I had the opportunity to be a part of a startup during my university life, and it was one of the biggest rollercoaster journeys I have ever experienced. I have always wanted to start a startup and work with a team to create something new and deliver value to the world. Startups are not all sunshine and rainbows like you see in the media, and it is not the conventional graduate career path in Hong Kong; regardless, I decided to pursue this journey.

While freelancing in digital marketing during high school and my freshman year, I noticed the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness in analyzing website and e-commerce data. With other co-founders, we founded CL1CK – converting website visitors to customers by personalizing promotions based on shoppers’ purchase probability.

We started with a Silicon Valley dream but soon realized the brutal reality of the startup environment, especially as students. With limited knowledge, industry experience, and connections, getting your foot off the ground can be extremely challenging. Pitching to investors and customers is even tougher for students, as they usually doubt our execution skills due to our young age and inexperience. Therefore, our team was forced to learn and face failure almost every day. Learning and pivoting fast were needed for survival. There is no specialization or financial resources in a small early-stage team, and we needed to prove to stakeholders that we could “talk the talk, and walk the walk.”

When we started, our team was always full of crazy and innovative ideas on our approach. In GBUS, we were given many opportunities to do presentations and engage with others in discussions where we always came up with good ideas and solutions to our problems. Every year, we have well-respected professors and speakers coming in that mentor and inspire us. The case competition experiences are always a plus! We applied our academic and case competition experiences in deriving solutions to solve pain points in inefficient data analytics. However, we realized that in academic environments, there is no “execution” that comes after your final presentation, as you are not required to implement your solutions! We soon realized that great ideas are everywhere, but the “execution” determines a startup’s success (or failure).

Our starting team had to quickly learn how to manage projects and KPIs to deliver a working software product. We built a prototype in a few months, applied to the Cyberport Incubation Program, and were accepted in the June 2021 intake. However, transitioning from ideation to getting customers was a significantly challenging journey. We made a rookie mistake of not talking to any of the users and built multiple versions of our product based on what WE thought would be valued, not our users. We focused on features that users were not interested in and spent 10 months building a product that no one needed. It was a constant cycle of feature releases and throwing them away, leading to decreased team morale and intensive burnout. We learned it the hard way, but in the end, we acquired paying users and successfully raised $600k USD with investors including MiraclePlus (www.MiraclePlus.com) and Iterative (www.iterative.vc).