Pressing Restart
There are moments in life you thrive
There are moments you crawl
And there are moments you are so happy, you get complacent, and have to press the restart button.
This is exactly what happened to MomoCentral. 7 years ago, in my mid 20s and not knowing any better, my co-founder and I built a remote tech talent platform with 0 funding. Back in 2014, no one believed in remote work. There was a demand for tech talent but not at the current astronomical levels. There were no Google or Facebook offices in Singapore. Most parts of the world still saw developers as blue-collar labor. Now they’re on par with lawyers, doctors and bankers. Somehow growing up a mini rebel myself, I loved proving people wrong. We did the blasphemy thing at the time of not having an office. Everyone was fully remote. We convinced our shocked clients to pay by time and how real developers are high value.
The crazy thing? We did not update the codebase for over 6 years. Yes, we built everything on Rails, HTML, CSS and plain old JS. React JS didn’t even exist back then. Our version of Rails is so old we can’t even upgrade it in 2021. That’s how complacent we got. We built the platform, was profitable from day 1 and sat back watching organic traffic come in from both the client and talent sides. First only small startups hired from us. Then YCombinator startups. Then Series C startups. Then Fortune 500 companies, banks and governments came knocking. We had no investors. This pretty much meant we were only answerable to ourselves. We traveled. We lived the digital nomad life while our friends were stuck in offices. I even found time to co-found the Singapore branch of a global for-impact organization called VIVITA. I volunteered my time to be CTO of Ray of Hope, a charity platform that raised $4.8 mil last year. Life was good. Life was meaningful.
Then one day, as you watch the startups on your platform grow and shoot for the stars, you say to yourself “Wait a minute. Why aren’t WE shooting for the stars too?”. Yes, even when you’re doing everything you love, including philanthropy, giving back to those in need, you ask yourself such questions. For 6 years, MomoCentral had absolutely 0 code updates. Some would say “Wow, what extremely well-written code!”. I saw it as “How insanely distracted could you be..”. Of course there were problems with our platform. It wasn’t always perfect but it was enough to keep most clients and talents happy, loving us, supporting us and referring lots of their friends to us. We didn’t even have a referral program. (We tried having one once but we are such bad marketers the referral program had a silent death!).
I spoke to someone I see as a mentor. I told him I actually feel really stuck despite everything happening in my life. He started asking me about what I have been doing at MomoCentral. I told him “Just running the company”. Him: Just running the company?
Me: Ya. Just going through the motions daily.
Him: With you and your co-founder’s skills, you are JUST going through the motions? OK what new features or products did you build for MomoCentral last year?
Me: Nothing. Exactly nothing. For 6 years.
Him: 6 years?! No innovation for 6 years?! OK. If you are stuck, it is exactly BOTH your faults. You and your co-founder chose to be stuck.
It stung. It hurt. But it was the truth that needed to be heard. My co-founder and I decided to go back into startup hustle mode. We listed everything WE didn’t like about our day to day life now. It was the mundane operations working perfectly like clockwork. I personally have grown to hate our old dashboard UI. (What am I expecting! I bought it for $20 from WrapBootstrap 6 years ago. But hey! don’t break what works).
We listed everything OUR CLIENTS liked and disliked about us. We listed everything OUR TALENTS liked and disliked about us. We found out what would make them love us more.
We then disappeared from the world for 2 weeks, hunkered down and rebuilt our entire platform. (Here’s how we did it in such a short time frame!). But yes, we finally now have a platform we believe our clients, talents and most importantly, ourselves, love. (Check it out here).
My co-founder and I are shifting gears to build and launch more new ideas — whether for MomoCentral or brand new products. We have no idea what direction we’ll go but we’re going to keep launching new products. I am determined to share everything I’ve learnt (and will learn) along the way.
If you want to keep up to date on my journey, follow me! Thanks for reading this far! :)
