launched a few months later. It was worth it!

2. You can’t win or fail alone

Every Singaporean who has gone through NS will remember the one person in their unit who just can’t get it right—late all the time, dirty equipment, fails inspections, etc. They will remember him because they also paid the penalty for his errors, resulting in extra physical punishment or something worse.

I remember one of my platoonmates reporting to camp late, and that resulted in my platoon booking out of camp last when the weekend came around. At first, we got mad, but soon we learned that unless we got around this guy and worked as a team to help him out, the misery would just continue. And that is what we did. The point is that you can’t win or fail individually, because you have to work as a team.

The truth is that if one person fails, we all fail.

I would argue that working in a startup is even harder than NS when it comes to teamwork. We have employees from all over the world—male, female, old, and young. Each have their own specializations, interests, backgrounds, and beliefs.

Additionally, unlike in NS, where everyone knows his or her role because it’s clearly defined, in a startup environment, everyone is expected to pitch in and help each other out even though it means going beyond the job description. The UX designer needs to liaise with the back-end developer. The back-end developer needs to speak with the client relations team, who also needs to provide feedback to the UX designer. After a while, these relationships start to get, as Facebook would say, complicated.

3. One speck of dirt is a big deal