We spoke to Richard Moh, co-founder of CatJira (formerly Rebaem.com) – the digital content marketplace to find, hire and collaborate with social media creators. The team took part in the February Discover program and share what they learnt in the 21 days.
CatJira helps social media content creators to discover paid sponsorship opportunities.”Our secret sauce to this is our proprietary journalist profile matching with natural language processing (NLP) feature to yield better match results,” said Richard, co-founder of CatJira.
The team applied to JFDI Accelerate and as part of the selection process, took part in the JFDI Discover program. “The pre-accelerator acts as a good checklist for founders who are in idea-validation and pre-prototyping stage. It helped us follow actionable steps on a timely basis,” he said. “The course covers the basics of lean canvas model development and OKR structures that may be new to first-time founders,” he said.
Here are some key lessons they learnt in the 21 days:
1. Don’t fall into the in founders trap
“Founders are often reluctant to pivot because they choose to believe in their initial idea instead of building what the market demands. Having an implementation-agnostic attitude is important. The focus should be creating products that people want, not what you think they want.”
2. Validation and user acceptance testing (UAT) is important at every stage
“Validating your idea is just the first step. It needs to be followed by iteration and acceptance towards change when necessary based on UAT results and interviews with potential early adopters and individuals from the VC. VCs help to validate feasibility of implementation and probe into loopholes that the team needs to cover.”
3. The more we give the more we learn
“In the program, offering our assistance was returned by similar kind gestures from other teams. The journey in entrepreneurship is never easy and it is always great to have someone to help along the road.”
4. Ideas are cheap. Implementation is the key
“In Discover, we learnt that similar ideas are everywhere. What makes one different from the rest is in the implementation process. For example, Facebook was not the first social networking website, Google was not the first search engine, Uber was not the first in car-sharing landscape. What made them successful was execution.”
CatJira Co-founders RIchard Moh (left) and Sheng (right), based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, are graduates of the JFDI Discover program in February.
“In our humble opinion, the true value of Discover is the safe environment that was provided to connect teams in a knowledge and experience sharing environment,” he said.
Cui-Lyn Huang is on the Editorial team for JFDI Asia. Currently taking a break from pursuing a combined major in Computer Science & Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston, and embracing life on the little red dot. She loves to write, she loves to eat, and loves to write about eating.