They say you never forget your first love – and that applies to startups too. Startup business Homework Elves helps parents to guide their children through homework problems. Co-founder YL Ang learned not to fall in love with the team’s initial idea, writes Cui-Lyn Huang.
We were doing online research to learn about other startups and the beginnings of their journey, as we wanted to bring our idea – Homework Elves – to life. We read about Tradegecko and Glints, who both described their experience with JFDI as beneficial. So we decided to do some research on JFDI, and found out about JFDI Discover.
Our team consists of two people and we are currently in the process of finding a dedicated tech staff. We often endlessly discuss ideas between ourselves and with our friends, pulling apart the pieces to find our strengths and weaknesses. Our passion for frequent improvement is what unites us together as a team but we weren’t aware of the resources that we should have been taking advantage of to get our ideas flowing, especially as Homework Elves is the first idea that we are working to bring to life.
A passion for learning
Homework questions for children are progressively getting more and more difficult, and parents are not always able to offer guidance to their children. The education industry in Asia is rapidly growing, with parents in Japan and South Korea spending billions of US dollars on private tutoring/private education every year, and Singaporean parents spending ~USD700m on extracurricular tuition. Therefore we believe there is a potentially large market for our service.
We liked that JFDI Discover takes a very structured approach and covers everything even starting from the conceptualisation stage. It allowed us to review our ideas in an organised manner and took our key issues into consideration. The set tasks allowed us to revisit initial issues, let go of some of our inaugural ideas, (as much as we loed them) and build new ones.
The most important lesson
Definitely not to fall in love with your original idea!
We still have a lot to work on, and would like to spend more time on the problem identification stage, so as to refine our idea and find our unique value proposition. We also need to bring a tech-versed team member on board, to help us with our app development.
There are challenges here in finding a local person who is willing to be a co-founder and receive equity rather than pay during this early stage. Nonetheless, it could also be due to our education backgrounds in business as opposed to technology, hence why we have struggled to find a willing coder. However, we are going to try our luck at JFDI Open House to see if our next elf (co-founder) is to be found!
Advice to other founders
For inspiration, we have subscribed to INC magazine and Bloomberg Businessweek, where we have read about the incredible developments that other startups are working on and how they have overcome great challenges in the process of building up their businesses.
In terms of books, we have read and recommend “E-Myth Mastery” by Michael Gerber and “7 Day Start-Up” by Dan Norris; to learn about the things we need to take into consideration in starting up our business.
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Thinking of starting your own business? JFDI Discover will help you find out if you really want to be an entrepreneur. It will reveal if your team is aligned to deliver results. And it will show you how to solve a real problem for customers who are willing to pay thus moving closer to a “problem-solution fit”.
Cui-Lyn Huang is on the Editorial team for JFDI Asia. Currently pursuing a combined major in Computer Science & Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston, and after growing up on the little red dot. She loves to write, she loves to eat, and loves to write about eating.