Oursky were started by fresh graduates from the Information Engineering Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Back in the days when we first started, we didn’t have any network or resources from where we could learn about starting a business, we didn’t even know anyone to talk to back then, and obviously we made a lot of mistakes throughout our journey.

Since I just did a sharing to a group of engineering students yesterday on the topic of startups, I think it might be a good idea to write a summary here to “log” the 4 serious mistakes we’ve made — hope this can serve as a starting point for fresh graduates to share and learn from each others on how to run a startup in Hong Kong…

Thought that we can do a start-up without a Sales

As a engineering student, we always tends to value “sales” less than technical capability, and some people like me just isn’t those “social” type of person and never know what to say even in a school party.

But after baking myself one year in a start-up, I would say starting a business is all about “sales”:

• To get your first customer — it’s about selling your product
• To get a good co-founder who shares the same vision with you — it’s about selling your idea
• To get a loan or investment — that’s a “sales” presentation of your company

Sales is all about communicate effectively, how to convince people and how to understand the needs of others and fulfill them.

I believe at least one of the co-founders should be able to and love to do “sales” — this is one thing I hope I could change if we did it all over again…

Over-architecting the software

I’ve met a lot of great developers but one of the common mistakes for young graduate is we tend to over-generalizing or over-architecting software.

We appreciate the beauty of elegant code that is flexible enough and rich in features — we all do. While it is important to write clean and well-architected code to avoid bugs and over-head for maintenance, we must never forget start-up is always about try-and-error on your business model, which means it’s better to get the product out-of-the-door asap to test your idea and iterate instead of have a big failure after spending years of development.

I make this mistake all the time — sometime I’m lucky enough to have someone argue with me. Sometimes, I could waste weeks of development time to solve a problem that never exists — So try to suppress your ego of building the most flexible and beautiful solution, and get the simplest product to test the water asap.

I will do a startup when I can “feed” myself

The 1st question I got when I talk with other fellows who have just graduated is: “How you earn a living by doing a start-up?”

I don’t have a really good suggestion here: I was not able to raise funding at the very beginning, I can only tell you what I and others do in Hong Kong there:

• Lots of us do web consultation projects on the side;
• Those who’re lucky enough get funding from families;
• Many of us teach at technical school at night or on part-time basis, and Universities sometimes do have some part-time offers for Research / Teaching Assistant.

These are the trade-offs: Having a part-time or do web consultation projects distract you from building your product, and most importantly it might distract the team from immersing in the start-up — that’s something we may discuss in another article.

Oursky didn’t really kick-off until the day I left my day job, so the lesson there is “you never start unless you dive into the water”.

Forgot I’m really really small…

Yea I know, think big! But HEY, you don’t have the capital as those big corporations, nor their branding, or distribution / social network, and frankly, you’re not as experienced…

I highly recommend Jason Cohen’s article You’re a little company, now act like one — know your niche, push your idea to those “Early Adopters”.

A lot of local students I know personally, tends to imagine they’re driving a “Titanic Company” on the “Sea of Businesses” at the 1st day — which leads to over-spending, over-planning, and forgot their advantage as a start-up is low-overhead so we’re efficient, we’ve nothing to lose so we can try and have nothing to lose, we can do rapid R&D so we can adopt changes…

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Here are the lessons I’ve learnt and we’re still learning as we grow — and sometimes we made the same mistakes again! Hopefully this sharing would help others to kick-off their start-up in Hong Kong.

Let us know what’s your thought or comments?