Startups must have focus on products

STARTUPS should have a clear focus on what they want their products to achieve to improve their chances of success, said the founders of Singapore's PigeonLab Pte Ltd.

The company is the maker of Pigeonhole Live, a question and answer app for the mobile web.

Lyon Lim, co-founder and head of product development, said, "It's good to talk to people but you also must have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, but when you talk to so many people you would essentially get this wide spectrum of ideas of the same topic, and you'll never get anywhere if you just listen from person A to person B to person C."

This would result in the business modelling its product to a specific client, just because of one criteria, he said. The "product would be stretched so wide that it has so many features and each of them only has a few clients that might be buying it, he said.

"What we do is to take 10 per cent of all that processed information and steer our direction to see how well are we addressing our market," he said.

Asked of the idea of going it alone or working in a team, in the field of social media startups, Hew Joon Yeng, PigeonLab co-founder, said that companies can still expand based on the growth of social media.

"There's definitely this need that is growing," he said.

Lim said "social networks by design are very open and that allows everyone, be it a one-man show, a two-man team, to latch on easily to what social media could bring to their company.

"I think when they've attained a certain stage of development and progress, there is a potential for them to be 'that big'," he added.

In terms of recovering from failures in the process, Lim said that there is a need for "clarity" and "if you know there isn't any demand for what you're doing, there isn't any way forward".

Startups have to be realistic in what they want to do, he said, adding it was important to step back and reassess the situation. "Sometimes you just need to step back and look at the bigger picture. How much of an impact are we making? Are there any trends developing based on what we're doing?"

Lim said capital is important to any startup but warned that "if you're factoring too much capital in terms of your runway ...(and) you've got enough capital for one year, you're probably not doing enough with your money."

It's a very volatile situation for startups, he added, saying that they are very dependent on what revenues they get from month to month, but it's also about making the best of what they've got and working fast. PigeonLab's technology was recently featured in the Think Big Innovate Forum 2011. The Brunei Times