I moved from Silicon Valley to Singapore to help scale a startup. Here’s what I learned

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Having been part of building Cisco for almost 20 years, I used to think that all the truly innovative and disruptive technology companies were created in Silicon Valley. I was in for a big surprise.

Four years after leaving Cisco in 2011, I was busy running my own consulting firm when I got a call from a Norwegian investor in late 2015. He and a partner had founded a Singapore-based technology company called Temasys. They were developing a cloud-based API solution that would make it easy to embed real-time interactive communication functions securely into any app and on any device.

They needed a Silicon Valley-experienced CEO to commercialize the company. I thought, “How difficult would this be?” Here’s what I learned along the way and, perhaps, these tips will help you with your own startup journey.

Building it from scratch

As any tech entrepreneur knows, bringing new technology to market presents many challenges. Building the technology from scratch, Silicon Valley-style, is just the beginning.

A tip I would offer to any tech startup: Building your own technology solution is a great way to differentiate yourself from others. This doesn’t mean you can’t use existing standards and open source code—both of these are critical ingredients that can greatly reduce cost and speed to market. But great success doesn’t come from improving existing products; it comes from creating new ones that your customers don’t even know they needed.

The key challenge of creating a new product is that it requires more time to get the product ready for launch. But bear in mind that using mostly existing solutions in new packaging also means that there is a low barrier to entry for others. From ideation, building, to fine-tuning, be patient with your new product and it will be worth it.

In Silicon Valley, almost every startup I came across got their hands dirty and built their solutions from scratch. When you truly innovate, your risks will be higher, but when you win, you win big.

Casting a wide net

The next major challenge is taking the product to market. When I joined Temasys, I learned that its cloud-based API solutions were based on an emerging standard called WebRTC. The technology would be truly transformational.

Great, but what good is a product if no one knows what it is or what it does? So, I set out to put this technology in front of the people who mattered to the business. Identifying these people was yet another obstacle.

If you’re not sure where the demand or need for your product is strongest, make sure you toss your net wide. We started with a broad outreach, connecting with developers online, offline, and through digital marketing and conferences, to get a sense of where the demand would be.

Finding your best market

In the long term, tossing your net wide may not be a sustainable approach for many businesses—it’s expensive and time-consuming. So, once you narrow down the possible market segments that demonstrate a need or demand for your product, weigh your options and choose the best ones.

Don’t be afraid to let go of market segments that will not bring you results.

In our case, we considered a few niches and chose to target larger companies. Large enterprises have longer sales cycles, a much greater buying power, and a higher customer retention rate than smaller companies. The advantages outweighed the disadvantages, so we focused on three or four verticals with early adopters.

You can’t do it alone