3 Things To Consider When Starting a Business
Hello, I’m Lily. I’m the co-founder for Austern International and I recently joined the team at H2 Ventures, an early stage VC firm investing in Fintech, Data and AI.
I started Austern when I was 19 at the end of my first year of university at UNSW. Entrepreneurship is something I’m extremely passionate about and this includes helping millennials discover their passion, their potential and their opportunities in a changing society.
Throughout this journey and now four years down the track, Austern generates over seven figures in revenue, we’ve run over 30 bootcamps, taken over 700+ millennials on our programs and was awarded Best Work Experience Provider by Global Youth Travel Awards two years in a row. But Austern wasn’t always the way it is now.
Looking back, I thought I would share with you Austern’s journey as well as three key things I learnt when starting my own business.
1. There Needs to be Market Traction
You can build the best product in the world but if no one wants it or finds it useful, then what’s the point? Market traction comes from understanding that there’s a real need for your business.
Having just quit a corporate job that didn’t suit my personality, I really wanted to just explore the options on what else was out there. Was my life destined to be stuck climbing the corporate ladder? I also didn’t want to limit my options to just Australia. With all the hype surrounding the Asian Century, I was intrigued by the infinite possibilities surrounding Asia. Austern was born out of the question “Are there other people out there like me?”
My initial version of ‘showing traction’ was posting online to see if anyone was interested in internship opportunities in Asia. Evidently, many people shared the same sentiment because I ended up taking 40 students to China in my first go.
However as time moved on and I completed our first two programs, we started shifting away from the internship model. With each iteration, we gained real-time feedback and discovered by observing our participants’ behaviour, what they really needed. We discovered that short term internships often didn’t provide much value and we hated the fact we couldn’t control the experience. It rendered us helpless if the company we partnered with decided to give our participants coffee errands or photocopying jobs.
Since 2015, we’ve pivoted to the current model of our 3 week Bootcamp that we have today where we run 2 hackathons with global companies. Each time, we take our participants’ feedback as well as A/B test solutions to implement changes and improvements.
Now, we’re providing more opportunities for our community whether it be learning experiences, mentoring, networking and training experiences. We’ve even started creating extensive partnerships to funnel our alumni into paid work, opening their eyes (and our own) to all the possibilities there is to be explored.
2. Attracting a Great Team
Having a great team is essential in succeeding. Part of growing Austern wouldn’t have been possible if I didn’t have a great team. In my first year, I was simultaneously juggling full-time university and I was struggling to grow Austern out of the Northern China region.
The success of my first year wouldn’t have been possible without some of these key people. I’m eternally grateful for some of my earliest supporters: Michelle, Jessie, Daisy and Emma who fit helping me out with Austern around their busy uni schedules. However, there was always a nagging feeling that there was so much more I wanted to do to grow the company. This just wasn’t possible if I didn’t bring someone more experienced on.
That’s when Jamie came on board. Bringing on Jamie as my co-founder in 2015 has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made and probably one of my proudest achievements. Jamie is the true embodiment of an inspiring Millennial Leader, someone who is now a valuable asset to Austern. As a former educator, TEDx Speaker, entrepreneur and absolute partnership gun, she was comfortably consulting for businesses with a high-paying salary when I approached her.
However, lucky for me (maybe my pitching skills weren’t too bad?), Jamie saw the vision I was trying to build and the passion. Even though it would mean a massive pay cut, overnight she gave up her comfortable pay in order to work together towards this big dream. She resonated with the value that we would only achieve success by making others successful. This was the type of person I wanted to be in my troop, standing in the ranks beside me through thick and thin and we are still attracting those kinds of people into our team today.
3. Customer Validation
It’s not hard to say that our customer experience is at the heart of everything we do and every decision we make. Our community is the soul of Austern and we do everything to make sure our participants get the most out of every experience. We’ll let our customers speak for themselves.
One surprising aspect about our program is that our Bootcamps are all facilitated by previous Alumni. We have structured leadership training in place where we identify potential leaders and train them to lead 30+ students to Singapore, HK, Sydney, Melbourne, New York and Shanghai where we often have several programs running simultaneously during the Summer and Winter breaks.
Rather than just hiring someone externally to run our program, it’s part of our Austernian way of training Millennial leadership qualities. We pay for their flights, accommodation, salary and any training needed. Not only do they have to react quickly in foreign and unexpected situations and learn how to deal with conflict, they also build out their domestic and global networks through liaising with our partner companies.
Many of our participants have gone on to become interns at Uber, Fave, CompareAsiaGroup etc. You can read our Uber case study here.
Most importantly, at Austern, we value personal disruption. We are developing Millennials to become entrepreneurial thinkers and problem solvers, training them with the transferable skills that will be essential regardless of what work they do in the future. This in turn will help develop them into Leaders and future innovation makers especially when 40% of our current jobs will become automated by technology by 2020 (according to the Committee of Economic Development).
On an ending note, we would also like to thank all the support we’ve received, all our amazing companies and mentors. We have some supportive mentors who mentor our community like Deeps De Silva (Head of Marketing APAC Dropbox), Sunita Kaur (GM of Spotify Asia) and George Stavrakakis (Director of Education Microsoft), Angel Lorente (ex-CFO of Morgan Stanley), our Alumni who are tireless in helping to build this community and our Partner Institutions who have course accredited our program.
