StaffAny - Secrets To Unlock $1 Million
On 4th Nov, we successfully organized a startup sharing event at iCube and invited Janson, the co-funder of StaffAny to share with us his experience on how he started his startup from NUS I&E program, in details with topics including the development and funding process: how did StaffAny grow in I&E incubator, what are the challenges they have met, and how did they start from having 0 to raising $1 million. In this article, we will share some impressive points mentioned by Janson during the sharing event.
Background:
StaffAny is a Home-grown human resource (HR) start-up company cultivated by NUS I&E program. Recently in this year, they raised $1 million in a seed funding round led by technology investment firm FreakOut Holdings. StaffAny’s enterprise software is a workforce management application that connects HR and operations in order to better manage hourly workers. The solution will help customers from labour intensive industries, such as retail and F&B, to save operating costs and increase productivity by optimising work processes and redesigning jobs. By this date, it serves about 70 businesses as customers, helping them manage over 2,000 staffs across 130 outlets. “StaffAny is aligned with our vision of creating better value in the world through their advanced technology in building a connected workforce.”, said global CEO of FreakOut Holdings.
Janson Seah is the co-founder of StaffAny. Before entering NUS, his work experience at a bar, of planning staff schedules inefficiently with prone-to-errors and tedious paperwork, drives his idea of solving this staff working hours management problems in F&B industry. After he become an undergraduate in NUS, he joined NUS Innovation & Entrepreneurship program, where allows him and his friends Jeremy Hon, Lee Kai Yi and Eugene Ng, other co-founders of StaffAny, to realise their idea by with financial, technical and logistics support, as well as mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs and professors.
Q & A:
What inspires you to do startup?
There are two reasons. Firstly, I found a problem existing and do want to solve the problem. Many company finds its hard to manage its hourly workers, which is a pain to these companies. Therefore, I want to do something to solve this problem. The second reason is my team. I have a very strong team and the team makes me stronger. I am the person who wants to work with people that bring me to the next level. Therefore, when I got this idea and the best team, I decided to do startup and make the solution come true.
If I have a good idea, how should I decide whether I should go further to start my own business?
There are four questions you should ask yourself before making the decision.
1. Is the problem you find big enough? If not, do not waste time.
2. How to make money? Is there a big market?
3. Is the time for that startup is correct? How do you understand the market and the problem?
4. Do you have a right team that can collaborate to reach the goal together?
How do you get your first employee?
There are only three kinds of people will help you, friend, family and fools. My first employee is my friend. We invited friends of me and our cofounders to take in charge of some small parts of work, including coding. We really appreciate their help!
Do you think is necessary for non-programers to understand coding staff?
I think everyone has his/her own strength and weakness. When working in a team, we should make use of each person’s strength in order to work more efficiently. If we ask people do work that they are not good at, then the team is not functioning based on people’s strength.
How do you find your first customer?
Actually we went door to door to find our customers at the beginning. We went into their companies and asked whether their boss is around. When we got the chance to talk with their boss, we would let them know that we have something useful want to show to them. And let them try our application. The last step is to sell to them. So this is our approach to get our first customer.
How do you motivate your employees?
Momentum is very important. When you are doing a start-up, the reason why people joining you is not because you are a big name corporate, but because of a shared vision to make an impact and everyone wants to be part of the growing story. Therefore, when feel that there is a momentum, everybody is growing, the company is getting better, and their impact is being felt. It is much easier to inspire and motivate them. The hard part is when your momentum slows down and stops.
Market validation?
Before you make the decision on whether to go on the journey, you want to first check whether the water is warm or not before going inside the swimming pool. I think market validation is very important as we make a lot of mistakes by not following a lot of the protocols etc. I think for my personal journey with my team in terms of market validation, the first thing we did is that we look at competitors’ mistakes. Because the first product we came out, StaffAny I, the scheduling and time management application, not the network tool which is what we want to develop in the future, Level I is more or less solve through other means. This means that people may not use the app today to do scheduling or accounting stuff etc, but people are using Excel spreadsheets, punch cards, biometric finger print etc. Basically I have the advantage as I used to deal with it myself therefore I knew the pain points myself. So how we make validation is we go down and talk to people. I don't think there is a hard and fast rule on how many you need to talk to. And we don't have more than 50% of responses saying that oh it is very painful. But the most important thing about validation on the hindsight that we could have done better is segmentation of persona of who we want to talk to. At the start, we spent a lot of time to talk to the mangers and ask them whether they face the pain points. We quickly realised that managers did not face the pain points as much as we thought they did. Therefore it kind of invalidated our product is serving the managers but what it validated is our product is serving the HR and owners. With that in mind, our marketing message is very different. It is not that we are the best way to schedule because the key decision maker, and the person who is paying you to solve the problem, is solving a different problem, the consolidation and authenticity of the record. The persona is actually journey dependent, who are you serving, whose problem are you solving. That to me is something extremely important which I wish I would have known earlier.
How do you know how much money you needed and how do you value your company?
Funding raising is not an end, it is a means. How you going to use the money for and you reverse-engineer. We are clear on how much we need to raise this round to achieve certain milestone which is part of the story for our next round of fund raising. There are different rounds of fund raising. In each of this stage, they have different risk appetite. Risk appetite means how much you need to prove for the investors to come in at that level. So based on our forecast is more on how much money do we need to hit series A milestone which is a certain number of revenue that we are trying to generate one and half year from the date we are fund raising. From there, we reverse engineer back the number to come up with an authentic number.
When do you decide you need to raise money?
At the start, when you decide on your start-up, you would decide whether it is a lifestyle business i.e. eBay shop, or it is a start-up that needs some form of capital. It depends. If from the end goal and NPV level, you can generate revenue, then don't need to raise, can try generate revenue first. The money you raise is rocket fuel, it can light up or explode. You must determine whether you are going to use that money to scale to next stage. For us, we only decided that we are going to raise money when we have around 30 shops around Singapore using our services. Then we think that this is something that we want to expand and lets start planning for it. But for many different businesses, it will be different as well. You may want to have 1000 shops or revenue first before you want to scale. The rule of thumb is, the more revenue you have, the higher the valuation, and the more bargaining power you have of your investors.
How do you find investors?
Prof Yeoh helped us to start a bit at the beginning. There are introductions here and there. But for institutional investors, there is a list of investors, called “Map of the Money” in Singapore. The question to find investors is not about the name of the investors, it is specifically the person you want to talk to and give your idea and pitch. I think this is the hard part. If you just send an email to them, they are too busy to open the email and reply you. If they reply you, it is already a good start. So I have two strategies to share with you. The first is getting a warm referal and that is the strategy I used quite often. Like hey prof, do you know this VC and can you introduce him to me? And hey prof, based on your past connections, I can see that you are connected to this person, do you mind sending an email for me? Because we are still new but Prof is someone different in status in the start-up world. Therefore, with his recommendation and reputation, it gives a good introduction. But this is also a responsibility on my side. As if we messed up, it will affect the person who introduced you. The second strategy is going for start-up events. That’s how I met some of the VCs and went through a very long due diligence process that almost invested in us. What I did was, I knew that there is this VC that always in town to give talks and sharing. First event, you go down there, ask questions just like class participation. Second event, talk to the VC again. At the end of the event, go and talk to him, have a five minute session with him. Created that facetime. So when you drop out the real issue, you will have a chance that he recognised that he had seen you before in other sessions, I would more likely to look at your deck than someone who I met first time and said please look at my deck. There are a lot of different strategies. If you want to know the full list of strategies, joining Furnace programme.
Advice from Professor Francis Yeoh (Chairman of I&E programme):
You have to participate in events, you have to be in the crowd that is in the start-up. Some of you may think it is time-wasting but you have to invest some time not just to think about am I busy, would I benefit directly. Overtime, you become part of the ecosystem, then the connections happen. Janson has been very much involved and he got the entrepreneurial spirit. Whatever occasions, get something out of it, don't just sit there quietly and fade in the background. There is no point. When you got a business, everybody is a potential customer, investor, mentor, hires etc. Take the approach that there is value in connecting to anybody and just do it. Be professional and nice about it.
How do you find your first customer?
Actually we went door to door to find our customers at the beginning. We went into their companies and asked whether their boss is around. When we got the chance to talk with their boss, we would let them know that we have something useful want to show to them. And let them try our application. The last step is to sell to them. So this is our approach to get our first customer.
How do you motivate your employees?
Momentum is very important. When you are doing a start-up, the reason why people joining you is not because you are a big name corporate, but because of a shared vision to make an impact and everyone wants to be part of the growing story. Therefore, when feel that there is a momentum, everybody is growing, the company is getting better, and their impact is being felt. It is much easier to inspire and motivate them. The hard part is when your momentum slows down and stops.
Market validation?
Before you make the decision on whether to go on the journey, you want to first check whether the water is warm or not before going inside the swimming pool. I think market validation is very important as we make a lot of mistakes by not following a lot of the protocols etc. I think for my personal journey with my team in terms of market validation, the first thing we did is that we look at competitors’ mistakes. Because the first product we came out, StaffAny I, the scheduling and time management application, not the network tool which is what we want to develop in the future, Level I is more or less solve through other means. This means that people may not use the app today to do scheduling or accounting stuff etc, but people are using Excel spreadsheets, punch cards, biometric finger print etc. Basically I have the advantage as I used to deal with it myself therefore I knew the pain points myself. So how we make validation is we go down and talk to people. I don't think there is a hard and fast rule on how many you need to talk to. And we don't have more than 50% of responses saying that oh it is very painful. But the most important thing about validation on the hindsight that we could have done better is segmentation of persona of who we want to talk to. At the start, we spent a lot of time to talk to the mangers and ask them whether they face the pain points. We quickly realised that managers did not face the pain points as much as we thought they did. Therefore it kind of invalidated our product is serving the managers but what it validated is our product is serving the HR and owners. With that in mind, our marketing message is very different. It is not that we are the best way to schedule because the key decision maker, and the person who is paying you to solve the problem, is solving a different problem, the consolidation and authenticity of the record. The persona is actually journey dependent, who are you serving, whose problem are you solving. That to me is something extremely important which I wish I would have known earlier.
How do you know how much money you needed and how do you value your company?
Funding raising is not an end, it is a means. How you going to use the money for and you reverse-engineer. We are clear on how much we need to raise this round to achieve certain milestone which is part of the story for our next round of fund raising. There are different rounds of fund raising. In each of this stage, they have different risk appetite. Risk appetite means how much you need to prove for the investors to come in at that level. So based on our forecast is more on how much money do we need to hit series A milestone which is a certain number of revenue that we are trying to generate one and half year from the date we are fund raising. From there, we reverse engineer back the number to come up with an authentic number.
When do you decide you need to raise money?
At the start, when you decide on your start-up, you would decide whether it is a lifestyle business i.e. eBay shop, or it is a start-up that needs some form of capital. It depends. If from the end goal and NPV level, you can generate revenue, then don't need to raise, can try generate revenue first. The money you raise is rocket fuel, it can light up or explode. You must determine whether you are going to use that money to scale to next stage. For us, we only decided that we are going to raise money when we have around 30 shops around Singapore using our services. Then we think that this is something that we want to expand and lets start planning for it. But for many different businesses, it will be different as well. You may want to have 1000 shops or revenue first before you want to scale. The rule of thumb is, the more revenue you have, the higher the valuation, and the more bargaining power you have of your investors.
How do you find investors?
Prof Yeoh helped us to start a bit at the beginning. There are introductions here and there. But for institutional investors, there is a list of investors, called “Map of the Money” in Singapore. The question to find investors is not about the name of the investors, it is specifically the person you want to talk to and give your idea and pitch. I think this is the hard part. If you just send an email to them, they are too busy to open the email and reply you. If they reply you, it is already a good start. So I have two strategies to share with you. The first is getting a warm referal and that is the strategy I used quite often. Like hey prof, do you know this VC and can you introduce him to me? And hey prof, based on your past connections, I can see that you are connected to this person, do you mind sending an email for me? Because we are still new but Prof is someone different in status in the start-up world. Therefore, with his recommendation and reputation, it gives a good introduction. But this is also a responsibility on my side. As if we messed up, it will affect the person who introduced you. The second strategy is going for start-up events. That’s how I met some of the VCs and went through a very long due diligence process that almost invested in us. What I did was, I knew that there is this VC that always in town to give talks and sharing. First event, you go down there, ask questions just like class participation. Second event, talk to the VC again. At the end of the event, go and talk to him, have a five minute session with him. Created that facetime. So when you drop out the real issue, you will have a chance that he recognised that he had seen you before in other sessions, I would more likely to look at your deck than someone who I met first time and said please look at my deck. There are a lot of different strategies. If you want to know the full list of strategies, joining Furnace programme.
Advice from Professor Francis Yeoh (Chairman of I&E programme):
You have to participate in events, you have to be in the crowd that is in the start-up. Some of you may think it is time-wasting but you have to invest some time not just to think about am I busy, would I benefit directly. Overtime, you become part of the ecosystem, then the connections happen. Janson has been very much involved and he got the entrepreneurial spirit. Whatever occasions, get something out of it, don't just sit there quietly and fade in the background. There is no point. When you got a business, everybody is a potential customer, investor, mentor, hires etc. Take the approach that there is value in connecting to anybody and just do it. Be professional and nice about it.
Nice blog! Really this was very useful blog for us. Nice sharing about IT DD
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