Wednesday, 28 November 2012


APK 2.0 : Lesson learnt!

The first day I entered the class, I thought it was just another APK class, I was even ready with a business idea of what stuff I will sell during the APK Festival. Then suddenly this dude came in to the class saying how messed up the previous APK system was and revamping the whole system to something new. All of us were perplexed. We didn’t see this coming at all.

But then again,  it turns out that the APK this time, or APK 2.0 they call it is the best APK ever! I feel that I get the chance to learn so much more than those students who did APK in the previous semesters. I feel so lucky to be introduced to an awesome mentor, Bernard Hor. For the first time, I paid 100 percent attention on series of 2hour long lecture and be excited along the way. Every APK class feels like motivation booster that light up our spirits and the will to act! Its an amazing feeling really.

What I learned from him throughout APK 2.0 series were:

If you want something to happen, stop talking and thinking too much and start doing it.
The fastest way to be successful is to fail faster. Therefore you get to learn and improve faster.

I also learned about business model canvas as well. An amazing tool to represent your business idea as a whole, showing the relations of 9 blocks of segments namely customer segment, value preposition, channel, customer relation, key action, key resources, key parners, cost structure and revenue stream.
This tool really helped us to plan and develop our business idea.

Planning is just the initial part of executing, what is important is to hear directly from the customers and learn from the real market because planning is just a collection hypothesis and assumptions. The only way to know the truth and prove the theories is to meet the real market and test it ourselves. On one class, Bernard asked us to go outside the class and do market testing. He asked us to meet people and tell them about our idea and ask feedback from them. To our surprise, we did get a lot of feedback. Some are good comments, some are harsh critique, but we also get some feedback to improve our idea. So, based on this activity, we fixed our idea and the idea evolved into something better.

After that, we also learned that idea is just an abstract of concepts without any physical realization. We were taught that to better convince someone about your idea, you should realize in in a form of “Minimum Viable Product” meaning product with the minimum features to be launched and tested on the market. From there on, if the idea is of any value, people will respond and the team can move on to continuously improve the idea to perfection.

This makes sense because, an idea will remain as an unrealized idea unless we make a move and actually do action to make it into a real thing!

The most important value that you need to have to be a successful entrepreneur is HARDKNOCK. It means that you have to be able to endure hardships, challenges, and failures after failures but still be able to get up and strive for the ideas that you believed in.

I hope this new APK system will still be implemented so that many more young minds can be given the opportunity to unleash their untapped entrepreneurial potential that will create generations of change-makers! 



Tuesday, 27 November 2012

One more thing! What do we need to do?

We have to the most important things a company must do to make our business model work.
We need to have a customer centric mindset will ensure our success.

Key Activity



Oh Wait! What do we need?

Oh Wait!
How can we create competitive advantage in acquiring or developing an attribute or combination of attributes that allow us to outperform our competitors?

We have to derermine our key resources!


 
 
 

I love changes

I felt so lucky in taking up extra credit hours for APK this semester, Semester 1 ~ 2012/2013.
Why? It's the 1st semester where the new APK education module is implemented.
I'm glad, finally UM see the relevance.

The first 4 weeks, the students will be having class with the lecturer for learning the entrepreneurship theory and model. I personally feel that the class is ordinary where the information can actually be found from text book.
I love Pn. Ponmalar, because she is determinant, caring, kind, funny nonetheless she always try to relate the theory to a real-time event in giving us an idea of what will be happening.

My APK class is suddenly enlighten by the mentor from Founder Labs, Bernard Hor.

In his class, I found myself gaining interests for being an entrepreneur and my learning curves goes exponentially.

"Punctual", " Stupid", "Honest"
These are the words I got from his class.
Punctuality does not simply means arriving exactly at the time appointed. It's more than that.
For example, if you have a class at 10am, you need to be in the class at least 5 minutes earlier.
Why? It's crucial to have some time to prepare and settle yourself.

Bernard called himself "Stupid". It doesn't mean he is stupid, but to keep himself humble to others.
Being a successful entrepreneur, one has to keep humble all the time nevertheless be honest.is very

The CEC Analysis is very useful in guiding us finding the 'real' problem. Getting a direction and setting a goal crucially important. Your goal must be "S.M.A.R.T.E.R",
Specfic, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely, Evaluate, Reevaluate/Redo.

Previously, my idea of running a business is just to generate profit by simply creating a new product / service.
Today, my mind has totally changed. "Your business idea has to be relevant."
How? We have meet the customer requirements by segmenting the target group.
I love the session when we were asked to go out from the class for customer outsourcing.
I personally found it very interesting where it's the actual time I hear the customer voices, their inner voice of what they need. Their requirements are varies from one to another, but at the same time, you could see the similar requirements among them.

Always bear in mind, start your business with minimum viable product (MVP), rapid prototyping (agilent development) and customer development. Last but not the least, build your startup with Good Question, Possible Solution and Awesome People.


I have decided to start my technopreneurship journey from Today!
Thank you, my dear lecturer, Pn. Ponmalar and my lovely mentor, Bernard Hor.

APK is just got serious : Reflection

APK (Asas Pembudayan Keusahawanan) is a subject that teaches us how to run a business or be young entrepreneur, but sadly for UM students it more well known as subject that selling sirap or cake in the end semester, but for this semester APK is just got serious, we will not selling the cake,sirap, or t-shirt in the end of the semester. It turned out help us to expand our creativity in business world, and if we are lucky we can make it into real things.

I have learned many things for the past few weeks in this APK class. Our mentor,Mr.Bernard taught us a lot of things about the entrepreneurship and business world. The first class happened to be an eye opener for me in business field. Before this I have no interest and knowledge about entrepreneurship and business the reason is because business has a lot of risks that we must take, and i dont think i can take that. However Mr.Bernard induced my curiosity level towards this subject so i have willing to know more about this things, and he also said : just step out from your comfort zone and give it a shot, that make me more want to learn about business and all of its stuff.

and the other thing i like is, we can speak out our idea whether is stupid or nice idea, whether in English or Malay because according Mr.Bernard there's no right or wrong idea. In the end i just want to say, that I am glad to took this class. Before the APK class, I never know there's some steps to open a new business. For example, we have to verify the customer segment, key partners, key activity and etc. And our lecturers are very inspiring, they always give us so motivations and suggestion to improve ourselves,and i really enjoy the class for this past 12 weeks.


THANK YOU APK CLASS :)



My reflection about the course

Thank you for the generous and professional sharing of your knowledge and experience. Your sense of humour made us feel at ease right away. An enriching experience.I’ve learned loads and you’ve really enriched my understanding of entrepreneurship.

Monday, 26 November 2012

Problem 2 Continued......

Solution

Well once we found a problem faced by many people who want to purchase certain items, we found that a very good solution would be a mobile app that would allow customers to have access to a centralized product database. Customers would be able to search for their desired products and then be able to find out all the various shops and malls they can find that item. A cool feature to include would be the ability of the app to automatically compare all the prices available and take into context the current location of the customer and decide the best place for him or her to purchase it.

Current System Research

With an idea at hand, we decided to look into the app market for any existing apps that can provide a similar service to the one we choose to offer. Immediately, we found quite a few apps that provide similar services but none of them were built for Malaysia. Also, very few took the customers location into context to find the nearest mall or shop. The link below shows some of the examples we found:




Where to go from here

As we have found out that there are many apps out there that are very close to what our solution is, we look at it as a good thing. First off, as there are no great shopping apps that are built for Malaysia, a huge user base exists that would look to use our app. Also, we do not need to start completely from scratch as there is a wide variety of apps that can give us the step up to develop a great shopping app.