Note: the following story is a personal one from Commoncog founder Cedric Chin; originally told in Fundraising Without Investors.
Over the course of late 2014 to the end of 2017, I helped my old boss bootstrap a Point of Sales company from nothing to S$4.5 million in annual revenue. I’ve referenced this story in multiple essays on this blog over the years. What I never explained was how we did it.
Let’s back up a little. When I first joined my boss’s company, we didn’t make Point of Sales systems. We didn’t make anything, in fact; no: we were a dev shop. We charged clients in Singapore slightly below market rates for iOS and Android apps, and we did that because we could afford to — our software engineers were, after all, based out of Vietnam. I was hired to help my boss shift the company from consulting to product.
I failed. That I failed isn’t really a surprise — as anyone who’s attempted should know, trying to switch from services to product is a terribly difficult thing to do. There are nearly no overlap in skills. We built three ‘products’ in three months — all of which got little to no traction — and then we ran out of buffer money. We switched back to app development to keep the lights on.
Hiring me did have one benefit: my boss finally got enough space to explore other ideas whilst I ran things out of Saigon. I still remember the day he pulled me aside and told me he’d found this interesting opportunity — he’d been attending a bunch of Singaporean government events and learnt that a national program existed to help older companies digitise. Specifically, my old boss met the agency director for something called a ‘productivity grant’ at one of these events, and pitched him on an idea: what if we sold Point of Sale systems to old school retail companies — the ones that were still using cash ...
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