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! 



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