DO you really learn from your mistakes? How important is social media to your business’ success? How important is gut feel when developing your business blueprint?
While there’s no fixed formula to running a business, there are methods you can adopt – and adapt — that could help you get across the line more comfortably.
Budding entrepreneurs, brimming with enthusiasm, set out to exploit a perceived gap in the market, maybe with a roadmap charting the pathway to products or services they intend to deliver.
Watch the full discussion of WED WEB CHAT — NailingYour Business Blueprint below.
However, the more experienced business folks caution for the need to be adaptable in order to stay on the desired or chosen path. And for those who’ve tasted success, the question remains, how to remain relevant? Common sense dictates that the business blueprint needs to be reviewed regularly.
In a recent WedWebChat, four entrepreneurs at various stages of their journeys discussed their business insights.
Dinesh Varadharajan, Chief Product Officer at Kissflow has been at the bleeding-edge of business ventures for over two decades. Adeline Koh stumbled into Sabbatical Beauty to address a personal need. Ann Kositchotitana has worked in various large organisations, across various sectors, and is now an independent mentor. One of her mentees is her daughter, Sofia Chen, a high-achieving secondary 4 student at Hwa Chong International School, who is “paying it forward” with upcie.net to match mentors with small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
This spread of experience is of particular benefit in a landscape such as Singapore’s, where SMEs contribute to 48% of GDP and 65% of all workforce roles.
Business Foundations
As chief product officer (CPO) of Kissflow, a low-code software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, Dinesh Varadharajan believes all businesses begin either from an original idea, or improved implementation of an existing model.
He describes the original premise for Kissflow, developed in 2004. “Software is going to be at a level of maturity, where businesses will want to use it to solve their problems. But businesses don’t speak the language of systems, i.e., programming languages. What if we allow them to solve their problems with their own native business language?”
More vividly, the objective was to enable SMEs who couldn’t afford enterprise SaaS solutions, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software, to build their own solutions.
Watch the full discussion of WED WEB CHAT — NailingYour Business Blueprint below.
The CPO reminisces on the transition of their business offerings alongside the maturing tech landscape, and which is now used in 160 countries. “If you look at the last 20 years of the journey, our vision did not change, but the way we solved the same problem over and over again changed, because technology matured, and the knowledge level of customers also changed. For example, 20 years ago there were no smartphones, but businesses are now far more technical than they were in the 1990s.”
Techy businesses such as Kissflow are now grappling with the rapid pace of developments in cloud technology and generative AI, and are continuously adapting their product positioning to support the latest entrants.
“The business model is living and breathing, and needs to be continuously shaped by the surroundings.”
Kissflow is the fourth product Dinesh and his colleagues have created to solve the same problem.
“The blueprint for enterprise level customers has changed completely. In fact, there is no universal blueprint, the approach must be adapted for the nuances of the region and even the person you are talking to, and success lies in these nuances, in all the small things you do.”
Dermal Derivation
Adeline Koh, owner of Korean-inspired skincare line Sabbatical Beauty, describes the formation of her narrative-driven brand as “accidental”, originating from skin issues she began to experience after moving from Singapore to a minus 20°C Michigan winter, for her postgraduate studies.
“My skin completely freaked out, going from oily to being completely dry, and I just didn’t know what to do about it. As a graduate student, I also had no money to do anything about it for a long time.”
After graduating, Adeline decided it was time to focus on remedying her dermal woes. However, a wave of consultations with dermatologists did her little benefit. “One of them even told me that moisturisers were a scam, which did not help me. Their advice seemed to dry my skin out even more.”
After discovering Korean skincare around 10 years prior, Adeline finally began to experience some relief. “A lot of the ingredients in the products sounded familiar to me, such as ginseng, which I had grown up eating a lot. Korean skincare products and routines did improve my skin, but not 100%.”
The Korean formulations inspired Adeline to create her own recipes, and rather than writing an academic book as planned, she used her sabbatical to study and concoct cosmetics in her kitchen, to achieve the 100% transformation she had long-craved. “I initially made products for my friends, who also saw drastic improvements in the appearance of their skin. Following this I made an online shop, which unexpectedly drew a lot of press to the business.
“Ultimately my journey to becoming a small business owner began with me just trying to solve my own problems, I wasn’t originally trying to create a business.”
Sabbatical Beauty is currently headquartered in Philadelphia, with all products being handmade by Adeline and her small team. The skin-focused entrepreneur attributes her success to the community that developed around the unique draw of her products. “For me I think the business came from creating a product that solved a lot of people’s problems, and having a community that was already invested in the product. The community aspect was vital to the product’s success.”
Watch the full discussion of WED WEB CHAT — NailingYour Business Blueprint below.
Adapting to a New Ecosystem
The evolving social media environment has also changed the points of contact utilised by Adeline’s marketing approach.
“The core of my business model is discerning how I’m going to create a community around my brand and the relevant social media channels. I’m also currently trying to coordinate with collaborators in Singapore to do some physical pop ups for the brand launch, as well as sampling events for people to actually get a physical sense of what the brand is about and what the community stands for as well.”
Transferring Knowledge
Following a successful career in management consultancy under a number of Fortune 500 companies before moving to a marcom role, Ann Kositchotitana became a serial entrepreneur, starting companies in industry, retail technology, education and consultancy. “I have been in 5 major industries and also created 7 companies during my career track, and now I’m kind of retired from this line of work.”
The seasoned entrepreneur turned mentor details her recent guidance offered to different industry players.
A start-up cosmetic company had to have their thinking and strategy set in perspective to their expectations. Ann explains the importance of tailoring product offerings to the intended market in the case of a cosmetics start-up.
“The blueprint for making 1 million dollars in sales is different to that for making 10 million in sales. It gets refined by how you want to grow and the stages of growth you are going through.”
Generational Knowledge Transfer
Ann also mentors her daughter Sofia Chen, who is the founder of upcie, a platform that encourages business professionals to become volunteer mentors for SMEs. Currently a top-10 secondary 4 student at Hwa Chong International School, Ann has encouraged Sofia to pay forward some of her prosperity through the development of key infrastructure, which she will donate to another business or non-profit organisation.
Launched on 9th August, Sofia hopes that upcie will meet a need. “I saw that many SMEs had to wait a long time to get a mentor, and sometimes the mentor wasn’t even able to help with the problem because they didn’t have the right skills or expertise. I felt that tech could help to make this process faster and more efficient.”
Teaching Through Mistakes
Having mentored many start-ups, Dinesh reveals his teaching philosophy, “There’s no magic for success. Mentoring is not about telling others what they should be doing, rather it’s about sharing our mistakes so others don’t make the same mistakes again.”
In Dinesh’s view, a lack of mistakes may indicate a lack of experimentation, and as an entrepreneur, adherence to the status quo equates to stagnation.
Adeline notes the importance of considering the context of actions perceived as mistakes, emphasising that you can never completely learn from an individual error. “Let’s say you are working on Facebook advertisements, and they worked at one point and another they did not. Can I really say that they didn’t work? It’s very dependent on when I ran them, how I ran them, how this platform changed relative to others.”
Differentiation Beyond Price
Dinesh crucially explains that while counterintuitive, price is not the biggest differentiator; customers are always willing to pay more if they can see the value of your service and products. “If you only play with price, someone will always undercut you and you will never be successful.”
Kissflow has long since raised the cost of their product from $3 to $40 per user, citing their initial expectations of low price points drawing more customers. “In fact, with a higher price, we are now able to close bigger deals. Clients are more worried about the outcome and not whether or not you are cheaper than competitors.”
Ann reinforces the idea, “Price is not a big factor, except in certain commodities, but if you’re talking about a consumer brand, image is more important.” She urges her mentees to create products with a particular customer in mind. Considerations such as scalability, product range and pricing come naturally from proper assessment of the target market and its size. When people appreciate your product, they will be willing to pay for it.
Watch the full discussion of WED WEB CHAT — NailingYour Business Blueprint below.
Watch our previous wedwebchats: https://storm-asia.com/category/wed-web-chat/
If you have a topic that is of interest, or have someone who would make a good panellist with a thought-provoking perspective on a subject, please email editor@storm-asia.com with your details and a short summary.
