Karl Mak’s business journey at SGAG
SGAG is a social media website known for its memes and entertainment content with a Singaporean twist.
We sat down with Karl, the co-founder of SGAG, after his talk on the “importance of building a creative culture in your startup” hosted at Spacemob Claymore.
What motivated you to start SGAG?
We just wanted to bring laughter to our friends and we wanted to share our ideas with people and hopefully bring a smile to their faces wherever they may be.
We also wanted to see if we can do this in the long run because the harsh reality of graduating and getting a job is that we may have to give this up or not do this so often- so we wanted to ask ourselves if we can do this in the long run and find a way to sustain it.
What were the challenges you faced in your business journey?
As an entrepreneur, the most challenging part is to find the right people and internal team to join you on this journey. This also applies to finding the right external partners who can work with you, which is really difficult. To SGAG, these are the biggest challenges that we face everyday and I think it will be a constant thing we have to figure out.
How about on a personal level, what did you find different about yourself?
I think I became a lot more mature and a lot more calm when dealing with different situations. I think as entrepreneurs, a lot of things blow out around you and I always give this analogy that running your business is like:
walking through a minefield and you can step on many different mines multiple times everyday but you have to keep walking forward even though things are blowing up around you and you have to get to the other side.
I think that’s the kind of thing we learn over the years that we stay calm and focus on our mission and we just keep moving forward to our goal.
What would you advise those who want to start their own business? What are the key things they should look out for?
I think one of the key things is to ask yourself why are you doing this and would you be doing it for the next ten years every single day? If you can say yes to that, then I can say that you have found something you are really passionate about.
I think for us when we were starting, we asked ourselves what we wanted to do with our lives and one of the keywords was impact. We wanted to impact a lot of people and bring joy and laughter, which is our mission. We also asked ourselves if would we want to do this for the next ten years of our lives and the answer was yes- so I think that really drove us through the tough times.
What you say is the next step for SGAG?
I think we are going to be exploring a lot of new markets and content types and we are planning to create other types of content in the future. We are going to be doing a lot of experimentation and hopefully discover new content along the way. This is also part of our goal- to try different things and see what works for us.
