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Mind Your Business Podcast: Intern to Co-founder, the Power of Marketing
How would you react if your boss suddenly told you to: "Think of a product and sell it?"
That's what happened to Nathaniel Yim in his first internship with a serial entrepreneur, and just the first step in him recounting his entrepreneurial journey so far to Tahmid Nasif and Arshvyn Prakas of the Mind Your Business Podcast.
Nathaniel eventually went on to co-found Janio Asia, an e-commerce logistics startup that's still going strong for 6 years and counting.
Tune in to find out:
- How the story above ends
- The role of guerrila marketing tactics
- The strategic vision behind Janio's rapid growth
- How Janio's marketing evolved over the years and adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic
You can also listen to this directly on Spotify.
Check out the Mind Your Business Podcast here.
Transcript:
Q: Hi guys, welcome back to another episode of the Mind Your Business show. As always, you're joined with Tahmid and Ash (Arshvyn).
Okay, today we have an amazing person in the studio today. His name is Nathaniel, right? So I've known Nathaniel for quite a number of years. We used to go to the same hall in university. We didn't really cross paths in our interest. It was more to the band and the artistic stuff, right?
Maybe he'll share a little bit about that later, but Nathaniel, it's so good to have you on the show.
N: Glad to be here. Thanks for having me, Tahmid.
Q: Awesome. Right. So Nathaniel, he was the co-founder of Janio, which is a B2C cross-border delivery solution. Right. And at the same time, right now, his focus is more towards his new venture, which is called Nila Studios. Right. And that is a B2B marketing consultancy slash studio.
We'll get into all of that in the next couple of episodes, but awesome that you're here.
Yeah, so of course as usual when we start off, we're always curious about what makes someone want to do entrepreneurship.
So when did your entrepreneurship journey really start? Do you remember?
N: Yeah, so I fell into it by accident really. And the seeds of the entrepreneurship journey started when I was in uni. So I started a business course.
Okay. Specializing in finance and like a typical Singaporean business student, I went into banking. Did the whole banking thing at a six months at a bank as an intern. Realized I didn't want to do it.
Q: So that was during your school days itself?
That was during my school days. Like a six months internship program, yes.
So you studied your degree to become a banking guy. And then how long into your degree was this? It was like almost three years.
Q: Oh my God.
N: Yeah. So after the six months at the bank, I realized banking and finance is not for me. I didn't really enjoy the nature of the work.
Interestingly, when I ran it in year one, most of the people told me marketing is fluff. Like, don't do marketing. Do something more concrete, right?
Finance is numbers. So it's a lot more concrete. So I followed that advice for a good 2 and 1 half to 3 years. Somehow, at the end of the internship at the bank, I realized maybe I should give marketing a proper go.
Okay. So I switched to it in my final year. Okay. Um, by then, most of my peers had multiple internships on their resume and I was going in for a blank slate. So I had to overload as many internships as I could within a one year period. Okay.
So I did four internships in a year - which I don't recommend anybody do it. Right. But one of the internships, the first one was at a startup because nobody else would take me for a resume except a startup founder.
So I went to this guy who was running a market research agency, just a two-man outfit. And while I was there, he said, Hey, I've got this other startup gig that I just bought this company and it's just me. You want to help me with this, do some marketing for this.
So I was double-heading for the second company as well. And on the first week of the internship, this guy is a serial entrepreneur. He says to me, think of a product and sell it. “Sorry, what are you talking about?” Like your company is a photo printing app.
People upload their photos and you print it out and you deliver to their house. What product do you want? Secondly, I'm the intern. Why are you asking me this? I was like, “no dude.”
“Next week is Christmas. Think of something and sell it. Let's make some money.”
Wow, okay.
So I had to figure out something. We ended up going with some Christmas tree decoration kit. That was, you know, you made use of the photo printing as part of the decorations. Ah, okay. Had some budget to run Facebook ads, ran it and made money from it.
Q: Oh, wow.
N: So like something out of nothing, in the span of a week, we were making money. Wow. So that was like the first like realization. It's like a spark went off somewhere. You can make money from nothing, so long as you make something valuable enough for people to want to buy it.
And it also showed me you don't need a team, you don't need much to get started. Right. But even then, I went back to school. I wanted to go into consulting, like a true business student. By the end of it, I did my four internships, graduated.
And as I was interviewing and getting offers, my co-founder, who is my classmate from school since year one - so he's a finance guy through and through, he's still at Janio as the co-founder - He messages me one day, Hey bro, have you found a job yet? Oh, you haven't? You want to start a company with me?
I thought, okay, sure, I'll just listen to what you have to say. And by the end of the conversation, I was like, you know what? I'm going to turn off my offers. You quit your job, let's do it.
Q: Wow. So he had a full-time job already.
N: Yes.
Q: Wow. Okay. So... Okay.
How was that? You spent your whole Singaporean life leading up to uni and knowing that, okay, I'm gonna get a job, I'm gonna have a stable pay, and then suddenly at the end of it, you're just like, you know what? Take the road, let's travel.
What was going through your mind at that point? Yeah, so at that point in time, I was interviewing with a few tech firms and consulting firms. And just nice, I haven't accepted an offer yet when my co-founder came to me with the suggestion.
N: If it came to me a week later, I wouldn't have taken it. I would have accepted the job already. So it was really timing, right? And then while he was talking to me about the idea, I realized, okay, we are going to go into this using a VC-backed route.
So from the beginning, we are going to take investments, which means on our side, the financial, if this doesn't work financially, it's not too much on us. Secondly, I thought, okay, what's the upside to this?
You have to learn and do a lot of things. So there's personal growth, there's financial stuff. If I go into a full-time job, I'm looking at my job descriptions, I got to do maybe some interesting things for the first two months, and then the next two years is the same thing again and again, right?
So it was really like weighing the pros and cons, the opportunities. At the same time, I had two other co-founders, one of whom was a tech guy, the other one was a 10 years older than us, he's a logistics guy.
So we had a very nice blend of skills among the co-founders, good network, good experience, very very controlled risk if you ask me. So I just weighed everything and it just made sense to do it.
Q: So like, I mean, I'm guessing like as a Singaporean, of course when you tell your parents that you're going to start a business, there's going to be a bit of like friction right? Like how is that conversation at home?
To summarise it, it was just don't do it.
It wasn't just my family, my parents.
Q: Was it your friends as well?
N: Everyone, everyone. So my parents are both civil servants. They're the most risk averse group of people. Yeah.
And my friends...
Q: They're all about the iron rice bowl, right?
N: Exactly. Civil servants their whole lives. My friends from school also were saying, maybe you should get some work experience first. You have to know the industry that you want to do a startup in. Like you have no logistics experience, don't do it. Why are you doing it?
So, I mean, everyone had good intentions. I think everybody was just trying to look out for me in their own ways.
But I decided it's okay. I'm going to do it.
Q: Okay. Did you feel dejected or were you expecting this, you know, friction?
N: Yes, I did expect it to be like all around, like don't do it. I was hoping someone would say, you know what, just do it. No one said that. You were making me feel like, just go for it. But my co-founders were really like a different breed of people.
Right. So it was a, at the start it was pretty discouraging. Every day I wake up and sometimes people will be like, are you still doing the startup thing? Like, have you gotten over the phase yet? Like, no. What are you talking about?
The phase, the term phase is... This is not my normal phase for you, dude. Yeah, I have no idea. Grow your hair a little bit. Right. Yeah, dyed blue or something. Yeah. So people saw it as a, like an itch that you just needed to scratch and then you would get out of it. Some people, some people. Right.
I think also like the family pushback was a bit stronger, not just from my immediate family, but from relatives as well. And I think for them, I see their perspective right now. If you grew up in Singapore in the 1980s and 70s, it's a very different world from the one that we have. And back then, if you see your peers at that age, starting and failing a company, which is quite likely, it's very hard. So that kind of experience stays with you.
And then you don't want your kids and your nephews and nieces to go through that. Right. So again, good intentions, but I'm happy that the world is a bit different today. Yeah. More opportunities available, which is also part of why we were, we had more confidence because we went through an incubator program for uni.
We had enterprise Singapore helping us out a lot at the start as well. Yeah. So the ecosystem is pretty robust for startup founders.
Q: Moving backwards a bit, right? So when you talked about like, uh, you had a good, uh, bad experience at a bank.
And then you knew that that was not what you wanted. What was it about the banking world that really turned you off away from it?
N: Okay. The first one was the whole six months I went back home, like five times the sun was still out. After that, it was just like, you know, every day go back home and the sun is down.
So, but it's a global bank. So I knew what I was signing up for. But putting the hours aside, I think the nature of finance is - at least this is my point of view, right? I don't think it represents everyone's (point of view) - It's fundamentally about optimizing where capital goes, right?
Like access to capital, capital flows, which is, don't get me wrong, it's very important, right? You need access to capital to do things, but there's only so much innovation and value-added things you can do before you reach a point where you're just there to run through the same processes, do the same thing. So during my stint at that bank, basically after the first month, I was just doing the same thing most of the time.
And then you saw your life like the next five years and ten years. I mean, I looked at the full-time staff there and there were some people who were truly passionate about it. I don't know where they found it from, but I think there were a lot of...
Q: About banking?
N: Yeah, some people really. Right, okay. Yeah, some of my family members are bankers as well and they like what they do, so that's great. But I saw some of the other seniors, they didn't seem to be having that fun at the time. And it was like decades in already and you were thinking that could be me.
Yeah I was like, that's not gonna be me.
Q: Yeah that's interesting because I mean, I guess it's a bit tough right because growing up thinking that okay I'm going to be a banker, taking the business route, I'm specifically studying finance, and then just overnight it's like, yeah nah man, it's not for me.
Like it does take a toll on you right, like it's like oh shit, where do I go now? On your final semester right, were you questioning yourself, where was your mental space?
N: The final semester, I wasn't actually questioning myself. The point when I switched, I was. To marketing.
So what I did was more of a controlled shift into marketing. The first semester back to school, I did half marketing modules and I still continue one more finance mod.
And I use that as a measure of, you know, whether this really is for me. It's night and day, like my marketing modes, my lowest grade was an A. Whereas my average grade in finance was like B-minus.
Q: So it was a bit telling as well.
Yeah. I was having way more fun in classes. My professors were, I was having a good conversation to them. I still keep in touch with most of my marketing professors until today.
Q: Oh, fantastic. So why, why marketing among all the, the business?
N: Yeah. We get exposure to all the different functions in business in the business school and also through the some of the internships, especially the startup one, you got to do a bit of everything.
So I realized marketing is to me, it's fundamentally about value creation. Right. And at the core of it is really understanding people, understanding what the value, understanding what, what makes them hurt, how you can provide value, how you can create a transaction for value to take place. Right.
So, at the smallest and then once you know that you have the understanding, you apply creativity on top of it, right? Create products, create ways to create transactions. At the smallest level, marketing helps to create new products. At the largest level, marketing creates markets.
So that was my understanding of, that is still my understanding of what marketing is. And everything else is really in support of that. Finance helps to make those things happen. Operations makes those things happen, but marketing is the one that sets the stage.
Q: I think I just saw this article about Nike right, so Nike spends about 2.4 billion a year on marketing and then they earn like 5 billion a day or something like that, it's like mad money, right?
And it all started when this broke guy went to Japan and signed with Onizuka and so what he was doing was literally right reselling Japanese sneakers in America and what blew them out was their marketing right
The power of that, yeah. And when they signed, like even Michael Jordan, they wanted to make like a hundred million over four years. And now Michael Jordan's, the Nike Air (Air Jordans) thing makes them like a hundred million every six hours or something like that. Wow.
Just another quick story to distract you guys with. You know how in the Olympics or any sort of form of worldwide competition, there's usually an official sponsor for the shoe or like product. So it's sometimes Adidas or Nike.
So, I think in the early 2000s or the 90s, one of the games, the sponsor was, for example, it was Adidas, for example, right? But the competitor, I don't know which one was who, on the way, since they missed out the opportunity to be the official sponsor, so from the airport all the way leading to the stadium, they bought out all the signboards and ads.
So when people were going into the games, they thought they were the sponsors. So I don't know what kind of a strategy you call that but... That's very smart. Brilliant. Right?
Yeah, I think marketing is always about that right? Like finding the out of the box. Yeah, correct. So off uni, you know, okay, so you got everybody around you just going like, don't do this, right?
And then you got these three guys with you, right? Four of you all. Two of them are your age.
N: Yes. So we're looking at y'all are about what? 24? 23, 24? 25 when we started.
Q: Yeah. And a guy who's 10 years older with the experience, right? What was the conversations like when y'all were talking about things? Was it very, um, um, aggressive or was it very like calculated? Okay, you handled this thing. Like what was the conversation like?
N: Uh, it was... For the most part, we knew what each person's contributions were supposed to be. Because like our backgrounds were quite different.
So the roles and responsibilities were both like implied, but we also like had a founders agreement where we listed out who's supposed to be responsible for moving certain metrics or certain areas of the company.
And the discussions at the start were very, very lively and energetic. So we were meeting in like rooms like this. In fact, our first office was Starbucks at Raffle City, which is not there anymore. So it is kind of sad. But we will sit there around the table. Maybe someone would take a somebody else's cup and put it there to pretend we got a drink, just to save some money. Right.
And then we were just like, okay, what are we going to do? Okay, let's do this. Let's do this. Okay. Then we just do our own work. Then afterwards we'll just update each other. Right. So it felt really like a uni group project.
Yeah, at the start it really was like that. Until we started hiring people, then like, okay, now we need to be professional and manage people and run this properly.
Q: So at the start it was really like a sit down, get together. I like what you said. Like, okay, you have a quick discussion. And then all of you get to work on your specific area. Yep. And then you update.
So a lot of people, you know, how sometimes, you know, we have conversations, oh, let's start a business and blah, blah, blah, blah. We talk and talk and talk. Now the work gets done.
How long was this period? Like when you all were discussing, like say, your friend approached you, right? Yeah. From the point where you decided, okay, I'm on board. Like how long did it take for you to come to fruition?
N: So first conversation was January 2018, then February started, February basically we agreed, let's do it.
Okay. So we launched, I think in June, I think it's June, somewhere around the June, July or May, that window of time. So it was very fast. From the time that we had the first conversation to launch was like four or five months.
Q: Okay. And was that your final semester of school?
Right after my final semester. December 2017, I did my final paper. Then a month later, let's do it.
Q: So paint us a picture. How did the four of you come together?
N: Okay. So my CEO, he's my classmate from school. I've known him since 2013. Same faculty, met in year one doing orientation activities. So I've known him for a very long time. So he's the one that messaged me and said, Hey, do you want to do this?
Um, for our COO who is 10 years older, we-
Q: Yeah, that's the curious part.
N: So I didn't know him. I didn't know him at the start. Right. But my CEO got to know him through, I think it was the investment space. Right.
And so at that point in time, my COO was running his own startup, a logistic startup. And I think some of the investors in that company knew my other co-founder, the CEO, so there was a introduction and some conversations and realized like “Hey, we see things quite in a similar way. We have similar ideas for what we think this could end up being. So why don't we try this out together?”
And the last co-founder, our founding CTO, who I'm still working with until today on different projects. So he's a very close friend. He's a mutual friend of ours. So one of my classmates from business school who knows me and the CEO introduced him when we told him, Hey, we need to find a tech guy. So he introduced him and we met up.
Yeah, we hit it off and decided let's do it together.
Q: Well, that's so interesting. So like out of the four of you, three of you are like zero experience starting a business. Yes. And the other guy was... So how fundamental was that, that this guy comes with experience?
N: I would say there would be no Janio without him.
So this one, this one, I think all of us agree. Right. So he came with the logistics knowledge.
Q: And is that the why, is that why you went into logistics? It could have been any other business, right? Any sector. The fact that you had someone on board who had a logistics experience, is that the direction you all went?
N: Yeah, that's definitely part of it. So he came with a know-how and very quickly helped us to get up to speed around what we needed to do. So that kind of made the learning curve less steep and the barrier to entry lower for us as well.
Q: So what was your role in this?
N: Marketing.
Q: So you were doing the marketing thing? Oh, cool. So when you first sat down at the meeting and then they started talking to you about logistics, right? I'm sure like you were a bit lost.
How would it take you to actually align to, okay, what is logistics and what is the marketing that logistics require?
N: So it's interesting you ask it like that because, you know, the first thing we would do when you don't know anything is you go to Google, right? Which is the first thing I did and nothing showed up.
Q: Heheh, “What is logistics?”
No, and even if it comes out, it's like some high level stuff that you can't take and go and do a delivery tomorrow.
So it was not useful at all and not localized to Singapore or Southeast Asia. And that was exactly the insight. There's nothing there for logistics in Southeast Asia.
Q: I think that is the light bulb moment. It's like, yeah, there's nothing.
N: So we are here to create something. That became the cornerstone of my marketing strategy. Also because the, so a quick background of the business model, it's an asset and light logistics service. Okay.
We do end to end B2C or rather the company does end to end B2C deliveries. Let's say you order something from Hong Kong, you want it here at your doorstep. The item gets picked up from the warehouse, it gets moved to the airport, flown over, clear customs, last mile delivery to your house. We don't touch any of that.
It's done to other people who run their own operations.
Q: Like, what, like we're talking about Shopee and…
N: I mean, that's an example. So maybe for example, you might work with a postal provider in Hong Kong. You might work with a - it might be flown on, let's say, Cathay Pacific. Okay. A flight over here, we might work with Singpost on Ninjavan to do the last mile deliveries.
What we have is a software that integrates with everyone's software, and we coordinate the deliveries across the supply chain end to end. All right. So that's why I say it's a tech-enabled solution.
It's not exactly software, it's not exactly a -.
Q: So you don't own any assets, personal vans, no you know, chips and stuff like that. Literally the guys who bring together all the different logistics partners so that you get your product.
N: Yes, correct.
Q: Right, right, right. Wow, that's cool. Tech-enabled logistics. So, well, COVID would have been amazing for you guys, right?
N: Yes and no. It was very hard at the beginning because B2C deliveries, which is, we specialize in B2C cross border. 90%, okay, maybe I'm gonna get a number wrong, but most of the world's e-commerce cargo is flown on passenger flights, not cargo flights.
So every time you sit on AirAsia below, it's someone's stuff from Taobao.
Q: Okay. Right, right, right.
N: And when COVID came around, there are no passenger flights. Yeah, there are no flights. Right. So basically overnight, like the whole, like how do I ship stuff overseas? Okay. I can't do that anymore. Right. So it hurt at the start because supply went down, which means prices skyrocketed, like no pun intended.
And it forced us to get creative around finding alternative means of transportation between countries, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise in the long term, because that meant that the business model could evolve as there were more capabilities added.
Q: Yeah, I think that's the beautiful thing of what COVID showed us, right? The tech companies who knew how to pivot, they have come out stronger because they move away from the comfort zone and the companies that didn't want to pivot, right, they died. Right? Yeah.
This continues in episode 106, which you can check out on Spotify here.
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