Multinational sharing talent collaboration platform for Hong Kong start-up
Tammy Tse & Jonathan Chiu
Inspired by a foreign recruitment platform, they hope to create a transnational collaboration platform in the Asian market. At the time when the government was vigorously promoting and publicising the “One Belt One Road” policy, all my partners felt that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, hoping that with the government’s impetus, the link with our neighbouring cities would be bridged so that talents from all over the world could gather together more effectively. At the same time, it could also bring more international business opportunities for enterprises. Team members come from a variety of professional background, some of whom were working partners, while still a lot of people only knew each other by their names. Our work is usually discussed in the group first, and then the colleagues with experience and ability in project management would take charge of the project. As we still lacked experience, the other team members played a major supporting role. At the beginning of the business, we could only rely on our team members’ savings, but it was not enough to rely on the savings of a few young people in their early twenties, so the team prepared a well-documented business plan at the same time. And we also actively participated in all kinds of start-up, entrepreneurial or Chamber of Commerce activities and talks, plucked up the courage to take the initiative to put forward our business proposal to angel investors. After many rounds of persuasion, finally there came an opportunistic encounter with the current investors, who eventually became our main source of funding.
Dare to try and work silently
At the beginning stage, everything is difficult and we encounter a lot of setbacks, and countless overtime working days and nights. For example, the time management of the whole team was relatively poor, resulting in miscommunication and misunderstandings. However, after a long period of cooperation, we started to build up trust and learn to deal with things more and more smoothly. Many people may ask: Is it worth it? It is really fortunate that all working partners have become one family over a period of time, experiencing the frustration, failure, and then support and starting afresh. At the end of the day, what could be happier than fighting alongside a group of like-minded comrades? It’s all been worth it all the way down the road.
Lack of funds, stable projects and confidence, together with keen market competitions and so on are the most common challenges encountered by entrepreneurs. However, our team members still want to encourage the young people not to fear the jackals before the tigers and then the leopards, otherwise they will never succeed. There are thousands of people who succeed in ideas or words, but only few succeed in action. The group members recalled: “I remember we had a technical problem before and we were all at a loss as to what to do about it, but as the presentation meeting for investors was getting closer and closer, we were all very nervous. In the end, with many sleepless nights, our colleagues came up with a solution, and it worked out. As it turns out, entrepreneurship is a bumpy road, and the most challenging is nothing more than a person’s psychological flexibility and the resilience after failure. It is only after each failure that comes an opportunity for learning. Furthermore, we have to learn how to strike a balance between the expectations of investors and our own abilities.
Learn from experience and develop steadily
I believe most of the people have the experience of keeping a pet. Colleagues like to call their work ‘a baby’. The happiness and success of starting a business is like watching your child grow up. After being a father, there are a lot of things to re-adapt or learn, and then to watch children grow, enter school, get good grades and so on. The success is not whether he walks faster than others or whether he is the smartest kid in his class. Rather, it is when he looks at himself, he remembers how everyone raised him together. In the future, the company will expand in many ways, so it is necessary to do promotions and publicity to attract outstanding talents to register on our platform. I believe with a pool of remarkable talents gathered can we attract better investors. Over time, we hope our business will sustain.
Entrepreneurs often come across questions like “Chicken or egg first?” This is a causal cycle: Should we improve our product quality or should we focus on publicity to attract a large number of customers? We believe that to begin with, we should first attract the public’s attention, understand the gaps in the market and recognise the needs of our guests, create popular, high-quality services and products, and strike a balance between stability and progress. After all, the boat has to go fast, but it has to weather the storm.