Make something people want. From 0 to 1.
January 2012, the turning point of my career that I quit my first job which had been working for 3.5 years. The reason I gave to my boss was that I would like to startup my own business.
In that year, I built 2 web-based startup products with my friend. The first product, Victoriafair, a platform which gives all offline store owners an golden opportunity to display their products online in a 6-day Chinese Lunar New Year Fair. I planned to charge them a lum sum cost but the results didn’t come as expected. After the event, we successfully helped 480 shop owners to take product photo, write descriptions and display their content online within 2 days. In this case, we learnt that it was not easy to get people pay for your service, which further proof the importance of “Product Market Fit” which we were lacking of at that moment.
The experience of failure doesn’t turn us down, but inspire us to start our second idea. We decided to build a market place to sell smart phone cases named ISpace. In that year, nearly all Hong Kong people changed their mobile phone cases once per month. Although we keep doing marketing promotion through google and facebook, the conversion rate was still very low. More importantly, as online chatting service was not well-developed at that moment and many people sent us inquiries via emails. Unfortunately, even we spent a lot of time on replying their inquiry emails, the potential customers already left our website and it was difficult to draw them back again. We found that this was the problem every e-commerce owners have to face.
How to increase the conversion rate on e-commerce?
After closing ISpace, we both went back to our own field to work, but we still never give up to start our own business. I joined Startup Weekend to learn how to do a startup. joined Google EYE to learn how to pitch. Read a lot of the startup articles. The words I like most is from Y-Combinator Paul Graham : Make something people want. Pak and I did think a lot of idea. Travelbuyer, a platform to match up traveler and people want to buy things overseas. EbookE, a platform to let students selling and buying 2nd hand textbook. But all are in the idea stage only. Silicon Valley Culture always got a sentence.
Idea is nothing without execution
One day in 2016, I found a very interesting tool called Live Chat Messenger. It is a messenger embedded on websites to let customers chat with companies instantly. The fast to solve customers, the more chance to get customer pay. I found that many of these tools are made in western and not suitable to Asian especially Chinese market. No Chinese support and many are too complicated for E-commerce usage. Coincidentally, the last 3 technical jobs I did are all related to Messenger. That’s how we started building Easychat : A live chat messenger for online sales and customer service in the early of 2017.
Easychat has been launched for 6 months since June 2017. From 0 to over 230 companies using us. From 300 message in the first month to over 18000 message in the six months.
Today, Easychat is not only a live chat messenger for customer service. It got Customer discovery and analysis features. Let you know who are on your online store, how they visit your store like which page they visit most and how frequent they visited.
We also provide the Auto Promotion Message to let your customer receive the promotion message or other product details you want to to know
It is all about solving the e-commence pain point: Increase their conversion rate
Last week, we did launch a new feature : integrating Facebook messenger and Line into Easychat. As many of the ecommerce owners today using more than 1 channel to talk to their customers like Facebook messenger and Line.
Easychat becomes the Asia’s first Live chat Messenger to let you chat with website visitors, Facebook messenger and Line customers in a single platform only
Few days ago. We just receive a good news that we are accepted to enter the Asia’s largest Accelerator program, Appworks. From 0 to 1. I think we have already made it in 2017. The next journey we are going is entering the fund raising world, from 1 to 100
The future is unknown to us, but one thing we truly believe forever : Make something people want.
