Working on a product is something I truly enjoy. It’s a multi-disciplinary effort juggling between technology, design and business. You have to approach things from different perspectives and when everything aligns, you’ll create something extremely valuable.
If you have attended any hackathons or business pitching competitions, you might have been introduced to the Business Model Canvas. It’s a tool to help you structure and design your startup’s business model.
Every startup or business ultimately aims to turn a profit by providing a product or service with a higher value than the costs to deliver it. Whether you are planning to start a new venture or currently running one, it's important to understand the unit economics of your business.
Unit economics is defined as the direct revenues and costs associated with a particular business model expressed on a per unit basis.
Understanding the unit economics of your business provide a way to measure its profitability. So let's start by identify the unit for your business. If you are selling a product like a glass of lemonade 🍋, that would be the unit. For those providing a service, the unit would be the customer or client.
When I was younger, most of my friends including myself aspired to be doctors, lawyers and teachers when we grow up. Those were the only professions we knew then so it made sense that’s what we wanted to be.
If you pose the same question to kids today, a lot of them would want to be entrepreneurs and be their own boss. They want to start businesses and change the world for the better.
Some would argue that entrepreneurs are different than small business owners. Both of them start businesses and companies but an entrepreneur disrupt industries and aims for exponential growth.
Urban planners know the importance of infrastructure and the role they play in the growth and development of a city. Transportation and telecommunications networks along with basic services like water and electricity are vital for cities.
Infrastructure is also an crucial component in the growth and scalability of companies. Apple is not only great at making products but also extremely good at getting them to their customers’ hand. It’s no easy feat to manufacture and deliver millions of iPhones to people around the world.
We live in a very competitive society. Businesses compete for market share while athletes train tirelessly to push the limit of human performance. Everywhere you look, there are winners, with a lot more losers behind them.
Since young, we are ingrained by the education system to compete with each other. The best will be rewarded with scholarships and endorsements while the rest will have to fight for what’s left. And if you can’t compete academically, well you can work on your competitive spirit in sports instead.
If you are building a product, you will undoubtedly had to fight the temptation of adding more features with the risk of delaying it from being shipped on time. I know I had to and quite often, we tend to launch products with more features than we needed.
Logically, the more features our product offers, the more potential customers for it. But when you are launching something new, your biggest hurdle is in marketing and discoverability.
I worked on my first startup idea many many years ago. Back then, I got tired of working at a software consulting firm and decided I wanted to try it out on my own.
The desire to build a product and a business of my own was so strong that I even convinced my long time friend to quit his job and join me.
Our first attempt as a 2-man team was to solve the age old of problem faced by every Malaysian. What to eat for lunch? This was way before Yelp and age of smartphones.
If you are building a system, you’ll want it to be scalable. Ideally, it should be able to accommodate an increase in load with a proportional increase in resources. An example of this is the WhatsApp infrastructure which handles billions of messages every day.
If you are building a company, you’ll want it to be able to grow and scale up quickly as you add more headcount and resources. In theory, given more access to resources, a scalable business will be able to grow it’s revenue and profits proportionally.
Hierarchies, processes and protocols. These are just some of the things I’m allergic to in most companies and corporations. I understand why they exist but I prefer to work in an environment where you can focus on actual work rather than trying to work the system.
After a year at my first job as a programmer, I was offered a pay raise. In terms of percentage it was pretty high but my original pay was very low. So let’s just say I wasn’t overly excited about the whole thing.
I went to my manager to ask him what I need to do to earn more and I was disappointed by his answer. He said it depends whether there’s an opening for me to be promoted or if they land a big client. Both factors that’s completely out of my control.
The one question that every entrepreneur and business owner keep asking themselves, every single night before they go to bed is how do I grow my business?
You may want to increase your sales and revenue to improve the bottom-line. Or you may want to unlock the economies of scale by ramping up your production output.
Whatever the reason, you can only grow your business if you have a clear understanding on how it is performing right now. That means you have to track and measure all the different parts of your business. You simply can’t improve something you are not measuring.
