Five Takeaways from NTU 37th Distinguished Alumni Forum, Drive your Online Business

I attended the forum “NTU 37th Distinguished Alumni Forum, Drive your Online Business” 2 days ago wanting to learn how I could build more intensity into an online business. The forum focused little on how to drive an online business. However, there are a few takeaways which I feel would be essential for anyone who wants to or is starting a business, whether it’s the traditional brick and mortar or online business. These are some of the questions from the audience and the panellists’ answers.

Drive your Online Business

  1. What is your definition of success?
    An audience asked (paraphrased) “What is the key difference between an entrepreneur who is successful and someone who is not?”
    Dr Xia, the forum Chair, sharply threw the question back to that audience asking “What is your own definition of success?” Initially, the audience mentioned something similar to “a person who is still learning is not a successful entrepreneur”. I presume he meant someone who is still learning (and re-learning) because a particular venture did not give any success.
    Dr Xia explained that a successful entrepreneur is someone who still needs to keep on learning and innovating. If a so called successful entrepreneur stopped learning, then there is a great likelihood that the success would not be sustainable.
  2. Launch a minimum working product, test, gather feedback and refine
    Kevin shared that one shouldn’t wait until the product is “perfect” to launch into the market. One shouldn’t spend like half a year or a year to “perfect” a product. Instead, have a product that meets the bare minimum requirements and then test it in the market. Gather feedback from your users and improve your product further.
  3. Leverage on existing platform
    Sometimes, you should leverage on the existing platform instead of trying to start from zero.
    An audience mentioned about wanting to introduce Indian Traditional Medicine into Singapore market and some of the challenges he faced.
    There were a few advices from the panel. Vicknesh cautioned first that there is a limited market as Indians are the minority in Singapore. Getting the necessary approval to bring in the medicine and practising in Singapore are hurdles that need to be overcome. Vinknesh added that he could think of leveraging on the existing eyebrown threading salons and partnering with them instead of starting from zero if they are thinking about how to market the product.
  4. To get co-founders or not?
    On the issue of finding co-founders or partners, there are 2 different viewpoints. Regarding where we could go to find co-founders, the panellists shared that school is a great place to get co-founders. Hwee Eng’s co-founder is a classmate from the Technopreneurship & Innovation Programme. For those who are out of school, forums and seminars (such as this alumni forum) allow one to network and are great places to find business partners.
    Vicknesh asked “Is there a need to get co-founders?”. You might not need one especially if you have the skillsets to go ahead in the initial stage of development. It is possible to just bring in the relevant talent at the later stage when that’s needed. He shared of one start-up whereby in the initial stage, the 2 founders are in-charge of everything, and only in the later stage, when a PR person was required did they source for one.
  5. Have a hypothesis, then test it.
    Lastly, Dr Xia shared that an idea is like a hypothesis, you need to test it through experiments. It’s not like an assumption whereby you accept it without any proof. With a hypothesis, you test the idea to find the answer. Dr Xia mentioned that there is a certain way of doing things, a scientific way, and using a hypothesis is one of the way.

While googling to find some other information on the internet about entrepreneurship, I came across a site by Channel News Asia focusing on Startup.

I hope these points are useful to those who are thinking of starting a business or are in the midst of one. I would like to lastly quote an advice I heard from Dr Xia when he gave this scenario: “For someone who has failed 9 times, should he continue and start another business the 10th time? Yes, because he learned from the 9 times the reason for his failures.”