As I mentioned earlier in this blog, I’m currently working on my own start-up. Just finished the blueprint, business plan, and of course, vendors hunting.

Here are 3 things I’ve learned about building a start-up at this very early stage:

1. How to choose vendors and the traits you should consider before awarding the projects. You don’t need to hire super expensive vendors but you can’t always choose the cheapest service just because it fits your budget. At this point, you will realize the importance of chemistry and belief in your business partners. If you don’t feel clicked since the very beginning, it they don’t share the same passions as yours, and if it takes ages for them to response your inquiries, then you’re just not meant to work with them. There are plenty of good vendors out there, but not everyone will work well with your business;
2. How to do free marketing. I’ve learned a lot from a couple of successful business founders. Free is not always bad, it can be as effective, it just requires more times to figure it out and a lot more times to work on it. Your apps is not yet live anyway, you have plenty of times to do it yourself. I’ve chosen not to accept any investor’s funding and free marketing (or cheap marketing to some extent) is the only choice I have at the moment; and
3. I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t have all features I want to have in the first development. I should be able to distinguish “the must have” against “the nice to have”. It’s better to have a few well developed features rather than a lot of troublesome features on your apps. Go live as soon as you can, new features can be developed later on.

I’ll write more about my start-up later on! I’ve created a new category in this blog named The Lens Story and a new tag named The Start-up Story.

And yes, my start-up is named The Lens Story. The web apps is going live in the next three months (insyaallah).

Stay tune!