Nathan Torkington shared a quote by Ray Kurzweil:
“I’m an inventor. I became interested in long-term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it’s finished, not the world in which it started.”
A google on the whole quote led to this page as the number one result:
“My Talk at Startup School” by Tim O’Reilly.
(SgEntrepreneurs live coverage of the Nexus 2007 event was second place)
That got me thinking. How do you spot long-term trends? Walter talked about how there is a phase between trends starting and trends gaining traction - the “traps” phase. So how can we avoid that phase or survive it?
Roberto Mariani (of XiD Technologies) shared about his experiences and gave this advice on not trying to push the technology, but to try to meet the consumer’s needs. Walter shared the insight that consumers want to use technology to meet their needs without knowing that they are actually using technology. Take email. It took off once web based email made it easy for most people to use it without worrying about smtp, pop and other configuration stuff.
Reading about what the founders of BookJetty, Ping.sg and IntelligentSingaporean had to say about their projects, one notices that each of the projects was born out of a personal need that each founder had.
Someone said something else during the conference which stuck with me although I can’t remember who actually said it. That individual said the key for Singapore startups is to focus on what we as Singaporeans are good at. Look what works for Singapore and then run with it although a point was made that it was hard to bring what works in Singapore to the rest of South-east Asia because of the differences in language and culture. Then I thought maybe there lies the opportunity for Singapore. We always pride ourselves of our multi-racial and multi-cultural society. What if we could indeed make that work for us. What if we used our position to actually gain a real understanding of South-east Asia and become masters of a process that easily took any innovation and make it compatible with the different cultures in SEA.
So some things that I took away from the day about building your own startup:
1)To do something which solves a problem (prefarably one that you can identify with). If you can solve the problem, more often than not, you’re probably going to meet the needs of some people out there - like what BookJetty, Ping.sg and IS is doing.
2)If the problem is one that a lot of people faces, but the solution is not being used, then maybe Walter’s and Tim O’Reilly’s insight about making things easy for the ordinary people comes in.
3)Focus on the long term. If you’re trying to solve something that a lot of people are already trying to solve, you better ensure that what you’re doing won’t be obsolete by the time you’re done. Also, use the present to help anticipate what future problems might be - that would be the best way to ensure what you do now makes sense in the future.
4)Don’t just make cool technology for the sake of it. If it doesn’t fulfill a need, its going to be really hard to gain traction. Of course, with a mega advertising budget and superb marketing, one could hammer the consumer to submission.
I was going to add a last point that we should focus on what Singaporeans are good at and what works in Singapore. The problem is that what works in Singapore may not work elsewhere in the world so whatever is built may not be able to be exported and I believe that is something our government won’t want to encourage. But then again, I believe if we try to build for a culture/country that we are not in, the chances of us building anything commercially successful at all falls tremendously - we may build something technologically innovative which by itself should have legs, but we would fail in the wrapping of a business around it.
The second problem was that I kinda felt that someone at the back of their mind would say “Singaporeans aren’t good at anything…except complain”.
Actually, our weakness of loving to complain should be turned to our greatest strength. If we are complaining, there has to be a problem, a need to be fulfilled unless of course we acknowledge that our country is just a bunch of weak whining cry babies (which is of course not true) and nothing we complain about is valid. But I do believe in every complain, is an opportunity. So maybe, its time for all our budding entrepreneurs to go out there and listen to complains - there might be an opportunity waiting to be seized.
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