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Asia Tech Podcast: You Cannot Sell What You Don't Understand
We've experienced this before: an unconvincing sales pitch from a salesman who can't answer basic questions about their product.
If they can't be bothered to understand their own product, why should we be bothered to buy from them?
In this podcast Nathaniel Yim shares with Asia Tech Podcast Host Michael Waitze about this theme and also his journey of how he entered entrepreneurship all the way to Janio and now Nila Studios. Tune in to hear these entrepreneurship stories and tips:
- The role incubators (like SMU Institute of Innovation & Entrepreneurship)can play in building the startup ecosystem
- How the military can prepare a person for business, marketing and sales
- How a university assignment in NUS Business School critiquing other professors' work led to confidence in writing and critical thinking (the foundations for content marketing)
- Why marketers need to know their products as well as their sales team does
You can find the original podcast link on the Asia Tech Podcast.
You can also catch it on Spotify.
Transcript:
Michael Waitze (Q):
This is Michael Waitze and welcome back to the Asia Tech Podcast. Nathaniel Yim is with us today, a director of Nila Studios. Nathaniel, thank you so much for coming to the show. Can we give the listeners a little bit of your background for some context?
Nathaniel (N): Thanks, Michael. Glad to be here. Hi everybody. My name is Nathaniel and as Michael has said, I am the director of Nila Studios, which is a B2B marketing studio based in Singapore and working with SMEs and startup founders to grow their business by way of B2B marketing.
Prior to starting Nilo Studios, I was a co-founder of a B2C cross-border logistics tech company called Janio, where I was there for close to six years running marketing sales and operations.
Before that, I was an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore studying business, where I specialized in finance initially, and then I dropped it and switched to marketing, which kind of set me up very nicely for Janio, which then again set me up very nicely for Nila Studios.
Q: So you also recently were speaking at NUS, is that true?
N: Yes, just a week ago.
Do you often go back to school to teach, and is that something that you enjoy doing, particularly given everything you've experienced since graduating?
Yeah, I do it quite often.
So I tend to do guest lectures at NUS. Some of my lecturers during my undergraduate days invite me to come back and share my experiences in marketing and building the startup with the undergraduates or recently with the master students.
So I’m happy to give back. I gained quite a lot when I was an undergrad. So it's a form of me just, you know, like paying it forward.
I do that for SMU as well. Janio was incubated in the SMU startup program. So one of our co-founders is from SMU. We decided to go there because of- you know, certain things like location and other criteria.
So we were there in 2018 as incubatees graduated from the incubator program.
Um, and last year, I went back as a mentor to help mentor the next batch-generation of startup founders.
Q: So I just for the listeners in the United States, SMU is not Southern Methodist University at Singapore Management University, but I do like the fact that you're so confident about it that you just like throw out the acronym because in this region, SMU is very well known.
I want to talk about this too. What was the benefit (of an incubator)? Cause I was having a long conversation with somebody about this yesterday, right? A founder who's like struggling with a few aspects of like building a thing. I think he's got a great product, but he's just not able to get kind of like the tech over the line. Like that's his big thing.
So I said to him, go to an incubation program. A good one is really good. Maybe you can talk to me about what the benefits were for you and for your co-founder of being in an incubation program, stuff that maybe got - for lack of a better term, accelerated, that may have taken you longer to do if you didn't go through the program.
N: Perhaps this is more representative of those run by universities. I'm not sure if it's the same for all incubators. But I would say that the main benefits would be, firstly, you get access to resources. Then, otherwise, perhaps as a first-time founder without a network, as was my case, I was basically a fresh graduate and didn't know anything, anyone. You get access to a network, right.
A network of mostly out of startup founders who are going through the same kind of challenges as you. So that's like a peer community that you can rely on. Yeah.
You have mentors, uh, people like the academic staff who have connections with industry, you have industry professionals who volunteered at a time to share about, you know, different topics like marketing, fundraising, um, sales, et cetera. So you get expertise.
You also get access to potential investment opportunities, right? Because most incubators would have some kind of a network with perhaps angels or venture capital firms.
For SMU, they have a pitch night at the end of every cohort where there are venture capitalists who come down to listen to the founders pitch their ideas or their startups, right? So it's a way to get in front of an audience that sets you up for growth over the long term.
Q: You said you've originally started studying finance, but then you switched into marketing. What caused that change? Was it like you were talking to your friends and like this marketing thing looks like it's going to be more important, something that may actually be harder to learn on the job than the finance? Like what changed your mind?
N: It was a process of like thinking through things over a year before I made that switch. I think going into university, I was a very typical student wanting to graduate for a finance degree and go into banking earn a lot of money and during Chinese New Year, my relatives can tell people, hey, he's working at a bank because that's what everybody was doing.
And then I interned at a very big bank. I'm not going to say the name. It was six months. And at the end of the six months, I basically realized that this wasn't for me. It was a good experience. I did enjoy working with my peers and with the bosses, but I found the nature of finance itself didn't appeal to me.
During that time, I was having conversations with a friend who was supposed to intern at the same place as me, but she decided to drop it in favor of a marketing internship.
Then she told me about her experiences and how much fun she was having. And I thought, you know, that makes so much more sense. After my internship, when I went back to university for my final year, I decided to give it a try instead of just doing finance modules. I did a number of marketing modules and just like made me realize that was where my passion and interest lay. It was like night and day. First thing, my results were completely different.
Secondly, it just came a lot more naturally. I found it to be way more engaging. So, yeah.
Q: So I like to say that I worked at a bank for 20 something years and I feel lucky to still like have my hair.
N: Yeah.
Q: I lost most of my soul when I was there and my brother- I don't know if I told you this when I was in Goldman Sachs, but my brother's a neurosurgeon and I used to say to him, cause he was like, “Wow, I can't believe you work at Goldman Sachs. That's so cool.”
And I'm like, “You're a neurosurgeon. It feels a lot cooler. And I used to say to him, if I ever lose my job, the only thing I'm qualified to do is to be like your housemaid because I'm not really learning anything here. We're just moving money around.”
Anyway. I think you probably chose the right path. And to be fair, if it felt more natural to you, then it definitely is the right path for sure.
N: Yeah.
Q: But did you go right into the incubator program right after you graduated? Like was entrepreneurship something you always thought, “I'm not gonna go get a job, particularly after your internship,” or was it just kind of a thing you did with your friend?
N: It was something I fell into by accident. Right, so. How's that possible? Because I switched. Allow me to elaborate. Please. So in my final year of university, I switched, after the first semester of doing marketing modules, I switched entirely to marketing.
At that point in time, my entire resume was geared towards finance. So I had no marketing internships. I had no professional experience doing anything that was marketing related.
So I had to cram as much work experience into one year while overloading modules to clear my specialization at the same time.
But because by year four, most of my peers who had been doing marketing from the beginning, they already had a pretty loaded resume, all the nice logos. That was what I was going up against. Right.
And having nothing there, I had to start from the bottom. Someone told me, you know, startups will take you, even if nothing, because they'll take anyone. Nice. Yeah, so I applied to a startup, an SME actually. And then the guy who ran the SME, it was a market research firm, very small, two-man outfit. He's an NUS Business School alumni as well.
So he said, “Why don't you, I have two other companies I'm running, so why don't you help me out with a few of these, get as much exposure as possible.
And one of them was a B2C tech startup. And basically I was the only marketing person there as an intern, and that was my first marketing internship.
So when I was there the first week, this guy asked me to think of a product and sell it. What do you mean?
“Next week is Christmas, think of a product and sell the product and make some money.”
I look at him, “Your thing is a B2C app. You're a photo printing app. What product do you want?”
“Just think of it and sell it.”
So we had to just scramble, figure out a way to create a product. In the end, what we went with was a Christmas tree decoration kit with the core of it was the photos that you printed through the app.
And then we launched it in a week and we made money from it.
Q: Nice.
So that opened up my eyes to possibilities of entrepreneurship. You can create value out of basically nothing in a short span of time.
And it was that internship that set me on this path, I would say.
So after that, I interned at a few other marketing (jobs). I did a stint at a brand consultancy, worked at a nonprofit helping them to do digital marketing.
And over time I realized that marketing really, you can start from nothing and you can create something out of nothing.
And that gave me confidence to, when we started Janio. So Janio was basically straight out of school. December 2017, I graduated.
January 2018, my co-founder, my classmate, who is a finance guy, comes up to me and says, “Have you found a job? If you haven't, you want to start a company with me?”
“Okay, sure, let's do it.”
So we started the company about six years ago, right? And incubation with the SMU program was in April. So it was a couple of months after we started the company.
Basically just went straight into it.
Q: So why did you choose this, what Janio was doing? Maybe you can explain what Jannio was, right? Because it's this asset low, if almost like a no asset company, but definitely asset low. And that had nothing to do with what you were doing before.
This idea that you could create value out of nothing, which you learned from this photo sharing app or photo printing app internship was like, I guess I can do anything. Yeah. So what was the idea behind Janio? How did that start?
N: So just a quick context. Janio is a B2C cross border, 4PL. It has evolved over the years. At this current stage, it is more of a end-to-end digitally managed supply chain company. But at the point in time when we started, it was a cross-border B2C platform. Right.
That's the only way I can describe it. The whole idea was instead of buying more assets like vans and planes, and then trying to do the cross-border deliveries ourselves, we would work with everybody else who owns the assets, who are already experts at their respective areas in the supply chain, and we would make it more efficient, help them to optimize their assets and coordinate shipments end to end using software.
So the only thing that we really have is the software that integrates with our supply chain partners from the first mile pickup all the way down to the last mile delivery overseas, and we orchestrate it from end to end.
So that's the whole business model in a nutshell. One of my co-founders is 10 years older. So he's a logistics guy. He's been there for a while and he has seen the challenges that many companies face in Southeast Asia when it comes to cross-border movement of goods.
And so he knows the technicalities around how to solve these, right? But we needed a team that could, that had a range of specializations that could basically cover all the different business problems that we really need to solve.
So I really fell into it by chance. It's only because my co-founder was like, “Hey, you want to come on board?” I did a rationalization, realized that, you know, the downside is pretty low. What I really lose as a fresh graduate is time.
But the upside is the sky's the limit. Right? So if it goes well, you learn so much, you gain so much. So it was a pretty straightforward decision for me at the point.
Q: But this kind of reminds me of this conversation I had with Glenn Lai, right? Who runs this company called Fr8 Labs as well.
It's not so much that the business is exactly the same, but that this idea of partnering with somebody who's kind of already - I wouldn't even say in your case, peripheral to the business, but in the business who says this thing needs to modernize, yeah.
And that's kind of cool, right? Because if you can find that person, your chances of success are so much higher because they're already doing it and they're trying to solve all the problems that instead of having to do the research for, they kind of already know, yeah.
N: Yeah, yeah. And it's a nice plan of perspectives, right? If you have someone who knows the problems very intimately, they can tell you like, this is the pain point. This is what makes people pull their hair out.
And then if you have someone who is from outside the industry, you tend to look at things from a first principles perspective, because you're new to everything and you're able to say, “it doesn't, does it have to be that long? Can't you cut out this step and oh, yeah, why not? Why don't we do that?”
Okay, so then you get a very nice blend of perspectives that leads to something that is truly unique.
Q: How did you find the right tech people to do this? And then let me back up a little bit. So you went through the incubation program. You said there was a pitch line at the end of every cohort.
Did your team, was your team able to actually raise even a little bit of money at the end from some VCs or from some angel investors to kind of fund a little bit of the tech development, if that makes sense?
N: Okay. So maybe to answer the first part, how do you find tech people? One of our co-founders is a, was a CTO. So he, we found him through a mutual friend. He's basically the best friend of a classmate of ours. So we didn't know him before we started the company.
And in fact, our first meeting with him, we thought he was going to ghost us because he was two hours late. He went to Johor for a day trip and then he got stuck on the way back. And the three of us were sitting in Manhattan fish market at Dobhy Ghaut and we were thinking, where is this guy? Maybe we should go back home.
Then he texted us, sorry guys, I'm still in a jam. Okay. We'll just wait for him. And he came in and we told him the idea and he was like, okay, let's do it together. So we had a founding CTO from the beginning.
And he basically helped us to, you know, screen and bring in engineers over time. So the second part, were be able to raise funds at the end of the incubation program?
My CEO, who is still running the company, his background is in VC and PE. So going into this whole thing, he already knew people whom he could speak to, network with and start canvassing for fundraising. So When he told me about the idea, there was already, there were already a few people who were interested in backing it, right?
So long as there was traction, all we had to do was get things going and then it was basically a done deal afterwards.
Q: Like I just want to go back to this conversation that you had, right? Where you said this buddy of yours called you and said, do you have a job? Which is a great way to start a conversation with somebody if you want to offer them a job. But were you kind of excited? Did you feel like you know what, I must have made the right choice because they don’t have someone who can go and get the customers although they know the tech side, they know the problems.
N: Sort of. I mean, I have no B2B marketing experience, even though I studied marketing it's going to be an uphill challenge, which was part of the appeal to me, right? Like the appeal of, it sounds great when you think about it, like, hey, I get to do everything and learn everything.
And then when you have to do everything and learn everything, you realize, okay, it's not that great. Like, you're like, oh my God, I have to learn everything and do everything.
Yeah, sounds cooler on paper. Correct, so that was the appeal to me. Like, okay, I get to do this. And if, you know, we make something of it, then I can say that that was me. Like, I contributed to that. So that was really why I was keen on this.
Q: So while you were learning everything and doing everything, here's the big difference, right? To get into NUS, you have to have had, I believe, at least if it's anything like the way it works in the United States, you have to have had a good school track record. Yeah. Right. Because it's the best university in Singapore.
Let's just say top three. So the other people don't argue with us, right? Like yell at you when you get on the subway tomorrow. Like I heard what you said. But it's a good school. So you've always been good at like learning stuff.
But in school, the learning is pretty well directed, right? It's like, read this thing, learn that thing, listen to this gal, she'll teach you how to do it.
But when you have to learn everything and do everything on your own, how do you figure out like where to learn stuff and what to learn? If that makes sense.
N: That's a great question. I think I picked some of that up in school. So one of the interesting things, or at least
The modules and the professors that I remember the most, where I feel like I've learned a lot, were the ones which were a lot more open-ended.
Q: I mean, can I just jump in for a second? Think about your experience at that startup, the picture printing one, the guy was like, just make a product. You're like, what product? He's like, which part of just make a product didn't you understand? I'm not giving you more information. I don't have time for this conversation. It's kind of what he was saying, right? Sorry, go ahead.
N: Yeah, so I had a professor in university - In fact, it was the same professor from the guest lecture last week. One of the major assignments of the module was to critique a publication.
So it was super open-ended. And then the publication choices were real pieces of research published by PhD holders from very renowned universities. And I was like, what do you mean by critique?
“Just read it and critique it.”
Yeah, exactly. It's like, yeah, go ahead. So I just, okay, I'm just going to write this. And she was like, this is, at the end of it, she was like, “this is great. This is a great critique.”
So it made me realize firstly, not to be afraid of what is out there. I think especially for many of us who go through education systems, we are afraid of being wrong. We tend to kind of subject ourselves to a higher authority that tells us whether we are right or wrong.
Q: It's weird, right?
N: Yeah. Yeah. And it takes a while to bring that. So the reality is like most of us, we only know what we know, right? And everybody's just trying their best. So that's, that's the most important thing. And that assignment kind of taught me that.
And then the second thing is 80-20, right? So if you are able to look at things and map it out, there's usually one or two portions where if you address those, it creates an outsized impact. Right?
So that's one of the things that, it takes a while to develop, but I would say throughout the general experience, many times when things happen, they happen very fast and very massively, right?
Like COVID came out of nowhere and basically forced us to make massive changes and do things which were not done before. Things like recession, things like, you know, team structure being changed, having to change requires us to quickly figure out, you know, how to stay on our toes, how to do that one or two changes steadily to the biggest outcomes, right?
So yeah, it's a process of like looking back at the data, making an educated guess, and then iterating what you're doing and also iterating the way you do things over time.
Q: Everybody in Singapore has to go through military service. Yeah. And that's between what, I don't wanna call it junior college, but it's between… I don’t want to call it junior college but it’s between when your previous education ends and then you go to university. Yeah. Is that what you normally do? All right. So what do you learn there that you can do?
Because I kind of miss the fact that I never did any of that. I feel like there's a discipline that gets imbued into you and some sort of level of responsibility. I'm giving you this gun or putting you in this helicopter, making you in charge of this unit. You better take it seriously. I don't care if you're only 20 kind of thing.
What do you take from that into building a startup where you have to kind of run stuff from scratch and learn stuff from everywhere, as you said?
N: Yeah, definitely. Leadership is one of the things that I drilled down. In fact, it's a, it's really one of the things that I found the start all the way to the end, it's, it's a main message that's driven, right?
So I was pretty fortunate. I was able to go to command school and learn a thing or two about leadership. Leading different types of teams in different types of settings. Discipline is also something that you is definitely drilled into you, right? You do lots of drills.
You have standards to hit, it can be pretty demanding. So when the occasion calls for it, you just have to rise to the occasion. It kind of shows you what you're capable of as well. And that is transferable to everything that you do thereafter.
Interestingly, there are also ways of thinking that are cultivated in the military that are also transferable.
Q: Tell me.
So I was in the artillery. For context, artillery is - Just think of like big guns shooting big bombs over long distances. Right. Um, and the training in the SAF is very, very, uh, it's very thorough and complete. Right. They will never put you in a situation where you have not been prepared for it.
So everything that you do from basic training all the way to when you fire the big guns to when you call for the big guns to fire, everything is trained. You're trained properly and you cannot proceed unless you have done certain tests and passed. By the end of it, I was basically put into a planning role, which currently as part of my national service obligation, I go back once a year to do planning kind of work. Right.
So without revealing too much, this work requires me to do coordination between different types of units. It also requires me to understand how to do planning, given resources, right. Appropriate resource matching to situations. Yeah. Which if you think about it is what you need to do in a startup. Yeah. Right. And the artillery basically serves to support the infantry. Infantry are the people that go in face to face, that tells you you are providing fire support from a long distance.
Putting into a business context, infantry is like sales. They're the ones that go face to face. And they are there in front of the prospects, the clients. They have to present everything as it is. They can't escape from the clients.
As marketers, we support the salespeople by helping them to create the brand, build the perception, provide materials, generate leads for them, even though right now you can't see the leads, we help to bring those leads in through different types of marketing channels and methods for the sales team to go in face to face and follow up. Kind of like how the artillery and infantry work together.
Q: I wanna make the equivalency way more explicitly. One of the things you said, and I wrote it down, was they're never gonna put you in a position that you're not prepared for. And what you're suggesting is, as a marketing person, right. If you make the equivalency into sales is you're not just going to send them out and just say, sell something.
You want them to be in a position also for which they are prepared. Right. Because there's this, there's this idea that like startups are chaos. It's just constantly chaos.
And you're talking to your sales guys and sales ladies and just going, I don't care. Just go out and sell it. But that can't be true. Right. So talk to me a little bit more in detail about, cause I guess now we're getting into Nila, yeah? Maybe talk about what you took out of Janio, what you learned and thought, oh, wait a second, maybe everybody needs these skills, but they don't have them. So how can I then affect that everywhere as opposed to just at Janio? And then what you actually do to affect that, if that makes sense?
So at Nila Studios, what we do is more of the marketing stuff rather than the sales. At Genio, I had to look at both, right? So that gave me an idea of how to, a very good experience in terms of learning both marketing in a B2B setting in Southeast Asia as well as the face-to-face sales across different types of markets.
So basically what happened is that equipped me to work as a marketer with sales leaders and CEO's, founders. Because I understand the challenges and the things that are top of mind for founders. I also know what are the things you face when you do face-to-face sales. And then how marketing is supposed to effectively support that, all the way from lead generation to supporting what you're doing during the sales meetings itself.
Right. And I think one of the most critical things that I realized in Janio was it doesn't matter which department you are in, you need a very, very thorough and common understanding of your customer, firstly.
Second, a thorough and common understanding of your solution. Yeah. Product that you have.
Q: Right! Can I just say this? There's nothing worse than talking to a salesperson or talking to even like a marketing person and going, okay, I get this, but what does that mean in the context of this entire product? And they're like, I don't know. Like that's bad. Yeah.
N: Exactly. Right. And salespeople, because they are put on the spot in front of the client, a good salesperson would figure it out afterwards. Right. So over time, they become proficient in the solution and they know how to explain it, but marketers are rarely ever put on the spot, right?
So I just had a conversation with a marketer last week where the marketing materials they developed were based on things like the product requirement of documents that the product can give them or what they saw on.
the website versus competitor websites. And I just told them straight up, you know, if business is like war and you have to go in and fight a war, what you are doing is saying this gun is great because I read the description, therefore it's great.
You've never used it. You've never logged into the portal. You don't know what the features does. You've never done the deliveries. So you don't know how it looks like. Right. But sales, because they go face to face, they are forced to figure out how to use the, the, the tool.
Q: Yeah.
N: Right? So marketers, salespeople both need to understand the thing inside out. Right? Because you can't, you can't sell what you don't understand. Right? Basically, like, I don't know how you get conviction to do that.
Q: So I had a whole conversation and I think I published this episode in one of my other podcasts, InsurTech Amplified, and had this whole conversation with this woman named Emma Roloff.
And her thesis was that the greatest salespeople are teachers because they actually, they're not just selling you something, they're saying here's what your current situation is, here's how I can help you do that, and here's why this math or whatever it is works, and I'm going to teach you through this process, and by the time you're done, you're not going to ask me how much it costs, you're going to ask me when can I have it, yeah?
N: Yep, exactly.
Q: Problem solving teachers, yes. Yeah, that's what I think. So you also, can we talk about this a little bit though? I like to say that the biggest problem that startups have is not money or funding.
And a lot of people argue with me about this. My, I think the biggest problem that startups have is discovery. How do people even know you're doing this? And I think this gets back to this marketing thing that you're talking about. And through marketing into sales, it's just like, how do I even know you're out there?
How does Nila help with that as well? Because if you're not part of the company, you're helping a company. How do you help them get discovered?
N: We do that through a few different ways. The main service that we do right now is mostly around inbound content.
So this can take the form of article creation that helps you to rank on Google search, which in fact was one of the main initiatives that we had right from the beginning at Janio. Right. So the insight there and the world is a bit different now with chat, GPT and sure AI tools.
But back then being fresh grads who didn't know anything about logistics, at least for my case, the first thing I did was to just do a search, e-commerce logistics in Southeast Asia and nothing showed up.
Q: Really?
N: Right. So yes. The closest thing was e-commerce logistics, but very generic, not localized. Doesn't factor in the complexities of the market. So it was both worrying because where do I get my education from on this? But it was also like the big insight. Hey, no one is publishing materials on this! That is the gap that I can tackle, right?
So basically our marketing strategy, our brand building was content, everything you can think of related to e-commerce logistics, we made sure we showed up. Rank one, rank three, rank five, three different articles. So we are doing that for some of our clients.
At the same time, LinkedIn, I think, has become a lot more, compared to even like six years ago, there are a lot more people on LinkedIn. And it's a platform that many people browse to get information, maybe even for entertainment, and it's used a lot more compared to previously.
So it's another platform that we work for clients on to help founders. At a very early stage, the founder is the brand essentially, right? If you say your company name, like, sorry, what's that?
But people might know the founder's name instead of the company name, right? Especially if you're solving a problem for your industry. Right, so the founder is the brand and you want to use a brand platform. You want to leverage that as much as possible. So content around the individual's profile or the corporate profile - using that to gain traction and visibility and interest in the product.
Q: Like in a way you were fortunate, right? Cause you, when you looked at e-commerce logistics and nobody else was out there buying the AdWords or writing content or publishing content on it. Right?
So it was kind of green fields for you. Like we can own this thing. We can be number one, we can be number two, whatever it was. We can definitely be on the first page. Yeah.
What do you do if someone's already operating in that space? Right. And they've been kind of smart enough or savvy enough to understand like that they need to buy the AdWords and do some of the SEO stuff.
But let's say your business is better. What do you do then? Because it's more expensive, right? To then get to the top of the page. How do you disintermediate that problem? You see that? I didn't do that on purpose. Anyway, go ahead.
N: So that's a great question. And it's a very real challenge, especially where you've got AI content that helps you to churn out 10 articles a day. So there's a lot of content out there right now that should not be out there if you ask me.
Q: Agreed.
N: The first thing, and I would say this is the most important thing is whatever you publish, you just have to make sure that it's really good. So it cannot just be a paraphrase of what is already there. It has to be something unique with useful primary data, useful insights. It has to represent what you do as a company, what your solution does.
Q: So isn't this the biggest, because you just said it, right? You said there's all this content you can create, 10 articles a day, but it's kind of generic, right?
So like I use chat GPT and I'm pretty open about that. But I use it more for structure than for anything else. And I definitely imbued my business partner. I talk about this all the time, my own personality into it and my own insights so that people know “Oh, Michael wrote that.” he may have had help writing it. But to me, that's like having, you know, a junior gal working for me who's doing some of the writing. And then I fill in the gaps where I put my personality into it. I think that's OK. But I think you're right. If you just like saying “Talk to me about logistics for e-commerce.” And you just publish, you just vomit that back onto the internet. That feels really lame to me.
N: Yeah. So that editorial input where you put in your own unique human perspective in is still very important.
Q: So when you, can we just go back to this experience you had at Janio? Was it an epiphany for you to figure out like, we need to be publishing this content, did it come out of this stuff you learned at school, like, or did you stumble on it? Like, how did that happen?
N: Oh, all the things that we were learning around, and by that, I mean like the non-operations people in the company. We would talk to the operations team try to learn as much vicariously as possible. All the notes we were taking, we turn those notes into our content. Right.
So it was a, it's kind of like a loop, whatever we were learning, we were publishing. Right. And after a while, people were starting, started telling us like, Hey, this is really good. I'm learning something. Right. And I think the best moments were people saying, “I print this out and I put this in my warehouse, so my staff follow it.” To us that was like stamp of approval. We need to do more of these.
And I mean, over time it changed a bit. We went into more niche areas as we started targeting more niche customers, et cetera. Because we put it out there, people see it. And then sometimes our clients tell us during our meetings, hey, I saw your article, it was great. That feedback helps us to know what we are doing is working and helps us to streamline or improve on some of the things that we're currently working on.
Q: That feels to me like really personalized service internally, right? So you're sitting with, like you said, with the operations team at Janio, and you're saying, how about this? How about that? What are you doing? How does that work? You write down those notes, you turn that into content, but that doesn't scale, right?
So as Nila, if you want to scale, is it part, and I don't know this, right? But is it part of the business to go into them and say, here are five different tactics, non-strategies, right? Here are five different tactics you need to use internally to build this content, and we can help manage you through that process and maybe create some tech tools around that as well. Like how does that work so you can end up scaling?
N: Yeah, this is a great question. I think if you're creating something that's really unique that no one else has done before, as far as content is concerned, then you're right, it is not very scalable because it's a unique thing every single time.
But where you can scale it is around distribution and repurposing. Right. So what we like to do is if you have a, let's say an interview that you're doing or something interesting that you observed, what can we do to extend the mileage of this, right?
How can we slice and dice this in different ways, different formats, publish on different platforms, right? Not just on marketing platforms, can the sales team use it as well? Send this to your clients, send this to your leads. Can you put this in emails, on social, on your website, even something like a podcast, one podcast recording, you can slice and dice it and distribute it a hundred times. Right.
Q: Indeed.
N: Yes. So it's really about getting as much leverage as possible, maximizing the utility of whatever it is you're working on.
Q: So how long have you been working on Nila?
N: Would be around seven to eight months now.
Q: Oh wow. So it's really new, yeah?
N: Yes, I left Janio at the end of June last year. So it's very recent.
Q: And how are you finding building the traction for Neela now that you've been doing this and what is like being a second time founder like and how is it different or better or easier or harder, whatever than being a first time founder?
N: Yeah. So for the traction portion, most of the early clients that I'm still working with them are from my, from my network. So these are people I've met along the way who saw me post things. Interestingly, I have clients who saw me post things on LinkedIn, right?
Which is why LinkedIn is one of the things that we work on, right? Because we've gained from it and we also like to practice what we preach. Yeah. We don't do things that we've not tested out before. So that's how we get, we get our traction.
And it's also the conversation that we started just now, right? Around NUS and the thing that I did last week. So, yeah, that's how we get traction, right? Through some of the marketing. That is both our service to our clients, but we do it ourselves. Yeah.
Q: So what is it like being a second time founder? Is it easier, harder? Like, how does that work?
N: It's different this time round. Cause the first time round I had three co-founders. So there were four of us. Yeah. So it wasn't as lonely, right? Even though, um, the hours are the same. We're just working like seven days a week. Yeah. But previously I could look to my left and right and see everybody suffering together. This time around is just me.
So being a solo founder is a lot more, you really have to push yourself, right? Because now you don't have anyone else holding you accountable. Secondly, Janio was VC-backed from the beginning, whereas for Nila Studios, it's entirely bootstrap.
So in terms of resources and cashflow, it's a very different situation.
Q: Yeah, for sure.
N: In this case, if I don't work, there's nothing done because it's just me. Secondly, it means there won't be any revenue next month. Right. So it's a, it's a process of continuously pushing myself to make sure that, you know, the company grows and we're able to generate cash.
Q: I want to share a funny story with you. When I was working at Goldman Sachs, my daughter was going to this kindergarten in Tokyo and one of her friends, and I put that in quotes, so I had another a five-year-old little boy, his parents invited us to go on vacation with them. And, you know, at that time, I'd only worked at big companies. And the guy with whom we were going on vacation, so the dad of this little kid, was in his 60s and he was an entrepreneur.
And when we were actually in Thailand on vacation and we were sitting in the pool, he said to me, and I kind of thought he was being a wise ass at the time, but he said to me, “you're on a one week vacation, do you still get paid?”
And I was like, “that's the dumbest question I've ever heard. Of course I get paid. Like I have a job.”
But now that I have my own company, I know exactly what he means. And that's kind of what you were saying too. Like if you're not affecting things, you're not getting paid. And it's a completely different mindset.
So it's just interesting to me that you said that. I wanna ask you one last thing, like I said, and then I'll let you go.
You know, you said that your original track in school was to study finance and that over Chinese New Year's, your parents or your family could just brag that you were working at, I'm just going to say like Morgan Stanley or whatever it is, and I'm just making it up because I worked there so I can use it.
But they couldn't do that. Did you take any flack from that as a kid? Because I think people forget when you graduated from college, like you're 22 or you're 23, you know, your parents are probably in their forties and their friends are just going, “Hey, I heard Nathaniel stop taking finance, hated working at the bank and went into marketing, doesn't have a job and now went into a startup.” Like was there family pressure as well or no?
N: There was definitely.
My parents are both civil servants. So they are the most risk averse people you could meet. And I think it wasn't just them. Quite a number of my friends were telling me, what do you know about logistics? Why are you doing this? If people that you don't even, you've just met like a week ago, why are you doing this?
So you're just like no's all around. Like don't do it. So, so for me, it was really just a, okay, I'm going to give it some time and see how it goes. And these are people that - I mean, at least my, my co-founder, the CEO, I've worked with him in school before, so it's someone that I trust and I know is capable.
And I think over time, the results kind of spoke for itself. Fair enough. Like the, the traction we got and the team growing in size and revenue over time, my family saw what we were doing and they kind of stopped asking questions. Believed in it a bit more over time. Yeah.
Q: Okay. So I said that was the last thing and I lied. One more thing. Cause I remembered this. You go back and you want to give back to school, whether it's at NUS or SMU. And in this case, last week, you're in a master's program. These are very well educated kids, right? And also people that potentially have worked already.
What are the biggest questions they have for you? I guess it's a marketing class, right? So they're asking you about marketing specifically, but like, what are the common questions that they ask for you? And maybe you can give me like a common answer that you give to them the thing where they're like, “Oh, I haven't thought about it that way.” Kind of thing.
N: Yeah. The class last week was a master's program and some of them have a bit of work experience already. One of the interesting questions I got was around, how do you do marketing for a service business that doesn't have assets to do the service?
So the class was a services marketing class, which is why I was there. And I think the common wisdom is, if you don't have a physical product, right - Basically what you're doing is intangible in nature.
How you get people to believe in what you do is through demonstration of expertise. So you use associated imagery in the context of logistics. That would be things like showcasing your vans, your planes, like these are the things through which I will deliver your service, Right?
But if you don't have any of the above, how do you do that? Or do you convey that? Right. And I think where the question was coming from is from, you know, people who have experience in corporates who are used to a more usual way of doing things by a physical product or a service, a traditional service.
So that's where being at Janio we were forced to get creative around our business model, as well as the financial constraints as a very young startup with limited funding.
So that forced us to look at how, okay, what makes a big brand name well-known and great, what can we do to get in on that? So, some of those things that we had to do, you know, leverage partnerships as much as possible. There was the content play as well and getting very creative around like, you know, how traditional things, ways of doing marketing was.
So I'll give you one quick example before we close. Please. In Malaysia, there's this concept of resellers, right? Basically it can be a mom and pop shop where they resell logistic services from, let's say SF Express or Ninja Van or FedEx. This is all over Malaysia. So it's a very, very, it's a physical brick and mortar store where you can walk in and sell and buy a logistic service.
When you walk in, you will see the banners of all the different brands. Right. Purple, yellow, red. We were working with resellers and one of the things that we realized would make our brand look as big as those brands was simply putting a banner next to them. I love it. You walk in, you see purple, yellow, red, blue… Janio blue.
And in your mind, we are on the same stage as them.
Q: Has to be, right?
N: And it's just for the cost of a banner.
Q: Wow. And that worked, obviously, yeah?
N: Yeah.
Q: OK, that's a great story.
I'm going to let you go. Nathaniel Yuen, the director of Nila Studios. That was awesome. I really appreciate your time.
And I cannot thank you enough for doing this. I really mean it. Thank you so much, man.
N: Thanks, Michael. Glad to be here.
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