The Company
1. What is a startup?
From a legal perspective, a Startup is a business that is registered with the Suruhanjaya Syarikat Malaysia (SSM).
From an entrepreneurship perspective, a Startup is "an organization that is looking for a repeatable and scalable business model".
2. What are Company Values and should I have them? Company Values are a set of human behaviours that you want everyone in the company to have. These can be being honest, punctuality, keeping the room clean etc. The founder's own behaviours are the starting point of every company's values. The founder should proactively decide on what behaviours are acceptable. Without that proactiveness, the founder's good and bad behaviours would be adopted by the employees, causing unnecessary risks of business failure.
The Business Model
1. What is scaling?
Scaling is how much the business is earning for every dollar spent. For example, if your current business earns RM3 for every RM1 spent. If it spends RM10 later, and it earns RM30, then the company have not scaled, it has grown bigger instead. The company would have scaled if when it spends RM10, and it earns RM31 or more instead.
2. Why is business model needed?
a. To determine the business to be sustainable in the current environment.
b. To determine the business to be sustainable in evolving customers and evolving industry sector.
c. To present the business model to stakeholders to gain their support.
d. To act as a reference to plan for business activities.
3. How are business models useful for startups?
a. The new product or service can be determined to be desirable, viable and feasible.
b. The business model is to be refined and tested until it is proven sustainable.
c. With proven business model, the business can scale up in size.
4. How frequently should a business model be reviewed?
a. When it does not bring the expected outcomes.
b. When there are changes in the environment.
c. When new technology is introduced.
d. When bigger opportunities present themselves.
5. How to monitor a new business model?
a. Use Analytics to determine how your customers reach your business for awareness, evaluation, purchases, delivery and after sales.
b. Engage customers to give feedback to ensure your customers are happy during the business - customer lifecycle.
c. Apply business and industry benchmarking to make sure your business is ahead of the marketplace average.
Employees
1. What are the Malaysian laws I should know?
Employment Act 1955, EPF Act 1991, laws relating to employee social security
2. What do I do if I need my employees to work more than 8 hours a day? As basic human courtesy, obtain consent from the employee for working overtime. Section 60 of the Employment Act 1955 have a long list of rules to follow if you seek to require abnormal hours.
3. How to retain talents?
Understand what your talents need. Employees at different levels may appreciate different things. A manager may appreciate growth, recognition, empowerment while entry level employee may appreciate salary, work load etc. And of course there will be general things that fit all levels such as working hours, number of off days and other benefits.
By designing an attractive remuneration package that suits the employee's profile is a good way to retain talent. But of course, the environmental factors matter too, such as corporate culture, company's vision and mission, company growth, person-environment fit.
4. How do I encourage creativity and innovation in my organization?
Create a culture whereby team members feel free to voice out their opinion without getting defensive. This comes from the effort of the managers actively soliciting their ideas in the team meetings. When they feel that their insights are respected and even put into implementation, it will encourage them to contribute even more ideas.
And you can also reward creativity. Some factories do that by giving a cash reward to employees who suggest and implement their new ideas.
Allow failures and experimentation. Instill a culture of "it is okay to fail" as long as the failure is within the boundaries set by the company's "experimental lab". Try a few pilot projects that do not incur too much costs. New product and services can be born out of these experiments.
All in all, a creative workforce is an asset to an organization that keeps growing.
5. How do you motivate your team when things are not smooth?
a. Use better reward system, it can be monetary reward and non-monetary reward.
b. Understand their challenges and frustration first, understand what is wrong, show empathy.
c. Most times, being truthful and honest to your team about a ‘not smooth’ situation is best. Everyone can then take a decisive action to help or to leave. Whichever way, you’ll be a better human being.
d. If sales are no coming in as expected . Invite team to revisit our own WHY we must generate sales in the first place.
e. Coaching or Co-creation
f. Use team-building
(Thanks to the contributors Jason Ng, Shauqi Radzi, Pasha Fazil, Ebuka Onyebuchi, Chin M C Mkt, Sze Chieng Ho, Ashraful Atik)
6. What are the common ways of recruitment?
a. Word of mouth referral
b. Use job recruitment platform such as Jobstreet, LinkedIn, Jora, Beamstart.com, etc.
c. Join career fair
d. Engage recruitment agencies
e. Advertise in media platform, online and offline
f. Build relationship with tertiary education institutes to have a continuous supply of talent pool
g. Headhunting
h. Organize Open Day to your office
7. How to build positive organizational culture?
a. Set BHAG -Big Hairy Audacious Goal
b. Provide a supportive environment
c. Build team structure that empowers people to help each other succeed
d. Lead by example
e. Show, don't tell
f. Value and be willing to invest in each person in the team-your investment can be time and energy to coach them
g. Encourage collaboration
h. Align personal goals to organizational goals
i. Genuinely care for your employees
j. Encourage continuous learning and development, even reward it
k. Share successful experience and celebrate it
Legal
1. What is a contract?
A contract is an agreement between yourself and one or more other parties to perform something. This can be a shareholder's agreement, employment agreement, supplier agreement, customer agreement and so on. Contracts can be in written form, verbal form, electronic texts form etc.
2. What can I do if someone broke their agreement?
This can be brought up in court. Work with your lawyer to build your case and he would advise you of your chances if you bring this up to court. The quantity and strength of the evidences would drastically increase your chances of protecting yourself from damages incurred when someone broke their agreement with you. It is along these lines that it is always good practise to have written documents of all of your business relationships (see "What is a contract?")
3. What are the important legal issues to sort out for startups?
a. Relationship between the founders
b. The corporate setup
c. Intellectual property
d. Regulatory framework
e. Good contracts
4. What are the common legal mistakes made by startups?
a. Not making the deal clear with co-founders
b. Not starting the business as a corporation or LLC
c. Choosing a company name that has trademark issues, domain name problems, or other issues
d. Not complying with Securities Laws when issuing stock to angels, family, or friends
e. Not adequately taking into account important tax considerations
f. Not having the right legal counsel
g. Not maintaining proper corporate and HR documentation
h. Not determining which permits, licenses, or registrations you will need for your business
i. Not carefully considering Intellectual Property issues
j. Not coming up with a great contract
k. Not having a good Terms of Use Agreement and Privacy Policy for your website
l. Not using a good form of Employment Agreement or Offer Letter when hiring employees
m. Not requiring all employees to sign a Confidentiality and Invention Assignment Agreement
n. Asking interview questions that are prohibited by law
o. Not taking the proper steps prior to firing an employee
(Credit to: Richard Harroch, Lynne Hermle, and Ellen Ehrenpreis )
Business Administration
1. What is bookkeeping?
Bookkeeping is the act of recording things that happens in the business. The things can be financial transactions like sales, buying supplies, paying rent etc. The most important factor for bookkeepers are Completeness. Everything should be recorded. The work done by bookkeepers forms one of the components accountants need to do their work. 2. What is accounting? Accounting is the act of preparing the financial statement of the company for management, shareholders and authorities. In Malaysia, the accountant prepares the financial statements following the standards of the Malaysian Financial Reporting Standards (MFRS), which is based on International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) that is adopted by every country in the world except the United States of America. The reason why the international standards are necessary because it enables financial institutions like banks to evaluate a company for loans and VCs to compare companies in different countries (such as Malaysia company vs Singapore company).
If you wonder why people study so many years to become an accountant, the reason being is that it takes a lot of time to know the international standards.
3. What is a financial statement? See "What is Accounting?" 4. What is an audit? An audit is a set of checks performed by a licensed auditor to ensure that your financial statement are prepared fully in accordance to the applicable financial reporting standards. Just like how you are more likely to trust a review by a customer rather than whatever the restaurant says about their food, an auditor gives your company the same effect for your financial statements when you use it to apply for loans or raise funds. In addition to that, a good auditor would also give you recommendations on how to grow your business, and to prevent future troubles (usually penalties from regulations).
Marketing
1. What do I consider when doing marketing?
The 7Ps, as shown in diagram above, is a good reference when doing marketing.
Product - what is your product for marketing? What is the Unique Selling Point (USP)?
Price - how do you want to set the price so that it looks attractive to the buyers?
Place - where do you sell it so that your target clients can be exposed to it?
Promotion - what promotion package you use so that it can attract the clients? What channels of promotion do you use?
People - what is your customer persona?
Process - the buying process, is it convenient for the clients?
Physical evidence - do you have any testimonial from the past? Any certification for the product and proof of its efficacy?
2. What are the good tools in marketing?
There are good recommendations here. Check out the list: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg_6XIEPEA1/
Idea Generation
1. What ways should I use to generate new ideas?
a. Identifying problem - the discovery of problem usually challenges the status quo and the old ways of doing things. By tackling the problem, new ideas are formed and thus new solutions. Sometimes the new solutions can even add features to the existing product or service, contribute to formation of new department, even new business, for example how Grab and Uber are born by identifying existing problem in the market.
b. Question everything you see. New ideas are usually mix up of something. New discoveries come from curiosity.
c. Approach things like playing Lego. Lego can stimulate our mind. The way Lego is played is methodical, structured and systematic, one thing to be put above the other. When an issue is approached like playing Lego, you definitely need a logical mind to do things step-by-step.
d. Look out from your industry, bring it to your industry and improvise it - other industries always provide a good frame of reference on how things can be done. Cross reference can definitely increase ideas in think tank.
e. Try AWS Working Backwards Methodology - focus on a persona and identify the main pain point. When we put ourselves in the persona's shoes, we can experience being him/her in his/her environment and thus understand the pain point he/she faces.
f. Travelling - travelling always widen our horizon and let us see how others do things differently. Not only we recharge ourselves after a trip, we bring back power-packed ideas to help scaling our business if the trip is a meaningful one.
2. How do I come out with good strategies for my business?
a. Find good and experienced mentors who have been there, done that.
b. Understand the market, the direct and indirect competitors
c. Predict the trend and forecast the future.
d. Then look back at your own resources; contacts, money, capabilities etc. etc.
e. With all the above, look back at your own vision and your imagination of the future you want for the business, industry and yourself.
f. Then draw a line through it all, connecting the dots.
(Thanks to the contributors Kenneth Choo and Alfred Foo for their insights.)
3. How to validate a business idea?
a. List down your business hypotheses and validation goals
b. Perform market research
c. Find out search volume and keywords
d. Carry out customer validation interviews
e. Test your product and service, get feedback
f. Start small
Personal
1. How do you handle burnout?
If battery have feelings, burnout is what it feels when a battery has no more energy left.
When you are already burnt out, take immediate steps to physically and mentally rest. Consider removing yourself from urban areas, and go to nature like parks or forests. Eat plenty of easily digestible food like fruits and sleep more often. Reach out to your friends and support group to enjoy time together and have laughs. When you are sufficiently rested and ready to go again, you might want to consider ways to prevent burnout next time.
Burnouts are directly correlated to the amount of stress that have been accumulated. It is important for you to find your unique balance to reduce accumulated stress of the day to zero. If we can measure accumulated stress, if your way of working gives you 5 units of stress a day, then you must rest out those 5 units of stress before you end the day. When you can achieve that, you will prevent burnout, and you will become more productive.
2. General advice from seasoned entrepreneur Hazho Human:
a. Spend more to get more.
b. Don't give up unless your path is wrong (you will never know it is wrong, because the time you know it is wrongly approached, you will be having alternative approaches, which mean you still won't give-up).
c. take care of your health by hiring personal assistants (as many as you and your business need).
d. whatever you don't agree, hire the guy/lady who agree that, in order to have a diversified perspectives(POV)s..(you no need to ask why).. just think of it for a while.
e. balance between the fast income and future income/s.
f. focus on the customers' needs, not your needs.
g. divide your customers into categories, and put yourself in their shoes each time you want to improve your business, when you do so, ask this question (what I want from this business?).
h. if you are still failing, take a rest, go for a vacation, do meditation, and see the nature from many perspectives, when you feel you are ready again, come back to your business and do changes, but slightly and only one change at a time.
3. Common roadblocks faced by a group of entrepreneurs, as reflected in an entrepreneurship forum:
a. Work life balance - insufficient time for resting and family, however after they adjust to have more time for family, their work efficiency improves, they get more things done and less stressed out
b. Less leisure - have to sacrifice the time to watch TV drama, and do the things they enjoy
c. No salary for first few years - to overcome this, he used savings from years of employment, terminated investment links insurance scheme (get back some cash reserve), no shopping (tough time)
d. Keeping facing burnout - stress from overwhelming task
e. Losing one single biggest revenue source which contributes to almost 90% of our income during early Covid-19 lockdown. It forced them to expand and diversify their revenue source in very short time. f. Funding - This is one of the biggest challenges faced by them. To one of the entrepreneurs who is doing digital freight platform, freight is one of the most 'unsexy' startups. The number of investors who are interested in this industry is very niche. g. Expansion
h. Decision between keeping the value or lower down the cost of COGS
i. Securing steady customer who is willing to pay higher than operating cost over a contractual period and pay on time.
4. Would you rather maintain your business as small and agile, or expand bigger? And why?
Some insights from experienced entrepreneurs:
a. Why not both? It is how you choose to maintain that autonomy and also delegation.
b. Expand but it depends on the exit plan.
c. Grow by capturing market size till you reach your goal of IPO and beyond.
d. Some people start a business because they won't want to be a slave. If in order to expand you have to kiss some investor asses or banks again, then it defeats the purpose. Grow but be independent. That's my thought.
5. What is the biggest satisfaction you gain from running your business? Insights from some experienced entrepreneurs:
a. Turning vision into reality
b. Time freedom - they can choose what time they wake up
c. Sense of accomplishment - seeing problems get solved continually
d. Smiles
e. Money - they can take one more dish from the economical rice stall without worrying the cost.
f. Freedom and autonomy
g. Expanding horizon - Able to know more about other countries on their markets; the market segment, government rules (exporting) & also the business culture
h. Not being controlled, avoid office politics
i. The biggest satisfaction comes from winning. The ability to win the market, get people to your side. See your vision and share your passion.
j. Recognition - customers appreciate/recognize their work/effort behind. And that makes them SOMEBODY in their industry.
k. Able to help and contribute - Knowing that sites they built helped to bring about increase of revenue, or word-of-mouth-among-competitors to their clients
l. Self development and personal growth
m. Feeling of working hard for themselves, not for the boss
6. What are some of the successful tech startups in Malaysia?
a. iflix
b. StoreHub
c. iPrice
d. Carsome
e. Kaodim
f. Lapasar
g. Paywatch
h. Poladrone
i. FoodMarketHub
This is an on-going FAQ.
Comments