Doing a startup isn’t easy, so some support along the way might be helpful, especially in Hong Kong. Although Hong Kong has one of the cheapest Big Mac‘s US$ 2.99, it is still one of the most expensive cities in the world, real estate wise and other wise that is. Read more…
Traction isn’t everything
This post appeared first in JumpStart Magazine May 2017 issue as part of Postmortem Conferences, a yearly conference I organize about startup leassons learned
It’s summer 2012, I am running the UX-Web Design Studio I set up over a year ago, and things are doing ok-ish. We have work enough, not a cash cow, but we share a nice office and work on projects we like. But it’s consultancy work, not scalable, not repeatable and the business model is straightforward: selling hours.
Being in and out of Mainland China for the previous 10 years, I had a QQ and a Sina Weibo account Read more…
How to validate your business idea
Ideas are cheap. Ideas are easy. Ideas are common. Everybody has ideas. Ideas are highly, highly overvalued. Execution is all that matters. – Casey Neistat
A way to validate
Everyone can validate an idea on the viability of it before writing a single line of code, or even before the question: “how do we find a CTO”. It’s pretty easy to draft up a Value Proposition to validate. There are multiple ways to validate, but one is using landing pages Read more…
Investing in early stage startups
Thinking about doing “some angel investments into startups”? This requires a different mindset than investing in for instance stocks or bonds.
Uber, WeLabs, 8 Securities, Tesla, Angry Birds, etc, imagine you were an early stage angel investor in one (or more) of them.
Granted, they weren’t overnight successes of course, most Read more…
WeChat as a mobile phone?
To, finally, put pen to paper – having talked about this in a number of meetings, the time has finally come to “paper”; the WeChat app as mobile OS.
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Fintech, the polarizing industry for Hong Kong
Hong Kong, the ultimate fintech place, or not?
Hong Kong has his share of financial institutes, but is Hong Kong also a good place to have a fintech startup? Read more…
Why Hong Kong is a good base for a logistics startup?
This is the second post, from a trio of posts, I’ve written about Hong Kong as a startup hub with a Dutch angle. This post will highlight the logistics part of Hong Kong. One about hardware and one is going to be about FinTech.
Logistics
The similarities between The Netherlands and Hong Kong pre-date startups. Hong Kong is a strong logistical center, it operates a big container port (4th globally), in addition to being driving distance of the port of Guangzhou (8th globally), and Shenzhen (3rd globally). These 3 ports are situated in the Pearl River Delta. The 3 combined handled in 2013 Read more…
Hong Kong as startup hub for hardware startups
What can Hong Kong mean for (Dutch) hardware startups?
Hong Kong startups has many similarities with startups The Netherlands in the way of challenges and knowledge. This is the first in a series of blog posts and in this post I will highlight the Hardware part of Hong Kong, other posts will be about startups in: Logistic, Finance and Garments.
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My year with Uber Hong Kong
Uber has been in operation in Hong Kong for almost 1.5 years now (YES, they still operate in Hong Kong) and I am an user as of day 1 , with an average of more than 1 ride a day (500+ total) and I’ve seen a lot….
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Running out of money is not a failure
Running out of money isn’t a valid failure reason.
While making the preparations for the next version of the Postmortem Conference about Startup Lessons Learned, I sometimes see founders writing: we failed because we ran out of money. Now those founders should get causation and correlation right. Read more…