Background: The Noteway started off as a company offering individually customizable paper notebooks for students who wanted something personal and useful. It began as a minor in an entrepreneurship project in NTU in 2014. A silhouette cameo machine and vinyl material was used to customize each notebook individually.
We had started The Noteway with big dreams. But it all seemed like it had ended on 14 March 2015. We were staring blankly at a huge pile of over four hundred notebooks, a silhouette cameo machine, and endless bundles of vinyl rolls. Despite 50% of students claiming they would pay for customizable notebooks in our survey, it was after all, just a survey. And the actual purchase rates were not even a tenth close to that picture perfect figure.
What made things even worse was the amount of labour needed to customize every single notebook. YouTube tutorials made everything seem deceptively easy. We had also priced our notebooks at unsustainable levels. Call it inexperience, carelessness or stupidity if you will. I say it’s a combination of them all.
These mistakes had led to a disaster for The Noteway. Co-founders were leaving. Cash flow was running low. There was lack of a focus and a clear direction. We were at our lowest point in this entrepreneurial journey of ours that day. It was painful, to say the least.
At this pivotal moment, we had to make the decision to continue running The Noteway or shutting it down. We were already near bankruptcy. But something told us that we could still continue operating. What we needed was just a complete change in our direction. And so, those of us who remained pivoted. We adapted to what the market wanted.
Consumers do not necessarily always know what they want and as such, you have to receive constant feedback from them when you launch your minimum viable product. As you get more and more feedback, you can then adapt your product slowly to suit exactly what your customers want.
For us, we discovered that students related a lot to motivational quotes and quotes that were relevant to them after selling our first few batches of notebooks. Our best selling notebooks were notebooks with quotes that represented their beliefs as well as notebooks that represented their respective schools.
With this core idea in mind, that students wanted something that they could relate to, we decided that this element has to be brought to other merchandise as well. We expanded to other items such as t-shirts, hoodies, mugs and even teddy bears.
After we branched out to offering a wider range of products for students and we started bringing to life our unique designs at The Hive in NTU, our fortunes took a turn and we’ve been back on track ever since.
Nearly one year has passed. The Noteway is now a rapidly growing designing and printing company hoping to encourage design, creativity and innovation among youths here. You could even call us a media company that does designing and printing on merchandise, because of our student-centric blog and viral articles.
Through the blood, sweat and tears of my entrepreneurial journey, I took away three key lessons:
1. Never trust a survey to know the demand for your product.
The only way to know the demand of a product for sure is to start selling it, or in other words creating what is known as the “minimal viable product” (MVP). Using the words of the author of The Lean Startup, “the MVP is that version of that product that enables a full turn of the Build-Measure-Learn loop with a minimum amount of effort and least amount of development time.”
What you build or produce may lack the features your customer wants. But as long as you can gauge the reactions and measure the feedback of potential customers while trying to sell a product to them, you will be able to learn and improve the product until you give them exactly what they want.
2. Do not lose sight of your company’s overall vision, values and beliefs
From the start, when we did notebook personalization, we were all about encouraging design, creativity and innovation among youths in Singapore. We may have pivoted. But our products, services, content and hiring practices will always be in line with our early values and beliefs.
I cannot underestimate the importance of having a clear vision and sticking to it closely if you want to grow your startup. Even more so, in a saturated industry like ours, I believe our vision sets us apart and guides the whole team in decision making. For example, we recently had an enquiry from a lady via our Facebook page to troubleshoot and teach her how to use a silhouette cameo machine, the machine which we had used in our early stages to customize our notebooks. That very next week we came up with course materials and offered to conduct for her a 1 to 1 silhouette cameo course at her house. This decision didn’t take us any time to make – it was simply a matter of us staying true to our vision to encourage creativity, design and innovation in Singapore.
3. There is almost always an better option than giving up just after a few months of trying.
People often say 99% of businesses that are started up fail within 10 years. I’m sure some of those businesses could have succeeded if they adapted and persisted. 8 other businesses were set up by my batchmates during our minor in entrepreneurship. Some surely had potential but none of them are still in operation.
A business cannot start seeing a lot of results just after a few months. Patience is often an underestimated virtue and strategies may take some time to translate into real results. To everyone who is going through a hard time in their start-up, always remember to have a winner’s mindset. Take every mistake, setback and rejection as something to learn from and push forward!
By Senthilkumar Subramanian
Senthilkumar Subramanian is one of the co-founders of The Noteway and a passionate entrepreneur. He constantly seeks to network with other like-minded people and forge new friendships. An eternal optimist, he believes that nothing is impossible and that there is something you can learn from everyone out there.
