As per the partnership, Go-Jek unit Go-Pay will work with Coins.ph to enhance cashless payments and banking services in the Philippines

Indonesia’s on-demand transportation, payments and logistics giant, Go-Jek, has announced that it “is making a substantial acquisition of shares” of Philippines-based blockchain-powered fintech company Coins.ph.

The transaction details have not been disclosed.

The companies have also announced a partnership, under which Go-Jek’s payments platform Go-Pay and Coins.ph will work together to encourage cashless financial transactions in the Philippines by combining Go-Pay’s technological expertise, scalability and experience in Indonesia with ​the blockchain firm’s deep local knowledge.

​Ron Hose, Founder and CEO of Coins.ph, said​: “Coins.ph and Go-Jek share the same vision that has made each a success in their markets, empowering their customers by giving them lower-cost and more convenient access to services. Together we have a tremendous opportunity and by leveraging Go-Jek’s resources and expertise, we can give Filipinos even more convenience, choice, and access to the services they want.”

Also Read: Cryptocurrency usage will be mainstream — and seamless — in the future: Coins.ph founder Ron Hose

Hose and the extended team will continue in their existing roles, with no impact to customers.

Coins.ph enables anyone, including those without a bank account, to access financial services directly from their phone. Using Coins.ph, customers have access to a mobile wallet and services such as remittances, mobile air-time, bill payments, and online shopping at over 100,000 merchants. Coins.ph claims to have grown its customer base to over five million in under five years, processing over six million transactions per month (as of December 2018).

Go-Pay is the leading digital payment service in Indonesia, with partnership with 240,000 merchants across Indonesia, almost half of which are micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). The firm has also partnered with 28 financial institutions in the country with whom it works closely to facilitate access for the unbanked to financial products and services.

Aldi Haryopratomo, CEO of Go-Pay​, said: “Consumer transaction behaviour in Indonesia and the Philippines share many similarities, and together with Coins.ph, we hope to have similar success in accelerating cashless payments in the Philippines.”

Go-Jek Founder and CEO Nadiem Makarim​, said: “With the second largest population and a strong domestic economy, the Philippines is one of the most exciting markets in Southeast Asia. Supporting the success of a local fintech entrepreneurial champion like Coins.ph, with a similar ambition to empower society through innovation and technology, has always been part of our passion for growth. Today’s announcement marks the start of our long-term commitment to the Philippines and a continuation of our mission to use technology to improve everyday lives and create a positive social impact.”

According to a WeAreSocial 2018 report, Southeast Asia has one of the highest rates of mobile connectivity in the world, with Indonesia and the Philippines boasting higher mobile user penetration and mobile connectivity than the worldwide average. And yet, according to data from Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, in 2017, ​77 per cent of the Filipino population were unbanked, 60 per cent of adult Filipinos still conducted payments through cash, and over 80 per cent used over the counter services to send and receive money. Digitising these payment and remittance services is a crucial step towards digital financial inclusion.

Photo by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash

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But when they do start companies, Singapore entrepreneurs have a firm understanding of the need to sell across borders

Singapore is consistently considered one of the best places in the world to do business. The World Economic Forum ranked the city-state as the third most competitive economy in the world, slightly behind Switzerland and the US.

However, according to a new report from Stripe, local companies may not necessarily be experiencing that reality. Only 40 per cent of Singaporeans told Stripe, “It is easy to start a business in my home country.” This despite it only taking 2.5 days to start a company in Singapore.

Japanese had the highest perception of starting a business in their country, at 77 per cent, but it takes 12.5 days to start a company in Japan. Hong Kong had both the fast time to start a business (1.5 days) and ranked second in perception of starting a company (57 per cent positive).

That being said, once Singapore companies do get their enterprise rolling, they are keenly aware of the need to sell their product/services beyond the city.

88 per cent of Singaporean companies cross borders to sell goods — which is tied for the world’s top-spot with Hong Kong. This makes sense considering the similar economic infrastructure of the two cities. They both are small-but-wealthy markets with a huge logistics industry that has transformed the island cities into international trading hubs.

This bodes well for building a culture of international commerce.

Other countries that ranked high were Japan, France, Italy and Spain.

Also Read: From Kopi to a cool mil: Event marketplace Delegate raises US$1 million

One interesting fact is that China ranks extremely high for an economy of its size (74 per cent of companies sell abroad). The US is much lower at 45 per cent.

This is important because, according to Stripe, companies that move fast to sell abroad grow more quickly (7x for slower companies compared to 9x for faster firms).

“There’s a logic behind the urge to expanding internationally quickly: it correlates with longterm economic success and productivity. Over the last five years, firms that expanded internationally during their first year grew 141 percentage points faster in revenue and 15 percentage points more quickly in headcount than the ones that were slower to reach international markets,” the report reads.

Also Read: Go-Jek invests in Philippines’s blockchain fintech company Coins.ph

Unfortunately, choppy trade waters have made globalisation more of a challenge for online companies. 42 per cent of respondents said doing business is getting harder these days.

In the conclusion of the report, Stripe notes that this burden falls largely on SMEs, who do not have the finances to pay for a legal team that could help them navigate increasing government restrictions.

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In addition to Dailyhunt, we also have updates from Delegate, Go-Jek, Coins.ph, and a scholarship programme for IT talents

Indian news aggregator Dailyhunt raises US$3.5 million – Dealstreet Asia

Indian regional language news aggregator platform Dailyhunt has raised INR24.61 crore (US$3.5 million) in Series E2 funding round, Dealstreet Asia reported.

Documents from intelligence platform Paper.VC named Omidyar Network, Sequoia Capital and the Renu Sehgal Trust as investors in the funding round.

Founded in 2007 by Virendra Gupta, the platform started out as an aggregator of news from newspapers. It also has a focus on aggregating and providing video content, as well as live television streaming.

Dailyhunt has raised INR36.9 crore in an earlier Series E2 funding round from LightVC.

Singapore’s Delegate raises US$1M pre-Series A funding round – e27

Singapore-based event management platform Delegate today announced that it has raised a US$1 million pre-Series A funding round from an undisclosed family office and former Zopim CTO Yang Bin Kwok.

The company planned to use the funding to support its expansion to the US and Australia as well as to improve its PRO SaaS product.

Delegate is a platform for users to find vendors to manage their events, from parties to marriage proposals.

Its PRO platform help vendors manage their business online through services such as lead generation, customer relations management (CRM), and payments.

Also Read: India’s DailyHunt raises US$25M from ByteDance, Sequoia and Matrix to aggregate content in local languages

Go-Jek invests in the Philippines’ Coins.ph – e27

Indonesian on-demand transportation, payments, and logistics giant Go-Jek today announced that it has made a “substantial” acquisition of Philippines-based blockchain-based fintech company Coins.ph.

Go-Jek also announced a partnership with Coins.ph to encourage greater cashless financial transactions in the Philippines by combining Go-Pay’s technological expertise, scalability and experience in Indonesia with ​the blockchain firm’s deep local knowledge.

Coins.ph Founder and CEO Ron Hose and his team will continue with their existing roles following the acquisition, with no impact to the platform’s users.

Indonesia to allocate US$7M for IT scholarship – KataData

The Indonesian government through the Ministry of Communications and Informatics is set to allocate IDR100 billion (US$7 million) of funds for an IT professional scholarship programme, KataData reported.

For the scholarship programme, the ministry will work with 28 private and public universities, 22 polytechnics, and five global tech companies.

The programme is being divided into four categories (“academies”): Freshgraduates, vocational schools, coding teachers, as well as online academies.

The programme aimed to solve Indonesia’s challenge in providing IT talents.

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Image Credit: rawpixel on Unsplash

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A problem that can be detrimental to your business, yet is not often discussed

Cosy.

That’s how I felt.

Tucked beneath what may have been the world’s softest blanket.

I took a deep breath and rolled onto my side. It was a familiar moment — the moment when my 6 a.m. alarm clock sounded, after a night of tossing and turning.

The moment when my daily responsibilities had yet to beckon me. The moment when the clouds of my imagination felt more real than writing lines of code.

In a few minutes, I would answer the same question I had faced every weekday for the past year:

Should I stay in bed or should I work on my side business?

At the time, I was working as a programmer for an NYC media company.

Balancing a full-time job with the responsibilities of scaling my startup, JotForm, taught me a lot about myself.

Among other things, I learned that I was somewhat risk-averse.

The typical path of raising venture capital wasn’t appealing to me. Additionally, as someone who highly values personal freedom, I didn’t want to make myself beholden to anyone.

This meant two things:

1. I had to prioritize profitability from day one.
2. In order to experience consistent gains, I had to consistently beat my arch-nemesis: procrastination.

My biggest realisation? The reasons we avoid completing a task, at any given moment, are extremely personal. And commonly touted “productivity hacks” don’t always cut it.

I want to share my experience of overcoming procrastination while scaling a side project into a company that now employs more than 130 people.

But before diving in, it might be interesting to take a look at how two types of founders handle procrastination: VC-backed founders vs bootstrappers who build their startups without any outside funding.

Are bootstrappers more likely to procrastinate?

Bootstrappers like myself aren’t the only entrepreneurs who sometimes grapple with the snooze button.

However, VC-backed founders may have a slight psychological advantage when compared to their bootstrapping counterparts: The pressure that comes with taking someone else’s money.

But that’s not all.

VC-backed founders are motivated to “pay investors back” sooner rather than later for another reason: Once a company has grown accustomed to a certain level of spending, scaling back becomes next to impossible.

Should the company fail to gain traction within 12 to 18 months, it could very well become another failure statistic.

Thus, the VC-backed founder who doesn’t feel like sending out emails Monday morning has every incentive to do so.

Conversely, the bootstrapper must learn how to push through procrastination — without the motivating force of a ticking clock and a room full of unhappy investors.

I encountered this learning curve while building JotForm in 2006. It was my first year in business, and my bedroom served as the company headquarters.

While I loved what I was building — a user-friendly form builder to help organizations enhance productivity — the temptation to procrastinate sometimes got the best of me.

Whether it was the lull of my comfy bed or the laughter promised by a favourite TV show, my home office was riddled with distractions.

During this time, I read many books about entrepreneurship, productivity, and procrastination. Sometimes their advice worked for me, and other times it didn’t.

The real reasons we procrastinate

When I became especially curious about the topic of procrastination, I often wondered:

Why do we delay doing the tasks that get us closer to the things we say we want?

Through self-observation, one thing became clear: There was always a reason for my procrastination.

Whenever I noticed the urge to put something off, I tried to ask myself “why.” Surely enough, my mind always answered.

Once I had identified the real problem — that was causing the feeling of avoidance — I could develop an appropriate plan of action to reclaim my productivity.

As simple as it sounds, identifying the root problem is somewhat contrary to common advice. The internet is filled with articles that advise us to push through feelings of resistance.

Heidi Grant, a social psychologist, and Harvard Business Review contributor, echoes this sentiment:

“Somewhere along the way, we’ve all bought into the idea, without consciously realizing it, that to be motivated and effective we need to feel like we want to take action… I really don’t know why we believe this, because it is 100 per cent nonsense.”

Also Read: How I navigated the trials of building an early stage startup

While I completely agree and have often written about how organizational systems can enhance productivity, I believe something extremely important is often overlooked:

Productivity hacks are only effective when we know why we’re avoiding something in the first place.

“Just do it” isn’t a sustainable solution for beating chronic procrastination. If we repeatedly find ourselves avoiding certain tasks, an underlying problem needs to be addressed.

Once we identify the real cause, we can search for the right productivity hacks and solutions to meet our needs.

Here are the most common reasons that I figured often lead us to procrastinate:

1. We feel like we’re not making progress

Think back to the last time you started a new project. You probably felt excited about executing that new marketing strategy, blog content idea, or programming stack.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and you now find yourself approaching the same task with a twinge of discouragement.

Observe your procrastinating mind in action, and it’s probably saying something like: My hard work isn’t being rewarded; this isn’t fun.

Science says humans are intrinsically more motivated by instant gratification than delayed gratification. Considering that worthwhile projects are rarely built overnight, this tendency is annoyingly inconvenient. The solution?

Stanford University behavioural scientist and lecturer BJ Fogg recommends creating systematic behavioural changes that correspond with “small wins.”

In other words, create your own way to celebrate small milestones. According to Fogg, every task should be accompanied by “a trigger” — and the easier the action better.

Say you’re committed to writing content for your new website. You might make an agreement with yourself to write one paragraph after each time you use the restroom, and continue to follow this trigger throughout the day.

Once you’ve completed the task, Fogg urges you to celebrate in a predetermined manner. The celebration could be as simple as treating yourself to a piece of chewing gum or as active as taking a bike ride through a favourite part of town.

Treat the series of actions like a game:

Trigger → Task → Celebration.

Why does this work? Creating small wins provides an incentive to keep working toward the finish line. Eventually, the actions create a habit that may become enjoyable.

2. We’re not sure where to start

Another common reason for procrastination? Having so much to do that we’re not sure where to begin.

During the early days of building JotForm, I wasn’t always sure what to work on. With seemingly endless tasks begging for my attention, I often ended up “procrastinating” with low-value activities.

Based on my conversations with other founders, I know my experience was far from unique. A lack of organizational systems leads to unnecessary feelings of overwhelm, confusion and avoidance.

Here’s the key:

a) Acknowledge that it’s normal to feel uncertain when beginning something new.

b) Brainstorm with mentors, advisors, and friends how to best prioritize your time.

The more systems we put in place, the less we find ourselves procrastinating. I’m reminded of the importance of this each year when I visit my family. They own a small olive farm that runs like a well-oiled machine.

Everyone knows what needs to happen first, second and third when we harvest the fruit. With no room for guesswork, procrastination is virtually non-existent.

3. We’re afraid of failing

This is the unofficial mantra of Silicon Valley tech founders.

– Fail fast, fail often.

However, look beneath the surface, and a different image will emerge: ambitious entrepreneurs who are terrified of making a bad decision.

As one anonymous insider shared with management consultant and Forbes contributor Rob Asghar:

“Many people here do talk about embracing failure, but that’s usually just hype. Many of them fear any kind of failure, and the pressure to succeed is so intense that some new businesses instead find themselves looking for shortcuts.”

While some founders cope by taking shortcuts, others stall out due to perfectionism. The tendency shows up in the form of delayed launch dates, missed deadlines, and “productive procrastination.”

During the early days, it wasn’t uncommon for me to spend a ridiculous amount of time on tasks that didn’t really matter.

Meanwhile, I was missing out on opportunities to grow our customer base, forge business partnerships, and help even more organizations enhance their productivity with user-friendly forms.

Also Read: How to acquire your first 1,000 loyal users and get them to actively use your product

This was another reason I made the controversial decision to forego venture capital. I knew the pressure of a board looking over my shoulder would clash with my inner perfectionist.

Does that mean I never procrastinated for fear of failure? No — but I could be gentle with myself when it happened.

“It’s not necessarily the sky-high standards that slow you down, but the sky-high standards mixed with a belief that your performance is tied to your self-worth,” says Ellen Hendriksen, Boston University Psychologist. “That combination can grind you to a halt.”

Hendrickson recommends that we should consistently remind ourselves of the crucial difference between who we are and what we achieve.

Easier said than done, but it’s sound advice.

4. We dislike the task itself

Surprise, surprise — the most common reason for procrastination may actually be disliking the task at hand.

It’s no secret that building a business involves several moving parts. Understandably, everyone enjoys some tasks more than others.

One person may have an affinity for cold email campaigns, while another would rather play in traffic.

In such instances, HBR contributor Heidi Grant recommends using something she calls “if-then planning.” The process involves identifying the specific steps needed to complete a task and — most importantly — where and when you will do it.

For example: If it’s 11 a.m. then I will stop what I’m doing and cold email prospects.

Grant claims the process is different than relying on sheer willpower alone.

Personally, I find it more effective to ask targeted questions:

What could happen if I complete this task?

What could happen if I don’t complete this task?

What is my overarching vision? Why does it matter?

Once I reconnect with my goals and remind myself of the potential outcomes, I’m back on track. Obviously, there is no “right way” to deal with procrastination.

These are just some of the methods that have worked for me over the years. Everyone has unique personality quirks, internal motivations, and reasons for procrastinating.

Translation: The newest productivity hack everyone is raving about may not work for you. And that’s okay.

Identify your personal reasons for procrastinating, apply the best-suited advice and ignore the rest.

Oh, and do your best not to hit snooze — no matter how cosy your bed might feel.

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This post first appeared on jotform.

e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash

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We reached out to Chit Hnin Pwint Wai to talk about her company, Myhealthcare, a mobile-based health consultancy and health checkup booking in Myanmar

After winning Startup of the Year last year in ASIAN Rice Bowl Startup Awards in Malaysia, the name Myhealthcare started to gain traction in health tech industry, and that’s not without a reason. Enter Chit Hnin Pwint Wai, who’s an aid of women reproductive issue, and took the matter seriously to start a company.

“In Myanmar, there is a lack of reproductive health access directly to the expertise. Burmese (Myanmar) women are too shy to discuss issues about contraceptives with family members, friends, and even doctors face to face. They don’t want to go to the hospitals for sexual health problems due to fear of being stigmatised,” said Chit.

Also Read: Go-Jek acquires majority stake in Philippines’s blockchain fintech company Coins.ph

Chit then shared her knowledge about the staggering numbers that has taken its toll among Burmese women and overall health scene in Myanmar.

“The statistics show that 282 women die in every 100,000 live births. It’s all most probably because they don’t have the right health knowledge. On top of that, only 1.33 healthcare worker (or 0.6 doctor) is out there to look after every 1,000 people in Myanmar,” she began with the statistics.

Shyness about reproductive issue can no longer be tolerated, and Myhealthcare, looking at the problems in the bigger scope, also provides the platform to tackle the shortage of skilled health labor in Myanmar.

M-health solution

In May 2016, The Myanmar Times revealed that approximately 43.72 million SIM cards have been sold in the country, signified the high mobile penetration the country had had since the 2014’s revolution. So building the mobile-based platform is something that made sense.

“We built the mobile health platform so the users can access confidential counseling as well as to reduce delay in receiving appropriate care and improve preventive health knowledge. MyHealthcare app provides remote medical help for every citizen with the aim to save time, energy, and cost, resulting in greater efficiency,” Chit added.

Since Myhealthcare is built on mobile apps, the health space it manages to cover isn’t limited to healthcare assistance through online connection, but also health education. The education side on its own is an untapped potential to create awareness around reproductive health issues.

As for the general health practice, Chit added that the health education that the company provides aimed at decreasing the workload at public hospitals, thereby cutting national
healthcare expenditure.

Asking health-related questions

The company’s platform works with a simple approach of Q&A. Like many others health tech players, it would be the easiest way to connect doctors and patients and one way that has been proven to be working before.

With Myhealthcare, Chit explained that patients can ask health-related questions that are answered by doctors on their specialties via chatting, voice messages/voice calls, video message and video call. Information on the nearest hospitals and doctors as well as its reviews are also available with health articles.

In terms of patient’s confidentiality, Myhealthcare ensures that no other personal identities apart from age, gender, and township are shared.

Since the healthtech space is a crowded one, it’s hard to differentiate and offer something that’s entirely unique and needed. Bringing ‘Reliability, Safety, Confidentiality’ as the service it’s committed to give its users still needs a deal breaker that can convince people to be a regular user.

“The patients can get medical help from doctors round the clock,” Chit mentioned about the convenience Myhealthcare provides with the direct chatting system it has, which also becomes its strength

A competition frontrunner

In the case of Burmese startups, recognitions are often a part of immersing your business into the eye of the public. Since 2014’s revolution, businesses and ideas on the ground have taken another level in Myanmar, and so competition for the scenes become a regular thing.

As for Myhealthtech, the company first secured funding for US$40,000 in total right after they participated in Innovation Marketplace in 2017. The competition was hosted by USAID,
FHI360, and Phandeeyar.

The company was also the winners of Myanmar Women’s Social Business Contest and was able to take a part in the Women’s Social Entrepreneurship Conference in Tokyo, Japan, where they pitched their company.

As a woman-led startup, this is right up the company’s alley since they also won Women-led Start-up Pitch Contest organized by Women’s Forum Singapore.

What lies ahead

With 7,600 users on the platform, Chit said that the company has recorded a total of 2,400 direct consultation through the platform. The most popular feature according to their insight is Frequently Asked Questions, and some of their health articles.

“In the near future, we plan to improve the platform to be able to do e-Prescription and medicine delivery,” said Chit.

Alongside Chit Moe Pwint Wai as the COO, there are two more co-founders on board contributing their expertises: Chit Hnin Pwint Wai, who’s the CEO and also the director of Global New Wave Technology, specialising in Business Development, and Swam Saung Oo, who’s the CMO that brought his experience as a founder of the first mHealth social enterprise in Myanmar in early 2015, which operated 24/7 Healthcare Call Center partnered with Semi-Government MPT and Health Portal (www.healthcare.com.mm).

Chit closed up the conversation by sharing her opinion on the current health tech scene in Myanmar.

“It keeps on evolving, following the political and administrative system and roles in this country. The Ministry of Health remains the major provider of comprehensive health care, with the mix of public and private system both in the financing and provision.”

Also Read: FAQ: Paid-up capital and incorporating in Singapore

“Universal health coverage in Myanmar in the immediate future will be very challenging as a result of the low health service coverage, high financial risk, and inequalities in access to care. Thus, I believe health service coverage and financial risk protection for vulnerable, disadvantaged populations should be prioritised,” she ended.
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Image Credit: Myhealthcare

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MoMo wants to continue on investing in its technology, particularly in the use of AI, security, and big data

Vietnamese e-wallet and digital financial services platform MoMo announced on Wednesday, January 16, that it has raised a Series C funding round led by global private equity firm Warburg Pincus, wrote Vietnam Economic Times.

The company did not reveal the exact figures but a report by Dealstreet Asia puts the number at around US$100 million.

The company said that the new funding will provide it with “substantial resources” to expand its footprints and develop “millions” of payment points throughout Vietnam.

Also Read: Vietnam’s FastGo commences operation in Myanmar

It will continue to invest in technology, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI), security, and big data.

MoMo claimed to serve nearly 10 million users on its e-wallet platform; its transaction volumes has also grown more than three fold over 2018.

In addition to enabling customers to pay for purchases at various merchants, the MoMo platform also enables users to buy phone credits, send money, and pay bills.

Entering 2019, startups of various verticals in Vietnam have been announcing late-stage funding rounds.

This week, e-commerce site Leflair announced a US$7 million Series B funding round while fintech startup Tima announced its Series C effort.

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Image Credit: Chang Duong on Unsplash

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The new e-hailing company manages to pull out a total of RM300,000 (US$73,000) on crowdfunding

EaziCar, a Malaysia-based e-hailing company announces that it has raised RM300,000 (US$73,000) equity crowdfunding using Ata Plus platform.

With the funding, the company plans to create a ride-hailing experience that’s centered around the drivers and passengers motivation and loyalty, which the company believes to be the future of e-hailing market. The company will further focus on marketing initiatives and product development.

Also Read: Vietnamese e-wallet service MoMo raises Series C funding led by Warburg Pincus

EaziCar offers peer-to-peer e-hailing services via mobile app and it aims to address drivers and passengers loyalty via both benefits and incentives.

As of January 2019, EaziCar said that it has signed 428 drivers on their platform and have since launched its mobile apps.

What differentiates EaziCar is that it gives drivers the flexibility and benefits like just a one-time registration to cover the region. EaziCar also takes pride in the control-free platforms that will not require its drivers to hit a certain quota of trips to be incentivised.

In addition to a more laid-back regulations for drivers, eligible drivers of EaziCar are also provided with medical benefits to ensure their basic necessities are covered.

From passengers side, EaziCar will offer incentives to its passengers with a cash reward system to merit passengers instead of using points. EaziCar’s long-term rebates offer passengers an additional 5 per cent for each reload on their Eazi Pay account.

Also Read: What I learned about procrastination while scaling my startup to 4.2M users

“Our focus is in ensuring the satisfaction of our drivers by providing attractive benefits, as well as taking preemptive measures in the safety and convenience of our passengers, we do believe we have an edge from our competitors.” says Alex Teow Boon Heong, Co-Founder and CEO of EaziCar.

“We are optimistic in EaziCar’s impact in the future growth of the industry, notably in the wellbeing in their passengers as well as their drivers,” said Kyri Andreou, co-founder and director of Ata Plus.
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The post KL-based e-hailing startup EaziCar raises US$73K via equity crowdfunding appeared first on e27.

Sometimes, conventional content marketing techniques are not good enough

In the 2018 Content Marketing Institute survey, 91 per cent of B2B brands and 86 per cent of B2C brands reported using content marketing.

However, most businesses struggle to get their desired business results. Merely 20 per cent of the surveyed B2B businesses rated their content marketing approach as extremely/very successful.

The reason most businesses can’t make content marketing work is because they get caught up in established best practices and tactics.

See, if you’re failing at content marketing, you need to shake up your strategy from the ground up. You need to go back to the drawing board.

What is the foundation of content marketing?

It is addressing the pain points of your target audience by publishing value-adding content. Then, building awareness for your brand by distributing it using appropriate distribution channels where your prospects hang out.

Based on the above foundation, here are three counterintuitive content marketing strategies small businesses have used to get terrific results.

1. Publish seldom, but only The BEST content in your industry

Traditional content marketing wisdom calls for publishing content regularly on your blog. It results in more indexed pages, traffic, and leads.

HubSpot found that companies that publish 16+ posts every month get more than 3.5 times traffic than companies that between 0 to 4 monthly posts.

However, as a small business owner, you know a high publishing frequency could compromising your content quality. Also, spending time on the distribution of your content is critical to ensure it reaches your target audience.

A counterintuitive approach to regular publishing is posting only once or twice per month and promoting it extensively. For the strategy to work, you need to ensure that:

• Every content piece you create has a proven demand,
• You create the highest-quality content on the subject,
• You have an extensive promotion strategy in place for distributing the content.

Suppose, you sell peanut butter. You researched and found that your audience is interested in cake recipes. Buzzsumo returns the most shared articles on the subject.

As you can observe, all the articles talk about different kinds of cakes. They contain text, high-quality visuals, and a video. Formatting-wise, the article on the second website has a good breakdown of Chocolate Peanut Butter Molten Cake. It neatly lays down the recipe in a succinct table.

When you create a piece of content on “peanut butter cake recipes,” then you can top the existing content quality by:

• Including more than one cake recipes,
• Doing a video breakdown of the recipe,
• Using multiple high-quality photos.

Pinterest and Facebook have fared well for the existing content pieces. The articles got over 10,000 shares on these platforms. Hence, you can target distributing the content on these two platforms.

Brian Dean religiously follows a schedule of publishing one article every 4 to 6 weeks at Backlinko.

Also Read: How to acquire your first 1,000 loyal users and get them to actively use your product

With merely 53 live blog posts, Backlinko had driven 4 million visitors. The reason it worked was that Brian created the best piece of content on every subject he wrote. Then, he extensively outreached to build links and get shares for every piece.

He even sends 100 emails as a part of his pre-outreach for an article. Here is a break down of his promoting strategy by the man himself.

2. Go beyond researching your audience’s pain points

It’s copywriting 101.

You need to get inside your audience’s minds and find out their pain points, dreams, and fears. Next, borrow the “exact” phrases they use in your marketing.

In essence, you are trying to connect with your audience while showing them how your products fit into their lives.

The traditional way most businesses employ for researching their target customers is through online forums and audience research tools. Few take the pain of conducting online surveys to understand their audience.

How about you go beyond passively stalking your audience online? You do the scary offline bit of talking to your customers.

Pinterest user experience researcher Gabriel Trionfi used to gather with Pinterest designers and make house calls. He found that these visits help them understand how their customers use Pinterest. Sojourning the users also proved fruitful in gaining inspiration and building new things.

Wonder how the strategy falls under content marketing?

By talking to your customers about their problems and offering help, you earn their trust. You can find burning customer questions that you can answer on your blog. If you plan to launch a new product, you can understand your audience requirements and validate your ideas.

When Ryan Robinson wanted to launch a course on validating a business idea, he met a few of his most engaged subscribers. Besides helping him in planning the content of his course, 75 per cent of his early feedback group also bought the course during its pre-sale.

Even when he launched a new project, he validated his idea through text messages. And he even got pre-orders while building his product.

3. Try to achieve your business goals natively on other platforms

Brands practice content marketing to build an audience and in the long-run derive a profitable customer action.

A few years ago, here’s how marketing content on social media might have helped your business bottom line:

1. Publish content on your website.
2. Send link updates to your piece on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and the like.
3. Thousands of visitors land on your site.
4. A minor percentage of these visitors convert into your email subscribers.

Once you have your tribe of email subscribers that are interested in your brand, you can build a relationship with them. You can send them value-adding content and interact with them. Then, occasionally when you send an email to buy your products, a percentage of your subscribers will oblige.

Currently, there’s a large quantity of high quality content published every day. Also, social media networks are becoming increasingly selfish and want users to stay on their platform.

Also Read: What Tokopedia does to ensure high quality customer relations management

You can’t abandon social media because of the huge pool of prospective customers. However, building your audience solely on these platforms is also not intelligent because their algorithms will then dictate your brand’s reach.

The way out is trying to achieve your business goals on other platforms itself.

For example, on Facebook, you can retarget visitors that interacted once with your brand to make them familiar with your brand. Then, invite them to try your product.

You can even do without creating content for your our blog.

Author Benjamin P. Hardy hasn’t posted a single article on his site and built a personal brand entirely through Medium. Each of his articles gets multiple thousands of claps and hundreds of comments.

At the end of his articles, he offers a cheat sheet as a way into his email list. His Medium popularity has resulted in a list size of 300,000 subscribers.

When he launched his online course to the email list, not publishing content on his website didn’t hurt. He generated US$90,000 in seven days.

Final thoughts

The above three strategies want a little extra effort. However, as I showed you with data they work when implemented correctly.

As the landscape of content marketing evolves, we should not forget the intent of content marketing: adding value and helping your customers wherever they hang out. If it requires disobeying conventional wisdom, then so be it.

Which of the three strategies do you plan to experiment with in your marketing? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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There is an underlying science to listening that may just catapult your digital marketing initiatives to success

Nobody can deny the importance of Social Media Listening as a marketing tool. As a refresher, listening is a way of collecting and analysing the chatter surrounding your brand through tracking mentions about you or your peripherals. As businesses get right into social media in large, escalating quantities, latest tools and the number of experts in the field have also increased considerably. However, not everyone has managed to utilise listening to the best of its ability; when not dealing with the strategy with reproach, some become totally dependent on tools.

We don’t want you to be like them.

Simple as it may seem because of the gamut of tools available to you, it is actually really easy to butcher this otherwise effective strategy. However, there is an underlying science to listening that may just catapult your digital marketing initiatives to success.

We’ve gone through establishing the strategic benefits of listening for your brand, but let’s now discover five effective tips that can lead your listening endeavour to success.

1. Clarify Reasons for Listening

Social media listening concerns itself more about the analysis of data to complement strategy instead of providing immediate responses. Businesses should then remember to collect not just for the sake of collecting. You wouldn’t want data dump or to fill your data centers with information that doesn’t really give you anything. Our advice is to set a clear goal in mind for your social media listening endeavour. This could be a few or a combination of the following: monitoring reputation, generating leads, increasing brand awareness, leveraging on competitor data, etc.

It might help to ask yourself these questions when you brainstorm with your team:

• “How will listening influence the way we strategise for our brand?”
• “How will data from listening eventually influence our customers?”

2. Use Social Media Monitoring Tools

We mentioned that brands often butcher social listening, and this is because of their failure to initially set their values and goals right (for the audience and the brand).

Now, the internet is teeming with social listening tools that can answer most of the goals you defined for your brand. Just like any other digital tools, they conveniently sweep the internet to help you make informed decisions. They generate real-time information and even provide historical data to help you spot previous trends. Some even include sophisticated features that allow you to view activity in certain areas around the world.

You will never be short of tools to employ for your convenience as there’s one for every social media platform. You can check this list to see some of the best tools in the market today.

Some tools give leeway so you don’t feel forced into making premature commitments. They can offer free trials and demos so you can see what best fits the objective you set for your brand.

However, we advise you to be wary. While tools are proven to make monitoring more convenient, base your decision on the parameters you set: objective, budget, and the capability of your team to handle it.

Also read: Social influence is an essential part of doing business today, and you should engage customers whenever you can

3. Monitor Relevant Keywords

Keywords lie at the heart of social media listening. Initially, keywords guide audience by connecting them to their interests and showing options available to them. They work like connectors that the people use to find services and products that appeal to them the most. Brands, however, create and communicate their messages effectively to the audience by visiting frequently used keywords in social media.

Since the majority of the keywords are created by the market, businesses must consistently update their keyword list or the word combinations that they monitor. However, you must remember that these query words vary per platform and that what’s popular on one platform may not automatically capture the essence of customer sentiment on another. This is because there are notable behavioural differences across the platforms. The “one size fits all” framework will not work in this scenario. Effective listening welcomes and works around the idiosyncrasies within platforms.

4. Benchmark for Progress

To improve your process, you must remember to track not only your movement but your competitions’. Some businesses lose out on the benefits of benchmarking simply because they don’t do it. Others fail remarkably at implementing the insights that they do get (more on this later).

Benchmarking for progress means basically doing a sweep of your industry to see how well (or how bad, even) your competitors are doing. Keep track of the essential dimensions of your business and pit it against your competition. This way, you can improve the quality of your services and products.

Benchmarking doesn’t have to be costly; the key to generating great insights is by, again, setting clear objectives. Ask yourself what aspect of your competitor’s business you want to analyse; it could be the process, their campaigns, latest product innovations, etc. The key here is to make sure that you are moving with the trend of your industry and not lagging behind on improvements. This urges you to not be complacent and to always, always ensure that you maintain your market relevance.

5. Tie-In Customer Chatter with Campaign- and Strategy-Building

Most businesses fail because they dismiss the last step to successful social media listening—tying-in the customer chatter to their strategies. Some brands become too obsessed with classifying labels and providing prompt, yet short-term solutions to maintain brand reputation. Now, we are not dismissing the utility of listening to making real-time responses, but social listening can benefit your company in other ways besides reputation management.

Also read: 4 ways to achieve high-converting engagement with your customers

Grand, longer-term strategies are rooted in data acquired from listening. Companies can use social media listening to monitor and predict emerging trends to aid the brand’s overall strategy. Effective listening doesn’t stop at the collection of data but always makes sure that they capture the whole chatter picture.

Conclusion

Businesses expecting social media listening tools to do all the work for them are in for a very rude awakening. Recognise the importance of the human element and why it has to co-exist perfectly with the digital.

Marketing and translating these goals takes a lot of work, but reliable teams can provide you with solutions that use the valuable insights from your listening.

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Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

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Mistakes will be made; but learning how to get back on your feet  will be more crucial

While I was reading through most of the success stories that were published on IndieHackers.com, it occurred to me that my project GetData.IO really took longer than most others to gain significant traction, a full 5 years actually.

The beginning

I first stumbled upon this project back in December 2012 when I was trying to solve two other problems of my own.

In my first problem, I was trying to identify the best stocks to buy on the Singapore Stock Exchange. While browsing through the stocks listed on their website, I soon realize that most stock exchanges as well as other financial websites gear their data presentation towards quick buy and sell behaviours.

If you were looking to get data for granular analysis based on historical company performance as opposed to stock price movements, it is like pulling teeth. Even then, important financial data I needed for decision-making purposes were spread across multiple websites. This first problem lead me to write 2 web-scrappers, one for SGX.com and the other for Yahoo Finance, to extract data-sets which I later combined to help me with my investment decision-making process.

Once I happily parked my cash, I went back to working on my side project then. It was a travel portal which aggregates all the travel packages from tour agencies located in Southeast Asia. It was not long before I encountered my second problem… I had to write a bunch of web-scrapers again to pull data from vendor sites which do not have the APIs! Being forced to write my 3rd, 4th and maybe 5th web-scraper within a single week lead me to put on hold all work and step back to look at the bigger picture.

The insight

Being a web developer, and understanding how other web developers think, it quickly occurred to me the patterns that repeat themselves across webpage listings as well as nested web pages. This is especially true for naming conventions when it came to CSS styling. Developers tend to name their CSS classes the way they would actual physical objects in the world.

I figured if there existed a Semantic Query Language that is program independent, it would provide the benefit of querying web pages as if they were database tables while providing for clean abstraction of schema from the underlying technology. These two insights still prove true today after 6 years into the project.

The trough of sorrow

While the first 5 years depicted in the trend line above seem peaceful due to a lack of activity, it felt anything but peaceful. During this time, I was privately struggling with a bunch of challenges.

Team management mistakes and pre-mature scaling

First and foremost was team management. During the inception of the project, my ex-schoolmate from years ago approached me to ask if there was any project that he could get involved in. Since I was working on this project, it was natural that I would have invited him to join the project. We soon got ourselves into an incubator in Singapore called JFDI.

In hindsight, while the experience provided us with general knowledge and friends, it really felt like going through a whirlwind. The most important piece of knowledge I came across during the incubation period was this book recommendation — The Founder’s dilemma. I wished I read the book before I made all of the mistakes I did.

There was a lot of hype (see the blip in mid-2013), tension and stress during the period between me and my ex-schoolmate. We went our separate ways due to differences in our vision of how the project should proceed shortly after JDFI Demo Day. It was not long before I grew the team to a size of 6 and had it disbanded, realizing it was naive to scale in size before figuring out the monetization model.

Investor management mistakes

During this period of time, I also managed to commit a bunch of grave mistakes which I vow never to repeat again.

Mistake #1 was being too liberal with the stock allocation. When we incorporated the company, I was naive to believe the team would stay intact in its then configuration all the way through to the end. The cliff before vesting were to begin was only 3 months with full vesting occurring in 2 years.

When my ex-schoolmate departed, the cap table was in a total mess with a huge chunk owned by a non-operator and none left for future employees without significant dilution of existing folks. This was the first serious red-flag when it came to fundraising.

Mistake #2 was giving away too much of the company for too little, too early in the project before achieving critical milestones. This was the second serious red-flag that really turned off follow up would-be investors.

Mistake #3 was not realizing the mindset difference of investors in Asia versus Silicon Valley, and thereafter picking the wrong geographical location (a.k.a network) to incubate the project. Incubating the project in the wrong network can be really detrimental to its future growth.

Asian investors are inclined towards investing in applications that have a clear path to monetization while Silicon Valley investors are open towards investing in deep technology of which the path to monetization is yet apparent. During the subsequent period, I saw two similar projects incubated and successfully launched via Ycombinator.

The way I managed to fix the three problems above was to acquire funds I didn’t yet have by taking up a day job while relocating the project back to the Valley’s network. I count my blessings for having friends who lend a helping hand when I was in a crunch.

Self-doubt

I remembered having the conversation with the head of the incubator two years into the project during my visit back to Singapore when he tried to convince me the project was going nowhere and I should just throw in the towel. I managed to convince him and more importantly myself to give it go for another 6 months till the end of the year.

Also Read: Rethinking content marketing: 3 new ways to catapult your startup’s revenue

I remember the evenings and weekends alone in my room while not working on my day job. In between spurts of coding, I would browse through the web or sit staring at the wall trying to envision how product/market fit would look like. As what Steve Jobs mentioned once in his lecture, it felt like pushing against a wall with no signs of progress or movement whatever so. If anything, it was a lot of frustration, self-doubt and dejection.

A few times, I felt like throwing in the towel and just giving up. For a period of 6 months in 2014, I actually stopped touching the code in total exasperation and just left the project running on auto-pilot, swearing to never look at it again.

The hiatus was not to last long though. A calling is just like the siren, even if somewhat faint sometimes, it calls out to you in the depths of the night or when just strolling along on the serene beaches of California. It was not long before I was back on my MacBook ploughing through the project again with renewed vigour.

First signs of life

It was mid-2015, the project was still not showing signs of any form of traction. I had by then stockpiled some cash from my day job and was starting to get interested in acquiring a piece of real estate with the hope of generating some cash flow to bootstrap the project while freeing up my own time. It was during this period of time that I got introduced to my friend’s roommate who also happened to be interested in real estate.

We started meeting on weekends and utilizing GetData.IO to gather real estate data for our real estate investment purposes. We were gonna perform machine learning for real estate. The scope of the project was really demanding. It was during this period of dog fooding that I started understanding how users would use GetData.IO.

It was also then when I realized how shitty and unsuited the infrastructure was for the kind and scale of data harvesting required for projects like ours. It catalyzed a full rewrite of the infrastructure over the course of the next two years as well as brought the semantic query language to maturity.

Technical challenges

Similar to what Max Levchin mentioned in the book Founder’s at work, during this period of time there was always this fear in the back of my mind that I would encounter technical challenges which would be unsolvable.

The site would occasionally go down as we started scaling the volume of daily crawls. I would spend hours on the weekends digging through the logs to attempt at reproducing the error so as to understand the root cause. The operations were like a (data) pipeline, scaling one section of the pipeline without addressing further down sections would inevitably cause fissures and breakage. Some form of manual calculus in the head would always need to be performed to figure out the best configuration to balance the volume and the costs.

The number 1 hardest problem I had to tackle during this period of time was the problem of caching and storage. As the volume of data increase, storage cost increase and so did wait time required before data could be downloaded. This problem brought down the central database a few times.

After procrastinating for a while as the problem festered in mid-2016, I decided that it was to be the number 1 priority to be solved. I spend a good 4 months going to big data and artificial intelligence meet-ups in the Bay Area to check out the types of solutions available for the problem faced. While no suitable solutions were found, the 4 months helped elicit corner cases to the problem which I did not previously think of. I ended up building my own in-house solution.

Traction and Growth

An unforeseen side effect of solving the storage and caching problem was its effect on SEO. The effects on SEO would not be visible until mid-2017 when I started seeing an increased volume of organic traffic to the site. As load times got reduced from more than a minute in some cases to less than 400 milliseconds seconds, the volume of pages indexed by bots would increase, accompanied by an increase in the volume of visitors and reduction in bounce rates.

Continued education

It was in early-2016 that I came across an article expounding the benefits of reading widely and deeply by Paul Graham which prompted me to pick up my hobby of reading again. A self-hack demonstrated to me by the same friend, who helped relocated me here to the Bay Area, which I pursued vehemently got me reading up to 1.5 books a week.

These are books which I summarized on my personal blog for later reference. All the learnings developed my mental model of the world and greatly aided in the way I tackled the project.

Also Read: 5 strategies for effective social media listening

Edmodo’s VP of engineering hammered in the importance of not boiling the ocean when attempting to solve a technical problem, of always being judicious with the use of resource during my time working as a tech-lead under his wing. Another key lesson learned from him is that in some circumstances being liked and being effective do not go hand in hand. As the key decision maker, it is important to steadfastly practice the discipline of being effective.

Head of Design, Tim and Lukas helped me appreciate the significance of UX during my time working with them and how it ties to user psychology.

Edmodo’s CEO introduced us to mindfulness meditation late-2016 to help us weather through the turbulent times that was happening within the company then. It was rough. The practice which I have adopted till to date has helped keep my mind balanced while navigating the uncertainties of the path I am treading.

Edmodo’s VP of product sent me for a course late-2017 which helped consolidate all the knowledge I have acquired till then into a coherent whole. The knowledge gained has helped greatly accelerated the progress of GetData.IO. During the same period, I was also introduced by him the Vipasanna meditation practice which coincidentally a large percentage of the management team practices.

One very significant paradigm shift I observed in myself during this period of continued education is the observed relationship between myself and the project. It has changed from an attitude of urgently needing to succeed at all cost to an attitude of open curiosity and fascination as one would an open-ended science project.

Moving forward

To date, I have started working full time on the project again. GetData.IO has the support of more than 1,500 community members worldwide. Our mission is to turn the Web into the fully functional Giant Graph Database of Human Knowledge. Financially, with the help of our community members, the project is now self-sustaining. I feel grateful for all the support and lessons gained during this 6-year journey. I look forward to the journey ahead as I continue along my path.

While I was reading through most of the success stories that were published on IndieHackers.com, it occurred to me that my project GetData.IO really took longer than most others to gain significant traction, a full 5 years actually.

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This post first appeared on Medium.

e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

 

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