Thoughts on Startups, App Development, and Software Consulting Business
Reflections from Oursky’s founders and leadership, including Ben Cheng, Rick Mak (CTO), Roy Yuen (project management lead), Frank Lam (design lead), Rocky Chan, and Carmen Lau. It can be on everything from tech culture, atomic commits, to leadership, recruitment, interns, design patterns, lean startup methodology, project management, and all the things important to running a great tech company in Hong Kong.
Until 2014, I was the only project manager (PM) for the company I co-founded 9 years ago. While my co-founder, Ben Cheng, became the technical and product bottleneck, I became the project management bottleneck when our team grew to 20+ developers and 10+ projects. Continue reading “How I became the PM bottleneck as a founder: And how I unblocked it.”
We recently did a quarterly review with our content interns and found that one piece took 3 x 8-hour days to write.
An editor, full-time staff, and the intern were involved over the course of three weeks, which made our intern’s piece more expensive than our in-house staff writers’ pieces. You’re probably asking, why did we hire him?
Continue reading “Interns Are Not Good Free Labor”
About nine years ago, I co-founded a company with Rick and Roy and created a product that helped businesses create forms and collect payments via Paypal. It ate up three of our lives and made life better for some small businesses. Honestly, this first product didn’t disrupt an industry. It probably only took a handful of clients from bigger competitors and we don’t have investors from Silicon Valley. Oursky has no valuation. Instead, we started getting paid to make other people’s products. Yes. We became an agency. We gave up being a sexy startup to become just another agency. And we got more jobs than we could handle, so we recruited more developers to help.
Now, we’re an agency that’s worked with listed companies like Yahoo! and Philips and created products with half a million active users. We’ve also opened up a satellite office…in Taiwan. I’m sharing this because I’m one of thousands of tech founders around the world who started companies not based in Silicon Valley that make money, have happy clients, and great team members.
Continue reading “Why I didn’t build my company in Silicon Valley”