Making Something From Nothing: Anne Cheng Of Supercharge Lab On How To Go From Idea To Launch

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

…Making time to share your knowledge, skills, and approaches with those around you is critical. Startup founders are unable to scale as a result of this.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Anne Cheng.

Anne is the founder of Supercharge Lab, a Cognitive Artificial Intelligence company that optimizes business outcomes through psychological profiling, helping companies reduce wastes of time, effort, and money. Anne is a serial entrepreneur who has previously exited two startups and has consulted for both large enterprises and startups through her previous work as the founder of Southeast Asian angel fund, Start Up Nation.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

I was born into a working-class family, and we were never too rich. While my mother came from a family of more “have’s” than have-not’s, I felt judged by society’s image of success. I wanted to be better, smarter, prettier, richer than the rest. I was not.

I did not do as well in school and almost flunked out just before entering college. At college, I almost dropped out because of my ego and argued with my dean, and claiming trauma, never turned up for classes.

I started off in a call center, then got a job in private banking business development, where I knew nothing, did nothing, and failed terribly. It all changed when the financial crisis swung by and everyone, at the first sense of trouble, jumped ship. I stayed behind and tried to save the lives of many (and will be remembered as either the hero or the villain of the mess of 2008).

I’ve had my fair share of setbacks. Much more than accomplishments. But I did learn to accept my truth as long as I practiced.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Live Your Truth” is my favorite life lesson quote.

To live my truth, I must be accepting of failure. Living my truth means admitting that I don’t know much, but that I’m prepared to try, fail, and learn. Telling it like it is — and being kind to the people I encounter and engage with — is living my truth.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I would have to say ‘Dead Poets Society’ — A group of guys from a private prep school meet their new English teacher in this film. The teacher encourages the boys to value their individuality, think for themselves, and pursue their interests. This takes them down a path of self-discovery that runs against to the conservative institution’s rigorous ethos.

In this film, Robert Keating, the said teacher, whispers to the boys in an iconic scene, “Carpe diem. Seize the day.” The boys take risks, discover their passion, and learn the value of independent thought thanks to the teacher’s encouragement and leadership.

Leadership entails empowering people to realize their full potential. You can set them on a path to discovering their true abilities. You can inspire them to reach for higher goals than they think are achievable. You can motivate them to pursue their goals, and one of the most essential lessons you can teach them is to embrace the concept of “carpe diem,” or “seize the day.”

Seizing the day to me is really about never letting a day go by without being a better version of yourself. It’s also inspiring to learn more about what seizing the day means to everyone else.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

“Vision without action is just a dream, action without vision just passes the time, and vision with action can change the world.” — Nelson Mandela

The first step is to take the concept and validate it with customers. I’ve mentioned in several previous interviews that a lot of people throw good money after a solution that doesn’t quite have a real “problem”. The lack of a market need for their product is one of the leading causes of business failure. It’s an uphill battle to build a business if no one wants your product or service.

After you have built confidence in the market need for your solution, the next step is really to build the basis of your business — deliver the solution, drive extreme customer satisfaction through excellence in the customer experience, then drive outcomes every step of the way — whether it’s in product development, early customer adoption, and then scaling the business up.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

You can do so much research, and of course, every good idea has already been done. But the reality is that innovation comes in different forms — many people take an idea that has been done and make it better. You can have incremental innovation, transformational innovation, and even disruptive innovation.

But as I mentioned in the last answer, validation is critical for your idea. If you can’t find anyone who’s going to give you the buy-in that you need, then perhaps you need to go back to the drawing board and work at your idea from a different angle.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

After your idea has been validated, you’ll need to consider how to get your solution to the customer with as little friction as possible. While I’m not an IP lawyer, nor an expert at manufacturing or product distribution, I have created businesses across different cultures and situations, and the one piece of advice I would give is to reduce the steps, friction, and time required to getting your ideal customer to experience the benefits of your solution.

It’s easy to find resources on the internet on how to get your product into your customers’ hands. But the one thing I wish someone had told me was the importance of reducing friction in every process.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)

Being a leader involves understanding that the people doing the task will be your greatest source of inspiration. Their frustrations are a rich source of knowledge. We must continue to learn and unlearn, as well as let go of our preconceived assumptions.

Embrace the discomfort. This is something which I will admit that I do not do well. I wish I knew everything. I wish I knew what was next. I wish… But on the other side of discomfort is growth. Learning through neurodiversity, from pain and from our failures, we get better.

The weakest link in a chain determines its overall strength. If you want a high-performing organization, you must have a high-performing team. It’s critical to bring the proper folks along for the voyage. Too many times, I’ve made poor decisions, believing that I could coach individuals to succeed and also failing to fire quickly enough. In terms of productivity, misunderstanding, and other toxic behaviors that can become reputational hazards for the organization, the weakest link(s) often drag the performance of everyone else in the firm down.

Making time to share your knowledge, skills, and approaches with those around you is critical. Startup founders are unable to scale as a result of this.

The significance of ‘checking-out’ in order to avoid burnout. It may seem tough to do a digital detox, but get creative and protect your personal time and space. Turn your phone off for an hour, then two, and gradually increase it.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

I would start with the end in mind. Imagine first, how your customer will feel, think, and act when interacting with your solution. Understand exactly the steps required to get the product into the desired state, such that you can have the desired outcome — work backwards, plan, and derive your strategy from stepping into the shoes of your ideal customer and immersing yourself into the emotional, mental, and psychological (or even physical) effects that you want to trigger through the interaction with your product.

Only by starting with your customer in mind can you truly start to build the solution. Then, validate that someone would pay you to feel the way you want them to feel with the product you want them to buy. The rest isn’t rocket science — it’s just building a product-based business.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

I’ve always been the kind of entrepreneur who gets my hands dirty — but that is not to say that consultants aren’t useful. The biggest need for an aspiring entrepreneur though, is really to find someone who has bought in to the vision of the company — not someone who is with you because they are being paid to do so. A mentor would be a good starting point to help you find your feet and lead you through the vagaries of being an entrepreneur.

I would hire a consultant if I were not a first-time entrepreneur, someone who can not only be a strategic sounding board, but someone who can help accelerate outcomes to get the product to market quickly.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

There is not one right answer to this — fundraising can really suck the life out of you and divert important management resources away from important organic growth. That said, fundraising can really propel your startup to greater heights in a shorter amount of time. It is really a question of your company’s needs, stage, and particular (financial) situation that will help you get to your answer. Having a mentor who is a professional investor can help you cut through the noise and decide if fundraising is the right thing for you.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions.

How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

Our purpose is to always assist people in acting, thinking, and doing better. While this remark is broad and general, we have always worked to develop solutions that allow our clients to spend more time interacting as people.

That said, I am a backer of entrepreneurs and small enterprises, as well as an advocate for the ethical use of AI. Supercharge Lab has given me the opportunity to explore how technology might be applied to causes that I care about, such as mental health awareness and assistive/rehabilitative technologies.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

That’s a tough one because I’m passionate about so many causes. I believe the one thing the human race needs more of is a better understanding of one another, so teaching people to listen with more empathy and less judgement could be a good idea.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

I would love to have a private breakfast with Michelle Obama. Her passion is with people, and it would be cool to collaborate with her about making the world a better place.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.