Overcoming Adversity to Succeed

Yvonne Chan: Welcome to futurepulse, a podcast series brought to you by IPI, your Innovation Partner for Impact. Together, we will explore how ideas, creativity and collaboration drive impactful innovation.

Welcome to this episode of futurepulse - Overcoming Adversity to Succeed. I'm Yvonne Chan, and I'm joined by Amanda Khoo, Director of Nipo International, and Zoey Tong, Founder and CEO of Octomate.

Welcome, ladies. Throughout this podcast series, we have explored factors that make for successful businesses. But success comes with many challenges and hurdles along the way. So for this particular episode, I want to hear your stories, what hiccups and roadblocks were encountered during your company's innovation journeys, and what key tips you can share with others in the industry today. But first, I would love for you to tell me a little bit about yourself and your respective companies. So, Amanda?

Zoey Tong: Yes, exactly, you know, still crying and trying to make your way around the world. And yeah, so a quick introduction. I'm the co-founder of Octomate. And I look after the business side of things in the company, but really in a start-up environment, you know, like a crying baby, the truth is that everyone wears multiple and different hats.

So I used to be a management consultant. And one day, I decided to actually just take the plunge to quit my nine-to-five stable job and start a start-up from scratch. So I don't think this is something that happened overnight. Like, I just wake up and boom, I send in my resignation letter. It's more like this part that is like within me for a long, long time, where I always knew I wanted to do something of my own, something that could create impact in this world we live in. So that was how Octomate came about two years ago. And today, we are one-stop workforce management software, with over 2,000 daily active users, where we help companies fully automate their HR processes. So while we can be used for white collar workers to manage their leave and expenses, our main target is actually the gig workforce, where they can get rostered, they can clock in and out on a solution and get paid instantly, as soon as their work ends.

Yvonne Chan: That's really pretty innovative and very refreshing right? Getting paid like InstaPay in this day and age. Very cool. And I do like both your analogies of a middle-aged company right just as still staying relevant as well as this infant start-up, navigating its way around the world.

Amanda, you've said before that innovation, it is a more creative way to differentiate ourselves rather than competing with others on price for a similar solution, because you end up with price wars, and no one benefits from that. So given the exponential pace of innovation that's happened over the last few years. How is Nipo International still keeping pace on this front?

Amanda Khoo: Keeping pace with innovation is difficult. There are so many things happening around you that you can't quite say you know, you want to do this and then you worry about not doing something else. I think one of the things that we've learnt in the last 20 years and for as long as I have been with Nipo, I learnt one thing and that is to talk to as many people as you can. Everybody will tell you - do this, do that. Whether it's relevant or irrelevant, I think you go in with an open mind. Don't pigeonhole an idea. You know, this idea is only for one particular function or one particular usage. Don't pigeonhole that. Take in everything. Don't have your blinders on basically. And then, of course, when you get down to it, manage your costs.

Well, I think one important thing we learnt through the whole journey is don't do it alone. It's not, research is not cheap. It doesn't come cheap, right? Don't do alone. It is going to drag the whole journey even longer. It's going to burn your limited resources. It's going to burn you out as a person. So spread that risk. And another thing that we've learnt through all this, I mean a lot of our successes we have today, a lot of it came about because we have very good relationships with the researchers. So that trust element is very important. So these are some of the things that we learnt along the way that helps us continue on this journey.

Yvonne Chan: Certainly, a lot of things to unpack there, you say talk to as many people as you can. Don't pigeonhole the type of business that you're in. Get rid of your blinders and definitely spread the risk, right? Don't do it alone because research can be very expensive. And this brings us back to the tenets of the purpose of this podcast series. Really, it's like the call to open innovation, right? Where you need to reach out for partnerships in order to grow, to expand and to get the resources that you lack.

Zoey, how essential is it for a company to have in this current environment? A very clear understanding of its core competency? I mean, why did you choose to pair them, blockchain technology with workforce management under Octomate?

Amanda Khoo: There are times you got to recognise that not every hurdle can be overcome. We just keep going. Sometimes the word we use internally is bulldoze, just keep bulldozing. Because sometimes there's just no way out, you just got to just try and try. Because we're in manufacturing, a lot of times, the researchers when they do a certain research or certain technologies at lab scale, bringing it from 100g to 100kg is a totally different concept. So that was something that you know, we learnt, it was not so straightforward - not knowing what the future entails, whether this research will turn out the way you want it.

One thing that we always kick ourselves is not knowing when to stop. When a research is not successful. When a research hits its dead end, and you keep thinking that no, maybe that's not the dead end, just keep moving. I think that is sometimes also very painful for us, we got to learn that there are certain times that you really just have to let it go and move on to the next one. Yeah, and then of course, managing costs. Again, managing costs, like I said, no, don't do it alone. Go with the research, people. Go with the big brains. I think that will save you a lot of heartache and headache.

Yvonne Chan: I hear. Yes. Amanda, echoing what you just said, Zoey and it sounds like it really takes a lot of grit, sheer determination to continue to bulldoze and, you know, move away from what has failed. And like what you said, it is about progression and not perfection because no one, nothing is perfect, isn't it?

Amanda, every product has a creative lifespan, right? And when you sense that Nipo's coatings were nearing the end of the product lifecycle, I understand that you felt that there was a need to future-proof your business. So when your company first embraced the concept of an open innovation, how hard was it to find, like-minded or maybe complementary collaborators? Was that a big challenge for you?

Amanda Khoo: We don't particularly go out to look for a complementary collaborator or a specific person because a lot of times we chance upon a particular technology when it's not meant for what we are looking to do. I don't know if it makes sense (to you), so I’ll give you an example. We were looking at a food packaging business. Now you wonder why is food packaging to do with the liquid applied coating right? So in the food packaging business, it was to keep food fresh, not so much moisture contamination and air contamination. Then we went into it, we were the only company in liquid applied coatings in that hold. Everybody else was a big MNC in food packaging. Then the scientists were saying, "Why are you in here?". Because we believe that if you can keep the food fresh, you can do the same for your house.

We don't go out particularly looking for a specific technology, but we look at what is out there, and try to steer that tech, that research into a product hopefully that we can use for our industry. So the thing is, we know we don't have brains to go alone. We work with a lot of people like A*STAR. And through IPI, for example, IPI was a really nice matchmaker, I call them. They went out and introduced us to new research in the market, brought us to new institutions that we didn't know could be helping SMEs. So yeah, these are things that we do to help us explore new technologies in the market.

Yvonne Chan: Yeah, IPI has helped so many enterprises find the right partners, but it kind of ties back, what you just said, ties back to your earlier business ethos, right? Talk to as many people as you can because you never know what kind of synergies and opportunities have come up in your conversations.

Zoey, Octomate. I understand is supported by many different well-established organisations, right? The middle-aged organisations, maybe as you know, coming back to that analogy of an infant start-up. So I want to know from you right now, as a start-up, what challenges were encountered in getting your ideas across, you know, when you have to talk to the big boys, for instance?

Zoey Tong: So as with every idea in the starting phase, you know, just like how every kid talks to their parents, there will always be like some naysayers at the very first instance. And this also holds true in Octomate's case. So furthermore, we were using blockchain, which is a relatively new technology in a market with limited use cases back then. So, when we first started pitching the idea across, we received a whole lot of questions on why blockchain. We had to constantly defend our idea and justify why we wanted to do things this way. To be really honest, it didn't feel too good, being constantly challenged and having to convince people. But later on, we realised that this is really part and parcel of starting up. I mean, if you're not thoroughly convinced of your own idea, who will be right?

So, sometimes you can have good ideas that fail because of bad execution, and great ideas that fail just because it remains stuck in the head. So the key is really, to persevere, and again, I think bulldoze, if you really believe in what you're doing. And once you can show some initial success to justify and also inspire people with what you want to achieve, then you will start to get buy-in not just you know, from fellow babies, but also the big boys and the middle-aged companies. So I think, to really put it across simply, once you have people and organisations onboarded with the "Why", then the funding and the resources is really just the mechanics to enable it to happen.

Zoey Tong: I've once learnt from a mentor that the key to differentiation is really a four-letter word, "PAIN” - pain. So by solving important pain points of clients, in a better or faster or cheaper way, you're effectively differentiating yourself against your competitors. In our case, in software development, we are continuously working very closely with our clients to build new features and enhancements to solve their pain. We are always building but we build deliberately. We co-create roadmaps with our clients, and have them beta test new features. This helps us stay close to the market needs and remain relevant and differentiated. This syncs to your next point on some common mistakes by similar start-ups. So back to the world of like software development, developers would tell you any day that anything and everything can be coded and completed. While this is technically true, where you can actually really do any features that you can think of, as a product focus start-up, it gets very easy to fall into this development pit hole. So you start building feature A, and then you realise, “Oh, I can also do feature B, feature C, feature D, and so on.”

At the end of the day, you end up with a product with 1,000 features, but 90% of the time, only the top 10 features are being used. We have also fallen into that trap before. But then we quickly realised that we have to reshuffle our priorities and focus together with our clients to co-create and co-develop. So instead of building all and every feature that we can think of, we work with our clients to identify what they would use the most. So we focus on 10% of the features that deliver 90% of the value, rather than you know, 90% of the features that deliver 10% of the value. So we have to pick our battles, right, as a baby, you can't be calling everywhere.

Yvonne Chan: It seems like just having the right team with various capabilities will be able to help a company, a young company or a middle-aged company overcome any adversity to succeed.

Thank you so much, Amanda and Zoey, for your very candid conversation with me today. You've both shared many key learnings which will certainly enable others in the industry to learn and grow. So one key insight from Amanda for me, was really not to waste a failure. To learn from the mistake and to also remember to celebrate your success, no matter how small the win may be, and to get rid of some of these blinders that we may have. And from Zoey, one key phrase that you said there really resonated with me it was, it is about the progress and not the perfection as long as we are better today than we were tomorrow. That's already a win right there. Thank you so much, ladies.