 Hi everybody, just waiting for you to start. OK, so I started my first business 10 years ago in Hong Kong. It's a beauty business. And four years later, I decided to start a beck and moor, which is the one you're able to do. On this page, I guess you should just take note that there's no successful word in front of a beck and moor. It's been six years, and it's still work in progress. But yeah, so I'm going to talk about a lot of my fuckups, especially with a beck and moor. So I wanted to start off with misconceptions of an entrepreneurial life. Firstly, doing what you love. So if you do have a passion for something and you want to make it into a business, that's wonderful. But to be honest, most of the time, you're not even going to be doing it. You're going to be wearing many different hats. You're basically your sales, operations, paycheck. Uh-oh. What happened? That's a little bit weird. That wasn't me, I know. No, it's going to start. Yeah, so you're wearing all these different hats, including being like even a handyman or even a janitor, especially when you start up. You're doing everything. And because you're doing everything, you don't have a lot of time. If you think starting your own business means that you're going to have more time to yourself, think again. You definitely not. There's no maternity leave or sick leave or annual leave. You're on holidays, but you're still on the laptop taking calls and this and that. The other thing is if it kind of looks easy, it seems like a lot of times being an entrepreneur and you start it looks easy. But there are no shortcuts to a startup. There's none. You have to put the work in. And I suppose it always looks easy because as an entrepreneur you represent your business. So you need to portray positivity and excitement to generate interest, right? If I'm talking about all the buckles, no one wants to really check it out in terms of general population. And a lot of the times you always see the success stories. But most of the times it's a pure fact most businesses don't survive. And success is not guaranteed. It doesn't matter how much money you raise and how much experience you have, how many connections you have, even having a successful business does not guarantee the next one will be successful. And it's always looking glamorous. This is me working from a magazine point of view. This is my reality, my little home office in my pajamas most of the time with house stuff, laundry catalogs, toys and all sorts of random stuff. So back story, it's pretty much like everybody else 20-something lost, was in a big poor county, moved to Hong Kong, couldn't get a job, can't speak Cantonese, found an opportunity to start waxing salons in Hong Kong. So I started waxing salons specifically Brazilian waxing. So of course I got laughed out the door by my friends thinking that you're mad. And especially 10 years ago success was deemed as being a big corporation. So nowadays it's completely changed and it's for the better. So this is how I started my first business. So I found the opportunity, I sold the demand, I did all my research, I literally signed myself up for Brazilian waxing courses. Research my products, my life savings. So I was super cautious with all my expenses. And every day I was there, day and night. So it was right there within like 6 months I was making money. Now comes to AVEC. Fuck up, fuck up, fuck up, basically. I started the business because I'm like oh, I have money in the bank, I'm just going to start it. And I basically went on a massive lingerie shopping spree. Then I realized oh, between the bras, how do you probably fit? Like I wasn't even wearing the right bra size. Actually 8 out of 10 women don't wear the right bra size. And then after that I realized oh, it still wasn't working. What do people actually want? So I completely fucked all that up. And these two went out the door as well. I wasn't conservative just purely because I guess I was leveraging of the money I was making of my first business and the Bank of Council all merged. And I was not even at my lingerie routine. And you're probably wondering what the hell's wrong with you. Well this is what happened. I moved from Hong Kong to Singapore. I had a little mini-me. Wrapped around my legs half the time. And because I wanted to make life more difficult for myself at that. If anyone had any one of these situations I would tell them do not start a business. Don't ask me what happened with me. Next major fuck ups for me was branding and having my brand identity. So because I never did research or found the opportunity of the demand I just thought okay, I'm going to leverage of my waxing salons and have a mashup. So I made a lingerie routine with two treatment rooms. So my rent and my staffing costs were pretty much covered by my first business. I wanted to focus on little boutique that people haven't heard of and then that wasn't really working. So I decided that I'm going to expand my product range. Going to swimwear, shapewear, sleepwear accessories. They all fucked up. So then I decided okay people are familiar with brands. This is Angel of course. So I want to focus on those. Close my physical store in Hong Kong and focus on the e-business e-commerce business. And because it's e-commerce it does extremely well. So I'm listening to my customers and I'm going towards that. So question marks, let's see how it goes. Next I wanted to talk about the whole e-commerce. This e-commerce is a massive monster. So anyone thinking of doing e-commerce just be wary it's about 50 times as much work as having a store. Two main components is the technical side of it. Finding someone to help you is extremely difficult. I've gone from chief freelance Beagle to big name companies to help me both mess it up. I've had to redo my entire business and so I'm on my third round of doing it. And the next major component of e-commerce is the content. The amount of content that you have to put behind it is really easy. It's not just uploading products it's naming them and linking them and images and descriptions and putting them in filters and categories. It's just for one product imagine that. And pretty much every step of the way of e-commerce has been a bother. Nothing ever goes smoothly. You change one thing or another. So following that the next of course is marketing. So let's talk about my marketing. Ten years ago it was still very much traditional marketing. So I was familiar with it. I was in that industry so I was able to leverage up my knowledge and make my first business simply. No and popular and just yeah. Nowadays it's digital marketing. It's this whole other beast that you need to be aware of. You don't have to be an expert which you definitely need to know about digital marketing. It's very technical and there's so many elements to it the biggest obviously is search engine marketing which is Google. So for me when I started and I'm like oh okay Google AdWords. I can't even count. I need to start with keywords so I started just throwing keywords out there. So with my beauty business you know it's waxing salons. What I haven't told you yet was the name. So the name of my beauty business is Nood. So I'm putting Nood. Nood Hong Kong. But it went through the roof. I've got so many clicks obviously because we try to think of porn. And I think when I had no clue whatsoever so I dumped a whole heap of money down the toilet just purely because I had no clue. So do your research know and try not to fuck up as much as you can because you can. You can end up spending a whole lot of money. So to kind of round up for my tips, be conservative. You need to dedicate 100% to a startup. My biggest tip was probably to be friendly to the network. So you're here doing a great job coming into a networking event. Purely every time I've gone to a networking event I've always walked out with a great contact or a great tool or a great website or great app. And so definitely it's great to have this kind of community because everyone is really willing to help each other out. So get out there and be bossy. Go up and start talking to people. Say hi or my name is whatever I want to pick your brain about something. Because you have to be shameless to gain more knowledge to find more customers to talk to the media. You just have to put yourself out there. So my last slide is a nice attractive slide. Take a look at my website. 15% up. Use the code FUN15. There you go. This has been one of our Q&A. Is there anyone who would like to ask a question? Yeah, so I saw conservative and bossy in the same slides. How do they do that? So conservative in terms of being cautious with your money. Because I think a lot of times, especially when it comes to a technical type of business and you're not a technical person you can definitely be taken for a ride. And so it's always always be conservative. Don't just pay up front in a sense, right? You kind of test people out, see how it goes before you commit. So you've shared backups, right? Right now, what would you consider as success? Has it been different? When you first started, perhaps you defined success as X. And now, maybe you looked at success differently after all these experiences. If I just had a back-of-all I would, I don't know where they would be here today. I take both businesses as a whole. So overall I feel like I'm successful in the sense that my first business is big enough that it can sustain my second. You know, we make money, we are very well known and it gives me more time to focus on it. So I, you know, there's still so much potential for it and I still have time to make it success. We'll take one more question. What kind of e-commerce platform do you prefer and why? I think it all depends on what you do. If it's like a small business, you can go for something like a Shopify. Which is very easy to use, very user friendly. I've got three, four thousand SKUs which is individual products. So we just went for the biggest, baddest one because we customize it to any way we want. Because ultimately I would love to be the lingerie site for Asia and to sustain that kind of size we need a monster. So we went with Magenta. So as a customer what is the potential for a counter It's a Magenta. Yes, so it's very technical. It's all basically coding and that's why I had so many mess-ups with outside. You're welcome. Thank you.