5 key ingredients to building a successful start-up

When it comes to building a successful start-up, there is no "magic formula" to ensure things work for sure. Entrepreneurship involves constant trial and error, coming out with hypothesis and validating it. It is always a work in progress, and steep learning curves to get to the milestones we set for ourselves. In this article, I would like to highlight some of the key ingredients of a successful start-up, which includes valuable insights gained from industry experts, mentors and speakers I have come across thus far in my entrepreneurial journey.

Skilio clients in Junior Achievement Program @ Bloomberg Singapore

1. Building a personal brand

Building a personal brand which is trustworthy, competent and trustworthy is not something that happens overnight. Mr Eric Sim has stressed during his sharing with my class on how people invest in people, and less on the business idea. It is of utmost importance to find a core platform where most decision-makers of our business is, and focus on building this core platform with a consistent message delivery to attract the right people.

2. Creating "Magic" within and outside the team

A very big part on why Careem faced operationalisation issues was due to the fact that it was losing its magic with its expanding team. Our guest speaker from LatentView stressed on the importance of generating key conversations with key players and employees alike, to seek clarity through conversations about demand and supply. Similarly, Magic Bus is working on how they can gain momentum for their cause both within and outside of the community. During his sharing, Darren Teo also stressed about the importance of under-promising and over-delivering. These are all ways in which entrepreneurs are working on the “magic shift” both within and outside their business teams. As easy as these shifts might be, it is always a work in progress for me and my team to create that “magic”. Learning and developmental opportunities are just one of the many things we do within our Skilio team, for this opportunity to add value for us, in order for us to create value.

3. Balance between effectiveness and efficiency

When a business grows rapidly with greater complexity, there comes a point where the business faces growing pains: deciding on the trade off between being rich (putting the business at highest potential for financial gains) and being the king (relishing control over the business but putting the business well below potential for financial gains). Finding the sweet spot to being an effective (which comes from greater control) and an efficient (which comes from outsourcing this control to a larger team) business is never easy. As much as good foundation can be laid in terms of systems and processes from the start, this is a decision that has to be made when it comes by founders. Key decisions can be made well with experience, and we acknowledge the need to build up this expertise of making the right decisions through experiences as we grow as entrepreneurs.

4. Dealing with risks

Risk management is part and parcel of an entrepreneur’s journey. We always come across articles saying that we need to “embrace risks”, but what I have come to realise is that as much as we can take on risks, there has to be ways to systematically eliminate these risks. This stems from being able to identify the various types of risks that affect your business. Thereafter, finding ways to conduct low cost experiments to find out ways on how these risks can be tackled. This has to be done while being conscious of not falling into the traps of confirmation bias - carrying out tests only to confirm your assumptions and not disconfirm them. This means that we cannot take up risks blindly, but be willing to take up risks, only when we are confident that there are sufficient measures to systematically eliminate them. This sequence of removing risks should be based on how valuable a particular risk's elimination can bring to the business.

5. Simplicity is key

As a first time entrepreneur myself, I understand how many would feel apprehensive about going out into the market and pitching their idea. One advice I would like to give would be to quote Mr Marcus Tan, the Co-Founder of Carousell - to start small, start simple, start now. There are numerous platforms, opportunities and grants out there for willing and able entrepreneurs to give their ideas a shot, and I am one of the privileged few to have been given this opportunity to be on the receiving end of these benefits.

Being an entrepreneur is not as insurmountable as it seems. If we work on our small wins, taking baby steps towards the end goal, validation can be sought with constant determination and confidence. My team managed to secure paid pilots with numerous organisations with just our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) (made up of Google sheets and Google forms). This shows that as long we are willing to take the leap of faith to get our idea out there, traction can be gained bit by bit.

So what are you waiting for? Start now!