Looking for Co-founder (Tech) for MarineCentral.SG

[Clement See]

Hi All,

A brief about myself, I have been in the marine repair for the last 25 years and in business for the last 8 years.
Late 2014, my friend and I embarked on providing a B2B marketplace for 2nd hand tools, spares and equipment for marine and offshore oil & gas industry.
We have since then develop the site and target to MVP by 5 May 2015.  The site under development as follows: -  http://marine-central.herokuapp.com/

Due to the fact that my friend and I are more marine engineering incline, we understand our limitations if we are going to do well in this new start-up.
Therefore we are looking for people with internet marketing skills and some programming knowledge. 
We hope to build a team and hopefully join us in our journey to become founders.
Looking forward to hear from you.

Regards
Clement See

[Irish Delos Santos]

Hi Clement,

You mentioned that you are looking for people with internet marketing skills and some programming knowledge. That being said, does it mean that the person you've been looking must have both skills? 

Cheers,

Irish

[Clement See]

Hi Irish,

We are realistic with our expectations and not too sure if we can have best of both worlds, having said that the person needs to demonstrate to us he knows what he is talking about and ready to execute them accordingly.  Regardless whether if it is growth hack, A/B testing, drip campaign, SEO or any marketing campaign; the person needs to know more than what we already know in this respect.

Like to reiterate we are looking at a member that helps to compensate our weakness; and we are 200% working full time on the project; reassured the person is not being brought on-board and left on his own.  We work as a team capitalizing each others strength and compensating each others weaknesses.


Thank you

Clement

On Thursday, 16 April 2015 13:19:38 UTC+8, Clement See wrote:

[Kai @ JFDI Asia]

Hi Clement,

Highly recommend this book

http://tractionbook.com/

It gives a very good overview of the the various online, offline, outbound or inbound marketing channels. It also provides a systematic framework to decide which channel to use at which stage of your startup. You might realised that it's premature to focus on digital marketing at your current stage.

[Clement See]

Hi Kai,

Our business does requires our presences via exhibitions, seminars and engaging customers one on one.
We offer repair services for ships with access to our workforce and shipyards, thus we have no issues with generating leads or converting them to become customers.
Our worldwide database of client list and network is about 1500 and growing but because Marinecentral is a online platform; that being the reason why we are looking at digital marketing.

We have spoke to industry service providers and asset owners (shipowners and mangers), some are quite positive while other unsure, naturally.
Building trust, we felt is the current most important factor for Marinecentral to gain traction.
Cold calls, business development and marketing creates personal touches is a daily affair for us but will be slow in reach.
Advertisements on publications will be a medium term plan, once we get some form of traction because we have to be careful not to burst our budget.
Digital marketing becomes relatively low cost activity that allows us to reach more masses in the shortest possible time; creating constant presence online to make them discuss about us.

Hope the above gives a better insight to our thought process and feel free to comment.
Also the link provided is still under development on a private server, and you can create any fake account just to try out and navigate.
If there any need of improvements, do let me know; we are always ready to accept any ideas.

Thank you

Clement

[Irish Delos Santos]

Hello Clement,

I strongly agree with Kai. Traction book will give you a brief overview about marketing channel and which channel is applicable at your current stage. Hence, you may focus on Digital Marketing once you're done with product development.

[Kai @ JFDI Asia]

Hi Clement,

Growth is important, but it might be good to think about what retention means for your business. Once there is evidence in retention, then think about how to scale using untapped channels.

I think you are definitely doing the right things now although it's not as scalable as you would like it to be, you could get some inspiration from http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

I would say, focus on getting to know your users personally, understand their behaviour and this would help you form a strong hypothesis about which online channels would be most effective.

When it comes to B2B online marketing, Linkedin would be the obvious channel, but you might learn that Linkedin is not a popular platform for your target user.

In other words, I believe that an experience internet marketer is definitely good that optimising specific marketing channels, but if he/she has no domain knowledge like the founders, it's hard for him/her to prioritise which channel to use.

[Clement See]

Hi Kai,

Thanks for your reply and that is very useful.
Sorry that I could not reply sooner as we were preparing for Sea Asia exhibition whole of last week. 
Please bear with me for the long post and hope you can give an insight.

During the exhibition, we took the opportunity to speak to exhibitors individually with flyers on MarineCentral.
While some are skeptical with the site being free, others received it with more positive feedback; friends in similar industry are already there to support the site.
One of the common questions is "Who are the ones using the site?" and this spurred us to think aggressively how can we secure a heavyweight in the industry to start the ball rolling.

Then we toyed the idea of having a feature "My Garage" space for premium customers, where they not only show their 2nd hand equipment but also out of box services that they do not normally put up in their main website.  Premium customers will have to be heavyweight in the marine and offshore industry, and we just throw the line out to one of them to wait and see.  To our surprise they responded and we will be meeting their guys for detail discussions.

Question: -

a. When mentioned scaling, there seems to be a chicken and egg issue at least for my case.  We need heavyweight to come in to showcase so SME knows that it will be possible for the heavyweight to eyeball their products and services.  To have heavyweight in, I may need to add feature such as My Garage which we did not plan for our MVP.  Cost and balance impact will be my main concern, to take this road means to increase my budget for added feature.  What will be your position to take?

b. In your post and please correct me if I am wrong, that I should get retention then decide to how to scale.  Please advise to scale my client base or scale my site with different level of services?

c. The link you provided by Paul Graham is fantastic !!! and we will be working on mass emailing to our network.  In addition we encourage our user to get their peers to follow them, so hopefully we can have more reach in time to come.  We will also be targeting on some industry heavyweight by visiting them in person for them to use our premium service for free.

d. We still need to build a team but to do what we already know may be a waste of resources.  Granted we will have more in-depth knowledge then the internet marketer but I guess with our guidance, he or she can soon get the hang of it.  Also looking at some of the feedback we have received, we do feel a internet marketer is still critical to our success.

Please give us your thoughts, I am ready to fail fast.....

Regards
Clement

[Kai @ JFDI Asia]

Hi Clement,

Please see my responses below

On Sunday, 26 April 2015 13:04:17 UTC+8, Clement See wrote:

Hi Kai,

Thanks for your reply and that is very useful.
Sorry that I could not reply sooner as we were preparing for Sea Asia exhibition whole of last week. 
Please bear with me for the long post and hope you can give an insight.

During the exhibition, we took the opportunity to speak to exhibitors individually with flyers on MarineCentral.
While some are skeptical with the site being free, others received it with more positive feedback; friends in similar industry are already there to support the site.
One of the common questions is "Who are the ones using the site?" and this spurred us to think aggressively how can we secure a heavyweight in the industry to start the ball rolling.

Then we toyed the idea of having a feature "My Garage" space for premium customers, where they not only show their 2nd hand equipment but also out of box services that they do not normally put up in their main website.  Premium customers will have to be heavyweight in the marine and offshore industry, and we just throw the line out to one of them to wait and see.  To our surprise they responded and we will be meeting their guys for detail discussions.

Question: -

a. When mentioned scaling, there seems to be a chicken and egg issue at least for my case.  We need heavyweight to come in to showcase so SME knows that it will be possible for the heavyweight to eyeball their products and services.  To have heavyweight in, I may need to add feature such as My Garage which we did not plan for our MVP.  Cost and balance impact will be my main concern, to take this road means to increase my budget for added feature.  What will be your position to take?

The short answer is to focus one side first, the long answer is at http://platformed.info/seeding-two-sided-businesses-strategy-chicken-and-egg-problem/

You could also get some inspirations from  http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/21/7-proven-strategies-for-launching-a-marketplace/

b. In your post and please correct me if I am wrong, that I should get retention then decide to how to scale.  Please advise to scale my client base or scale my site with different level of services?

Scale client base and the primary interaction/transaction that should happen on your platform. In a platform business, usually growth is measure by number of interactions/transactions.

c. The link you provided by Paul Graham is fantastic !!! and we will be working on mass emailing to our network.  In addition we encourage our user to get their peers to follow them, so hopefully we can have more reach in time to come.  We will also be targeting on some industry heavyweight by visiting them in person for them to use our premium service for free.

This piece could be useful read

http://practicetrumpstheory.com/how-to-get-customers-to-want-to-pay-even-before-building-your-product/ 

[Clement See]

Hi Kai,

My sincere thanks for your patience and this has been an exciting journey for me, although this is just the beginning.
I have started see your point and fortunate enough to have spoke to a kind gentlemen with great start up experience to give me a kick.
Once again pardon my numb skull and Thank You.  I am also pleased to share that our site is now live.
We will still need improvement and do share any comments or feedback; we will try our best to rectify them.

www.marinecentral.sg

Thank you
Best regards

Clement See