The Zone - Now is the Best Time to Start

Last week, we went to iCube, the I&E startup incubator and spoke to Jovin Liew, who is a NUS undergraduate and also the co-founder of a startup, The Zone. Their startup developed a guided journaling app, which provides different sets of writing prompts that helps people journal better. It also provides sentiment analysis, which helps to track the mood and emotions of the users. The team has already successfully applied the Furnace program. In this article, Jovin will share with us his startup experience and story with SOC I&E program.


How do you come up with the startup idea?
The idea was conceived with my roommates when we were living out of a small apartment in California. One of my roommates, Muruges has been journaling every week for the past four years and he realized there is no good app that allows him to do this in a better way. Most people still use Evernote or other kinds of note taking apps but we believe that journaling is a lot more than that. There are so many ways of journaling other than free writing – which is what everyone thinks journaling is about. 

We realized that we could actually create a product that's better than anything out there and it is basically guided reflections. With this app, it will ask you different sets of questions, which will lead to different benefits and different outcomes. But at the time, it was more of an idea that was stuck in our mind. And we did do small validations to try to see if it's really a problem. As we did more research, we realized that this is something that people might actually want. We really want to build out a product and to put it out into people's faces. Therefore, we decided to start right now as we have more time to spare when we are still here together in school.


What’s your biggest take away from Furnace program?

I would say we definitely get great resources and help from this program. Apart from the free office provided, which is very convenient for us, we also got a really experienced mentor. He gives our startup lots of guidance and advice, which is really helpful. And ever since we came here, we got a lot more people interested about what we have building. 


Do you have any advice for students who are still thinking if they should make their idea come true?

Each idea that each team has is very different dynamics, so that's not one piece of advice I can give you, in the sense that you might want to work on it part time, full time or as a side project. But I think it's important to convince yourself that your idea is something that people really need or can really benefit people. Only then can you be motivated to make your idea come true.

Another advice is about when is the best time to jump in and do it when you got a business idea. It's definitely not easy to make your idea come true. It takes a lot of time and you may still fail. So many people may hesitate whether they should start now. However, it's not necessarily about succeeding in the idea, but it's about the learning process, because if you look at the statistics, the best entrepreneurs actually feel like 10 times of what is succeeding ones. So, my startup might fail, and I might move on to something else. But during that process, I would have already gained a lot of experience and new skills and so I can use them along the way.

Therefore, I would say that the current time period is one of the best times to create a business, because the barriers of entry are a lot lower now compared to a decade ago. You don't need a lot of money and you can easily get help from school, professors and alumni. “Today” is always the best time to start your journey. No harm trying – don’t let the fear of failure stop you from chasing what you want to do.




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