Andrew Lee Miller has spent over 12 years of growth hacking startup wins, including 5 years in Dubai and 5 years in Silicon Valley.

Andrew discusses how he was able to growth hack the startup to 600k users, 300k monthly unique visitors, first page rankings for over 50k businesses in the region, yet the company still failed, and with glorious fashion.

https://www.birdylabs.co/

Started in 2015 while still studying. After his university did not allow him to adapt his courses to his new project, he decided to drop out school and start his entrepreneur journey.

Know more on mistakers.co !

Originally from Thailand, Monk Varayano spent a few years in Germany. Living a comfortable life with his dad and growing up in an environment of entrepreneurs, he spent a few years worried about the right tings to do. 

Afer 2 years of learnin, he officially became a monk living in Wat tam wua temple in Thailand.

During my Vipassana retreat I got the chance of interviewing him in order to answer one question.

As simle as it looks like, the question is far more difficult that we can imagine. During our interview we'll get the chance of going through a few key notions. After listening to the podcast, you should be able to:

Do you think we forgot something? Feel free to add your questions in the comments!

Let’s talk with Sayumporn Singthong (May) 

Originally from the north of Thailand, May grew up in a few places including, Chiang Mai & Singapore. She is now involved in a few business from beauty salon, to design & more. 

You can find her on Mcouturestudio81, Nataulique and a few more businesses.

Let’s talk about work / life balance

Far from being easy for entrepreneurs to handle, finding balance between working hours and family time is difficult. 

May will share with us her own vision, tips & hacks to make sure working hours remain where they should and don’t overtake your life as it happened with her in the past.

Why May’s experience matters when it comes to work / life balance?

Being a mum and entrepreneur is usually a double challenge. Most of the time, women entrepreneurs will also have a bigger share of the house & kids tasks. 

This is one of the reason we were happy interviewing May. Her experience is not unique, but the vision she has and the way she now handles multiple business deserve some more attention.

What did we learn on the podcast?

We learned that business is not all. Sometimes growing means losing freedom we could have enjoyed better.

So as May said  a few times “life is not only work, enjoy what you do”

So now the question is how do you set up boundaries when it comes to work / life balance?

Wanna know more? Visit us in mistakers.co

Let’s meet Ms Sirasar Boonma from Local Alike

Sirasar Boonma has been working with Local Alike since 2016, now Director of Customers. Her main achievements with Local Alike allowed the company to scale rapidly after winning an important prize of about 300,000€ with Booking.com. 

Sirasar has been working with local communities in Thailand for years now and has a great knowledge on the problems faced by them alongside Community Based Tourism (CBT) activities.

Let’s talk about scalability

The main challenge we will be discussing about on this episode of our podcast revolves around the acceleration of your activity. 

This is what happened to Local Alike after winning booking.com prize, they had to come back home and prepare the team for a huge expansion. 

In a few months, they almost tripled the number of employees and had to onboard a lot of new projects. 

Why Local Alike experience matters when it comes to scalability?

The interesting part in this is that Local Alike does not only manage online activities. In this case, scalability is usually handled by a few engineers and growth hacking experts. 

Local Alike activities require them to actually go on the ground, meet people, train them, setup new activities, launch new products, improve them and promote them online.

In this case, scalability comes with lots more projects than a classic ebusiness. 

Their experience is especially valuable because they made it. They managed to survive and expand. 

What did Local Alike teach us about scalability?

The main learnings I got out of our interview, and feel free to comment if you think I did not get it right, is that scalability comes in a few levels.

1- Get the right mentors and vision 

without this we can imagine how confusing it will be for the team behind it.

2- Train, talk, train, talk to your team 

at the end they are the ones delivering it. So you better make sure they share the same vision.

3- What can be implemented?

In their case, they focused on career path & new workflow, making sure all the team share the same long term vision.

4- How do you see scalability?

What elements to investigate more

Books

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

What do you think?

Wanna know more? Visit us in mistakers.co !

 #Failure 5 - Being a wannabeentrepreneur instead of an entrepreneur

Entering into the entrepreneur jungle is far from being easy. There is no training or diploma to prepare us. So when you do it straight out of school, there is still a huge delta between your learnings, your experiences, your believes and the real life. 

How do you know you’re an entrepreneur and not a wannabeentrepreneur?

Today, we have the chance of interviewing Simon Oberman in Jakarta. He will take us through his entrepreneurial journey and help us to identify some key pain points from first time entrepreneurs. 

At the end of the podcasts, you should be able to ask yourself the right questions and make sure to kick your project off properly. 

Simon Oberman is now the director of Artemis Impact in Jakarta. His previous experience at Volpit definitely served him and allowed him to successfully run his current business. But far from being a peaceful journey, his adventure had lots of ups & downs. 

To go back in time, Volpit was a platform created in the early 2010 when Simon felt an opportunity due to a new regulation around startups fundings. The idea was to offer a platform and easy solution for entrepreneurs to showcase their ideas to more investors. On the other side of the coin, the platform allowed investors to save time by reviewing similarly presented projects. 

Despite successfully launching his projects with other co founders, their team quickly realized they had a huge gap between their theoretical knowledge as fresh graduate and the real needs of the market. 

After a few months of activity, the promotion of a few projects and they had to close the business. 

One very interesting element, we’ll discuss during our podcast is the reuse of the built asset while closing down a company. 

In this specific exemple, Simon and his team could not get back all their initial investment. But the process in place and the ideas they developed are worth a try.

After this podcast, you should definitely get some key elements to consider while launching your first project. You’ll also get more understanding on the closing part or a project and what to do when the time has come to pivot. 

Have you too, launch your first startup after college? If yes we’d love so much to hear about it in the comments!

So .. tell us. How was your own journey?

You wanna know more? Visit us on mistakers.co

 Let’s meet Jonas Eisert from Etui von Jon Case

Live from Bali, where we’re having our swimming pool interview with Jonas Eisert. Jonas will come and share with us his first ever entrepreneur venture. 

You will also learn how to make side incomes using your parents’ fridge. 

Main learnings from Etui Jon Case Amazon experience

Starting a side business with Alibaba & Amazon is not a new concept. It’s something that a lot of people consider or manage nowadays. 

However Jonas did it years ago. Using his unique set of skills in design & video editing, he partnered up with a friend and together started a startup selling unique glass cases. 

A niche market + right marketing skills. So what could have possible gone wrong?

Why their Etui Von Jon Case experience matters?

A few issues mentioned during the podcasts: wrong suppliers, imbalance between offer and demand, & cashflow are key for any amazon business. 

Jonas shared with us a lot of useful tips & todo. 

What did we learn from this episode of our podcast when it comes to launching an amazon business

Price, positioning & supply matter a lot. In order to succeed you definitely have to consider a few things such as:

What do you think?

There is no perfect business and we have tons of examples of people who succeed or not with similar approach. So how was your amazon experience?

Wanna know more? Visit us on mistaker.co

 Who is Joanne Ho

Joanne Ho CEO is the CEO of happybunch.com.my

What is Happy Bunch?

Happy Bunch is Malaysia’s largest online flower delivery service, birthed in 2014. We make it simple for you to send fresh flowers to people who matter (or yourself!) - for moments big or small - when words alone can't say enough. In 2017, Happy Bunch spread its wings to Singapore.

#Mistake 6 - How a low staff turnover may not necessarily be a good thing.

We’re today live from Singapore where we have the chance of meeting with Alan Yeap founder of Viroboss. 

Serial entrepreneur, Alain will take us through some his past experience. Our main challenge today, we’ll be to draw 12 steps, 12 elements to keep with you when you gonna start a new business. Every business is unique, for sure, but now that we said it let’s review his journey. 

After raising 800,000 USD to develop a project that struggled to be delivered, Alan had to rethink the full business model. For the ones who still don’t know it, I invite you to read the Lean Startup. For the others, let’s jump into the core of the discussion. 

Let’s say that you raise almost a million USD in funding to deliver a project that comes too late or does not come at all. What do you do?

Wanna know more?

mistakers.co/blog

 #Failure 2 - Closing a startup 12 months after raising 1 million USD

Raising money is one of the key challenge for any entrepreneur. Without money, no cash flow. Without cash flow, no salaries. Without salaries, not much is done. 

So just imagine, you raise 1 million USD but 12 months later you’re forced to close the company. 

So what happened when you’re forced to close a company that raised 1 million USD, 12 months later? 

To answer this painful question, we got the chance to meet Viktor Kyosev who’ll share with us his Tinggal experience.

Wanna know more?

 https://mistakers.co