I was at the Prudential R U Ready workshop to give a talk last Saturday.
Shared with everyone a bit about my story with Nuffnang and ChurpChurp. No matter how many times I practice going up in front of a crowd to speak, I still get a little nervous and shy. What helps though is when people in the audience are responsive and the crowd that day was wonderful. That alone makes you feel a lot more at ease.
The past few days got me thinking about the life I have. I feel blessed and not a day goes by when I don’t thank God for how fortunate I am. I sometimes can’t help but wonder how different my life would have been if I had graduated and taken one of those investment banking jobs instead of starting Nuffnang. For starters I would probably be dressed like this every day.
Instead of like this.
Probably wouldn’t have met Shorty too.
Now don’t get me wrong.I enjoy being part of an internet company. I love the people I work with and I enjoy the work. While internet companies are cool and fun and all that, a part of me always wishes I was doing something more brick & mortar. One thing I always thought I’d love doing is property development. No no not necessarily in a huge way. Even in a small way, like buying a piece of land and building a house on it to sell. When I was a kid I loved building things with Lego and a part of my heart always feels like building a building is something I would love.
When I meet owners of the brick & mortar business though they tell me how lucky I am to be in an internet business. Where startup costs are low and where you don’t have to hold physical stock or invest in expensive fixed assets. Well there might be some truth in the latter but not in the former. One of my angel investor friends told me the other day how one of the biggest misconception is that “internet businesses are cheap”. He goes on to say, internet businesses tend to have a lower sunk cost or startup cost but they cost the same to run as a real business. Take for example if you were to start a physical shop at the Curve that sold shoes versus an online store. With a physical store you have to rent the store and put money into renovating it etc etc. In an online store you don’t need to do that. But the costs after that are similar. In both cases you still need to hire staff, do marketing and etc etc.
I spent the past 5 years selling an “intangible” or virtual product. Banner ad impressions (Nuffnang), Tweet updates (ChurpChurp) or things that you can see on a screen but can’t feel or touch. I always wondered what it’s like to sell not a service, but a product. Like shoes, a keyboard or anything like that (which maybe is why we’ve worked so hard on Jipaban).The people I know who sell tangible stuff like that though always go on to tell me how they wish they were selling what I was selling, so they didn’t have to keep stock or things like that.
Maybe it’s like what they say in Hollywood: “Singers always want to be actors and actors always want to be singers”.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space