Starting a business is not as difficult as many make it out to be. Entrepreneurs indeed carry a lot of risks, as most experiments fail. But losing money in your start-up business doesn’t have to mean the end of the line—it’s an opportunity to learn and improve. GCG Asia CEO Phillip Chow has some experience as a founder who has failed and succeeded. As he strives to help others through sharing knowledge, CEO of GCG Asia Phillip Chow draws from those experiences to offer some tips to entrepreneurs who are beginning their start-up journey. Read on for GCG Asia CEO’s advice from the GCG Malaysia office!
The hardest thing about being a founder is that there’s no blueprint. When I first became CEO of GCG Asia Games, I made many of the same mistakes as other founders. This was partly because I didn’t know any better, and partly because after a time I got too competitive to admit mistakes. The best way to learn from your mistakes is by comparing them with other founders. One of the best (and certainly most entertaining) ways to do that is to look at someone who just sold their first product or service (and probably their first fully automated product as well), and see how they made it work.
It’s a good thing that there are a surprising number of up-and-coming businesses popping up now on all sorts of channels, especially ones that don’t have an established following yet. For entrepreneurs who aren’t part of the scene yet, one very important point of entrepreneurship is to branch out and take risks: to ask hard questions, to get passionate (and sometimes obsessed) about where you want your company to go.
Start-ups are often viewed as glamorous jobs, with lofty goals and near-term success on the forefront. But not all start-ups are glamorous. When things don’t go as planned, it can be heart-breaking. And that’s when you first need some perspective to help you get back on track – perspective is taken from someone who has lived through something similar before. Those who have survived many such setbacks can offer valuable perspectives, including past experiences, faulty assumptions, and good practices (even if they are not part of the official playbook).
As CEO, GCG Asia is my baby. If I had to put a label on what defines a start-up, as CEO of GCG Asia I’d probably say it’s a group of people set loose with purpose: In other words, a willingness to take calculated risks, break new ground and learn from failure. This is a surprisingly abstract definition, but it’s the one I’ve used most often as CEO of GCG Asia Games. In most cases, it’s not the specific product or service that makes a company a start-up, but rather the culture that embraces risk-taking wherever possible.
Being a founder and CEO of GCG Asia Games is truly one of the greatest accomplishments in my life. I get to combine my passion for gaming and esports and for building communities.
Before I started my company GCG Asia, as CEO I conducted in-depth market research on your field and the demographics of your potential clientele.
Conducting surveys and focus groups is an excellent way to understand your market and what they want. You can even use what you learn from these studies to create marketing materials or advertising campaigns that appeal to everyone regardless of age, gender or economic status. Start-ups have different needs even if they share some similarities that make for a great core business relationship.
Startups have unique challenges, but luckily, as CEO of GCG Asia Games, I assembled an amazing collection of resources to help make you successful.
- Discover a need
Start-ups have to answer two questions. What problems do we solve? And what problems will our product solve? The answer to the first question is generally pretty clear, but the answer to the second question can be anything but. Plenty of start-ups try to sell their start-up as the solution to everything, but they often fail. The reason is that people have lots of needs that aren’t being solved by the product. The product is only useful if it can enable one or more of those needs to be fulfilled.
One of the biggest mistakes young companies make is to assume that people want just another version of what already exists. This was my mistake when I started as CEO of GCG Asia Games. The biggest risk people take in starting start-ups is that they think they can reinvent the wheel and create something revolutionary.
The only way for you to truly succeed as a start-up is to solve a real problem that other people aren’t already solving. But in either case, as CEO of GCG Asia, I should remember that the true innovation is not in the details but in the goal: solving a real problem and meeting real needs with your product. In our case, e-sports teams and ecosystems support.
- Assemble a Dream team
Start-ups don’t always just need money. Often, they need people. As GCG Asia Games CEO, I think the best kind of start-up is the one that has parents, not founders. As CEO, GCG Asia Games The best start-ups attract the best people who are willing to work for them. Those people get on board because of a shared experiment in which they have participated. Their success and failure help each other learn more about how to build and maintain the very thing they love working for.
At start-ups, people help each other. As GCG Asia CEO, my door is always open. People love start-ups because they want to change the world. Start-ups help people change the world. They bring cool stuff into the world and that makes it a better place. As CEO at GCG Asia Games, I truly believe this.
That is why a team is vital to any start-up and a common goal that is defined in the mission of the business, many young people nowadays prefer working for an ethical and purposeful goal. Look out for your peeps.
- Create a business plan
A successful start-up does not just occur overnight, and most start-ups require some amount of time and money. If your idea is worth pursuing, you need to act now! Look for ways to raise money. Look for partners. Explore how others have started their businesses and learn from their experiences. These are all great resources for starting a company that will change the world or at least make you feel better about how long it will take to get there.
Here are questions I asked myself when I became GCG Asia CEO. What is the Purpose of Our E-sports Business? What are the end goals? How will you finance your startup? These questions can be answered in a well-written business plan. You should write a detailed business plan before you even begin talking to a bank or a lawyer. Creating a good business plan is a critical step before taking the next step in starting a business. This is what I did and it gave me as CEO of GCG Asia the clarity about the direction I wanted to take GCG Asia Games in.
When you have a great idea, it’s tempting to just go ahead and create it without any thought or planning. But that creates an entire slew of problems. Your focus will turn to the idea and you won’t be able to pull the right strings to get your company off the ground. Creating a good business plan or idea is essential to creating a great product. Without a solid structure in place, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut and never see the results you’re after.
- Research
To start a company, you need research. One way to do this is to conduct market research. Market research can be incredibly valuable for understanding your target audience (at least as well as you can know them), as well as their needs, preferences and behaviour. As an entrepreneur, your job is to find ways to address those needs and satisfy those preferences. Market research can help you do this. My staff know me as GCG Asia CEO Phillip Chow, the avid researcher who is always looking at the market.
Any good startup needs market research. It’s often the difference between success and failure, or between getting funded and choosing to go without. It can provide a vital advantage to your company development, allowing you to make informed decisions about where to invest time, money and resources. Through research, as CEO of GCG Asia it helped me to understand the market, competitor strengths, market potentials—and all the other factors affecting business success.
- Have a good time
Work doesn’t have to be torture if you know how to start from scratch using your imagination. If you have the creativity and ability to think on your feet, in just a few hours you can create a start-up that could expand into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. Now that I’m an older and wiser GCG Asia CEO, I am much better at letting go. The hard part is having the vision to achieve your goals and then sticking with them until the end. It takes an incredible amount of courage to keep going when the going gets rough. Most start-ups fail, but those that persevere usually become global giants. Might as well just have fun doing what you love with a team that has a passion for a common goal.
