EdgiWit

Aihui 爱慧 (pronounced as i-we) Bio: Love With Food Founder 1 cup Entrepreneur, 1/2 cup Swimmer, 1/2 cup Runner, 1 cup Rails developer, 1 cup Cook, 1 bag of Smiles

[aihui-blog]

10 Lessons Learned From Being a Startup CEO

2015 marks the third year anniversary of Love With Food. It’s surreal to think that three years ago I was a team of one, and now we are a team of 15 people. I’ve spoken at many events in the last three years, even one titled “How to Turn an Idea into a Multimillion Dollar Business.” I’ve also been in the press, here, here and here. All good news, but it has been nothing short of a roller coaster ride.

Am I glad I ditched my engineering consulting career for a risky venture? Hell yeah, but it wasn’t a walk in the park. It’s been a hell of a ride that never ends! No business school will ever be able to teach what I’ve learned--the only way to learn is to walk the journey. One founder recently told me, “You’ve earned your badge of honor because you’ve suffered the pain.” So what did I learn through this walk of pain?

1) It’s damn hard and it doesn’t get easier

If someone tells you it’s going to get easier after you’ve raised the next round, it’s a big lie. It doesn’t get any easier. You’ll feel good the day after you closed the round, but the pressure to deliver exponential growth immediately kicks in. I’ve raised two rounds of funding, and it didn’t get any easier after each round. In fact, the more money I’ve raised, the greater the expectations and the greater the pressure. The challenges I had to deal with were much bigger and more complicated over time.

2) Hiring and Firing

My criteria for hiring now is culture fit, which is mainly comprised of being hungry and ambitious. This combination is the key ingredient for startup growth. It trumps any MBA, Ivy League education or “C” level experience. If grit is not part of your DNA, then a start-up is not the right environment for you.

Firing fast is also crucial. I dreaded the first fire, but once the person was gone, many problems also went away instantly. When someone underperforms or hurts the culture, it’s important to act fast otherwise the person could be toxic to the environment.

3) Importance of having a mission statement and core values

Love With Food’s mission statement is

“To provide the BEST snacking experience by helping consumers snack smarter and do good at the same time, and by helping food brands understand consumers better with insights and direct connections via social media.” Our core values are:

Team Excellence and Happiness

Above and Beyond Customer Service

Create Win-Win partnerships with our Vendors

Ending Hunger

Always be bold, creative and fun

Always be curious. Never stop growing and learning

Be respectful and humble

It’s easy to lose sight of the end game as we grow. It’s good to have a mission statement that’s communicated frequently to align everyone and to ensure we are all moving toward the same end goal. Setting our core values sets the expectations on our behavior and actions. It sets the guiding principle on how we treat one another and how we work.

Having a mission statement and a set of core values are important because they help the team understand right from wrong, especially in times of conflicts. It helps to resolve disagreement because the solution must always be aligned with our mission.

4) Never outsource online marketing. My biggest mistake

Since the beginning of LWF, I’ve been in charge of online marketing. I’m a software engineer learning the ropes of the online marketing world. I started playing with Facebook ads back in 2011 and got very proficient in running Facebook ads. In early 2014, I decided to outsource our acquisition to an online agency, expecting the agency would do a better job than me. After all, it’s their bread and butter. Well, I was so wrong. They couldn’t acquire new customers as efficiently as I could. Lesson learned - no one will ever understand our customers better than me or anyone on the LWF team because we live and breathe the brand everyday.

5) Follow your gut

I’m a very analytical person. I love looking at data and making decisions. However, for an early stage start-up, most of the time, we don’t have sufficient data to analyze. So I often follow my gut. It’s hard to go wrong when you make decisions based on your first instinct because your first instinct is almost always right!

6) Know your personal system

As a founder, it’s very easy to work non-stop. I work about 14-16 hours a day everyday, including weekends. I stopped exercising because my theory was exercise less, so I could work more. I was completely wrong. The six months that I stopped exercising was my worst. I wasn’t a good leader. I was always cranky, exhausted and I was experiencing a higher level of anxiety and stress 24/7.

Exercising is the only time I have for myself. It’s the only time I’m doing something for my well-being. Exercising keeps me centered and my thoughts more clear.

7) Listen to your body

I’ll wake up in the middle of the night panicking or in cold sweat. There are so many things on my mind, which issue should I start tackling first? Often, I would wake up thinking of one particular problem and this one problem disrupts my sleep night after night. My body was showing me a sign. Out of the 1,001 issues, whatever was continuing to awaken me, it was the biggest problem I had to take care of immediately.

8) The more I accomplish, the bigger my fear

As the company grows, the sense of responsibility just gets stronger. The fear of failing my team and my investors accelerates. I can be quick and reckless when I was a one-woman show but now, whatever decision I make, it affects 15 people on my team and many more investors.

9) Rejection is part of the game

In the last three years, I probably heard 50 times more No’s than Yes’s. By now, I’m immune to rejection. People may reject me and my ideas for many reasons, but I never wasted time finding out why. I would rather spend my time and energy on the next hustle.

10) The ultimate price is loneliness. Have someone to talk to

The entrepreneurial journey is a very lonely one. One of our very early investors made a pact with me. He would only invest if I promised to have lunch with him once a month and share with him all the good, bad and ugly. I thought it was silly since I didn’t need a shrink, but I made the promise anyway.

I’m so glad I did. I fully understand now his intentions. He’s a serial entrepreneur and he knows how lonely the journey is. I look forward to our monthly lunches and I honestly will tell him all the challenges, stress, big plans, good news, every little detail of my roller coaster ride. Not only is it it’s good to pour it all out, it’s even better to have someone who has been there, done that, to tell me what I’m going through is normal. You wouldn’t believe how comforting it is to hear that, to know that I’m doing my job right and how I’m feeling is normal.

[aihui-blog]

Lee Kuan Yew - One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs

Today, I interviewed someone for a job opening at Love With Food. The first thing he did was to offer his condolences for the passing of Mr Lee Kuan Yew. I choked and held back my tears. I had to pause for a moment to regain my composure. Normally, the phone interview was an hour long but today it was only thirty minutes. After the interview, I broke down.

Mr Lee Kuan Yew is the Founding Father of Singapore. He led the country from a third world to first in less than forty years. Back in the 60s. Singapore was a tiny tropical island that’s only 600 square kilometers (231 square miles) with no natural resources, no water, no military to protect herself, no economy, no stock exchange, nothing. Life was hard. And yet, under Mr Lee’s iron fist leadership, he increased GDP per person from $500 (USD) to more than $50,000 (USD), surpassing the U.S.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve never read The Art of War by Sun Tzu but I’ve read every book about Lee Kuan Yew. When I was growing up in Singapore, there were times I didn’t agree or understand Mr Lee’s policies. As I get older and have more responsibilities, I began to see his point of view and understand the “why” behind every decision he had made.

I’ve always admired Mr Lee as a great leader and statesman, but what I admired the most about him was his entrepreneurial vision and finesse. Singapore, after all was a startup back in the 60s. No funding, no branding, no marketplace and as the founder, Mr Lee had to build credibility from the ground up. To him, building Singapore was entrepreneurship at its best.

Being a startup founder is hard, and I find myself going back to his books to find strength and inspiration. At times when I had to make hard decisions, I always asked myself, “What would Mr Lee do?”. He has definitely shaped the way I lead and build Love With Food.

Beating the Odds

When I left Accenture (formerly known as Anderson Consulting) to join a much smaller consulting firm, the interviewing Manager asked, “Why do you want to join a small company?” and my response was “bigger doesn’t mean it’s better”. I said that because I’m from a very small country that beat all odds and size didn’t matter.

Growing up in Singapore from the 70s to the 90s, I’ve seen first hand how Singapore struggled and how Singapore prospered. To turn mud flats into a wealthy metropolitan city sounded impossible but Mr Lee turned the impossible possible.

When I decided to launch Love With Food, all I heard was the word “impossible”, my most hated word. I’m an immigrant. I wasn’t educated in the US, hence I didn’t have a network here. I’m a solo-founder. I have a weird name. I’m a woman. I’m not in my 20s. I’m not a typical white male in a hoodie (duh) who gets funded. Seriously?!? To me, these ridiculous reasons were just nonsense and I completely ignored them and went on to raise $2MM (USD) for Love With Food.

If a visionary and dedicated leader can lead a country out of poverty in four decades, who am I to give up just because someone told me I’m not a typical “fundable” founder? Seeing how Mr Lee transformed Singapore has given me a lot of strength running my startup and honestly, because of him, I don’t know how to give up.

Diversity, Meritocracy and Respect

Mr Lee was the product of the times. He lived through the British occupation, the Japanese occupation and then the brief governance by the Malaysian government when Singapore was part of Malaysia. During the three occupations by three different countries, Singapore was always a minority and treated unfairly. When Mr Lee took over the reigns, he had zero tolerance towards any forms of discrimination. Regardless of race, language, religion or gender, everyone was treated equally and great measures were taken to ensure racial harmony. Mr Lee once said “social cohesion through sharing the benefits of progress, equal opportunities for all and meritocracy, with the best man or woman for the job were the basic principles that have helped Singapore progress.”

Growing up in a multiracial country where the core values emphasized meritocracy and respect, I was taught I can achieve anything I want as long as I work hard. I work hard, I hustle harder. Life is not fair, that’s something I can’t control but I can control how hard I work. As I build the company culture, I also instill the values of hard work, respect and fairness in the company because these are the key ingredients to create progress.

Use Your Weakness As Your Strength

To Mr Lee, small countries are usually weak and vulnerable, “not masters of their own destiny”. Hence, small countries have to be better organized, alert and nimble to counter or evade threats and seize opportunities (source: Lee Kuan Yew’s Strategic Thought).

Small countries are just like any startups, we are small and insignificant. As a CEO, my key job is to make sure the company is organized and stay organized as we grow. I’m probably known to be OCD in my company but in situations where I needed to decide if we could spend another $20,000 - $40,000 on marketing and had only 5 minutes to make that decision, being organized helps me get to a quick yes or no.

As my country mourns the loss of a great leader and father, the world’s leaders have also lost a great friend (The world will miss Mr Lee Kuan Yew by Henry A. Kissinger, secretary of state from 1973 to 1977)

I’m a product of his life’s work and will forever be grateful to Mr Lee Kuan Yew for he has proven there’s no such thing as impossible.

[aihui-blog]

How to Build a Happy Startup Culture the Scrappy Way

Company culture can make or break a company. One of the companies with great culture that I really admire is PeopleSoft. PeopleSoft has been voted the best place to work in America countless times and they truly deserve it. I was fortunate to have worked there as an engineer and then as a pre-sales engineer. Whether I was a developer or in sales, I enjoyed everyday of it. I wasn't the first 20 employees. I was employee number 10,398. Prior to PeopleSoft, I worked at another two large corporations and I simply assumed happy culture didn’t exist in large organizations. That’s why I was so amazed how everyone treated each other like family even when there were 10,000 employees at PeopleSoft. Ensuring 20+ employees share the same values and practices might be a cakewalk, but having 10,000+ employees singing from the same page, practicing the same values all across the globe was a man-made wonder. And the man was Dave Duffield, one of the greatest American entrepreneur. 

Every new PeopleSoft employee gets a t-shirt with their employee number printed on the back. 12 years later, I still have this t-shirt. It's torn and tattered but I kept it as a memorabilia, to remind me what a great company it was and what type of company I want to build. I learned a lot while working at PeopleSoft but the most important lesson I learned was the intangible benefits of a great company culture, an absolute intangible asset that money can’t buy.

Building a team and culture should be championed from the top. Whether you know it or not, the culture of the company starts to morph from the first day you launch your company. Founders are the ones who set the stage, the culture usually mirrors the belief system of the founders. It's so important to set the values and tone right at the beginning. 

Startups are always cash-strapped but that shouldn’t stop any founders from building a great culture from the beginning. Building a great culture is a practice not an expenditure. These are some of the things we do at Love With Food to build a great culture and a great team.

1) Be a Compassionate Leader. Be hands on with everything in the company

As the founder, I’m also the one and only person in the company who has done everyone’s job. I wrote the code for the site, I pitched to brands, I built our Facebook following and even did customer support. Because I understand the challenges of each of these jobs, I’m able to set reasonable and yet demanding expectations and goals for everyone. When issues happen, I’m able to walk in their shoes, not panic and try to solve the problem together. When *shit* happens, and I’m not just talking about work, life events happen which may affect job performance, be understanding, be caring, be flexible because that’s the first step to building a great culture. 

2) Contract-to-Hire

Almost everyone at Love With Food was hired as a contractor for 3 months before being brought on board full-time. 3 months is a good time frame to test a new hire’s job performance and also a good period to see if the new hire fits the company culture.

3) Traveling as a team? Share a Room

Traveling to conferences can be expensive, especially when 3-5 team members have to attend together. To save money, we usually have 3-4 people share a room and the up side is team building. Sharing a hotel room is a great way for the team to bond outside work.

When I was invited to speak at the Hawaiian Food and Wine Festival in 2012, I decided to bring the team with me. Everyone worked really hard to get the company up and running, and the team deserved a much needed break. At that time, we were a team of 6. The 6 of us shared a tiny 2 bedroom condo for 4 days. We cooked together, hiked together, it was a memorable experience for the team. 

4) Annual April Fool’s Event

Every April Fool’s Day, it’s Love With Food's tradition to launch something ridiculous, like LoveWithWeed.com and LoveWithLuv.com. It’s great for publicity but the main reason why it’s a tradition for us is because it’s great for team building. This is the one event that everyone in the company will stop doing “real” work and go crazy with their ideas for 4 days. Trust me, it’s worth halting real work for 4 days. The hilarious ideas, laughter and humor is a great startup stress reliever!

5) Do Something Together

Plan to do something together every 6- 8 weeks. At Love With Food, we love to EAT.  One of the favorite things we do is potluck. We’ll agree on a common ingredient or theme and everyone will whip up their favorite dish regardless of your culinary skills or lack there of. The outcome is usually more amusing than appetizing.  We also love cards, beer and pizza night. Cards Against Humanity is our go to game. If your team are into sports, then plan a trip to support your local team, e.g. SF Giants!

6) Encourage Laughter - Gif Wars

Whether we are in the office or working from home, everyone is always on HipChat. There’s no rules about what can or cannot be said in the chat room, as long as it’s legal and not obscene. Our conversations are definitely about work but there’s no shortage of gif wars either! Humor is such a important part of our culture.

There are many ways to start planting the seeds for building a great culture in a startup. I would love to hear how you are building your culture at your startup!

[aihui-blog]

How I Met 75 Investors and Raised $650,000

Love With Food graduated from 500 Startups accelerator program about a year ago and we raised $650,000 in June of 2012. It was 3 painful months of fundraising. If you think fundraising is a piece of cake just because we were a 500 alum, think again! When I first began fundraising, all I hear was discouragement. Most will tell me the food space is hard, being a solo founder makes it even harder. Fundraising is one of the most painful things I've done in my life. It's physically exhausting and worst of all, it was mentally torturing. My mind started to play games with me, and every waking moment, I had to fight the thoughts of being a failure and was at the brink of giving up countless times. Not only I had to endure the heartaches of rejections, I had to defend myself against cynicism that I didn't have an Ivy league education hence I wasn't qualified to run a startup. There are many reasons not to fund Love With Food, but me not having a MIT/Stanford education is definitely not a legit and fair one. I remembered walking out of that meeting and said "Watch me BITCH, I'll prove you wrong." Prove her wrong, I did. In 3 months, I pitched to 75 investors and raised more money than we needed. People often ask me how I met 75 investors. Looking back, here are the 10 different things I did:

1) Wear your Company T-shirt

If you know me, you know that I'm always in my Love With Food t-shirt, jeans and a black blazer. In the usual fashion, I wore my Love With Food t-shirt to Women 2.0 conference last year. During lunch, this dude holler, "Hey, Love With Food. I read about your company. I'm intrigued. Tell me more!" It so happened that this dude is the partner at Blue Run Venture. After the conference, we met up again and he wrote me a check within a week.

2) Angel List

Be on Angel List. I can't stress enough how important it is to have your company profile on Angel List. After we started to trend on Angel List, we had many inbound interest. In the end, 3 investors on Angel List invested and one of them eventually became our lead. If it wasn't for Angel List, I wouldn't have met these 3 investors!

3) Be Flexible

Be ready to fly or drive to meetings at a moment's notice. There are days where I'll have 5 meetings back to back, starting in Palo Alto, to San Francisco, to Mountain View and then back to San Francisco. Yes, it's lots of driving and super out of the way, but being flexible helped me get investor meetings.

4) Reach Out to your Network

I'm very lucky to have many friends in the startup community. I reached out to my network of entrepreneur friends and asked for intros to their investors. Everyone I reached out to was so generous. My dear friend Amra Tareen, founder of AllVoices.com single handedly got me 10 meetings. Those days volunteering at Women 2.0 as the Pitch Director helped too. I got to know many investors over those 3 years of volunteering and it made it easier to reach out for help.

5) Don't Be Lazy. Follow Up with Updates

After every meeting, I'll write a thank you email and in the following weeks, I would continue to provide updates and progress to potential investors. This is of paramount important in fundraising. It's the only way to show persistence. For an early stage startup, there's really no good data to show other than persistence. You want your potential investors to see that!

6) Email Potential Investors Once a Week

Investors get pitched all the time. You want to be on their radar constantly so that they'll not forget about you. I kept a spreadsheet with their names and dates like when we first met, 1st progress email sent date, 2nd progress email sent date. After sending 3 update emails and I don't hear back, that's usually a sign that they are not interested. It's also a great way to sieve out those that are really interested vs maybes.

7) Pimp Your Ethnicity. Be Shameless.

I met an investor at an event and found out he invested in another subscription commerce company. In our brief conversation, I found out that he used to live in Singapore (where I'm from) and he speaks Mandarin. I really wanted him to invest! One thing Singaporeans love to talk about is FOOD and I made sure our conversation was filled with that. In the following 6 weeks, I would write him emails, leave voice mails in both English and Mandarin. You get the picture? He finally invested and I seriously think he wrote us a check so that I'll stop harassing him :)

8) Harass the Press

Love With Food received some press mentions on Techcrunch and Mashable before Demo Day. However the most impactful press coverage was the one written by Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch. She wrote about how I kidnapped her in the ladies room to get her to pick Love With Food as one of the Top 7 Startups on Demo Day. Two investors reached out after that article because they liked my tenacity, aka shamelessness!

9) Get Current Investors to Make Intros

Warm intros are the best intros. You current investors want to see you reach the finish line. Get them to pimp you to their other investor friends.

10) PitchCrawl

My friend, Tracy Lee runs DischCrawl and PitchCrawl, which is like speed dating for investors and entrepreneurs. I didn't know what to expect but we had 3 follow up meetings and 2 investors ended up investing.

There's no cookie cutter formula to fundraising but I believe the common denominator in fundraising is perseverance. 

[aihui-blog]

Top 10 Ways 500 Startups Open Doors for Love With Food

There are so many incubator/accelerator programs in Silicon Valley, e.g. Angel Pad, 500 Startups, YC, and each has a different application process, providing different levels of investment in exchange for equity. However, they all share a common trait, they aim to open doors for you, help propel you to the next stage of your startup growth. What they don't do is spoon-feeding. Hand holding not included.

Love With Food is fortunate to be part of 500 Startups (graduated Feb'12), one of the top 10 Startup incubators and accelerators in the world. Many have asked about my experience at 500 and also requested to be referred into the program. What shocked me was a common assumption, life after 500 is a bed of roses aka fund raising will be a smooth ride, getting press is a piece of cake! Haha, dream on! 500 will help open doors for you, but it's still up to you to hustle to make things happen. 

When I pitched to 500 almost a year ago, Paul Singh asked  "How big is your team" and my answer was "ONE". Yes, just me, from being the sys admin to Rails developer, from sales/marketing to customer support. Today, we are a team of 5.5. The 500 experience has definitely helped us grow in many unimaginable ways, more than I can list in this blog post, but here's the top 10.

1) Team

Yes, the $50K was helpful but the branding of 500 helped me convince 2 very talented individuals to join the team. Not everyone can work in a startup and Katie who was a food writer decided to take the leap of faith to join the roller-coaster startup ride. As everyone knows, talented engineers are hard to come by. I remembered reading Hendy's github account and knew he would be the ideal CTO. After a 20 minutes conversation, he hopped on the next flight and 17 hours later, he was working with us at 500. 

2) Workspace = Camaraderie

I really love the fact that we were given a workspace for 4 months. We were strangers on Day 1 but by the end of the 4 months, we were family. Working together helped us built a bond that I know will last a life time. It's amazing how we all came together to exchange ideas, lend a helping hand to one another. For me, I can't thank the class of F11 enough for cheering me along. Being a single founder is hard, but the support I've gotten helped me persevere on! 

3) Discounts = Save $$$

Heroku, Amazon, Sendgrid, Mailchimp, Rackspace, Optimizely and many more. I bet you use at least one of these service providers. As a 500 company, some of these are provided to us at a hugh discount or even FREE!!!

4) Mentors

Whether you are building a mobile app, an enterprise business or even an e-commerce startup, there's a hugh array of experienced entrepreneurs whom you can tap into. They are part of the 500 mentor network. I've reached out to several to talk shop, to learn from them and potentially partner with one another. Even when we needed physical help the first month we launched our boxes, mentors like James Levine and Hong Quan were eager to step up!

5) Community

500 is not just a 4-month experience. It doesn't end. 500 has invested in more than 300 startups and we are all brought together by this online community, sort of like a private quora. As startups, we are always faced with unknowns and questions, it's so easy to post your questions and everyone is always so eager to respond and help. This knowledge sharing is priceless. It's such a great platform to learn from other founders and hear their experiences. Need an intro to someone? Just ask, and someone in the community will try to help. I needed an intro to the founders of Warby Parker and one of the founders responded, "My brother-in-law might know one of the founders, I'll try to connect." I was floored!

6) Events / Talks

Need advice? Just reserve one of the many office hours slots at 500. Luminaries of Silicon Valley are often invited to speak at 500 too. All these internal events are awesome but 500 also partners with other events to bring more awesomeness to their portfolio companies, e.g. the upcoming Hawaiian Food and Wine Festival which Love With Food will be participating. Yippee!

7) Big Brands

500 is alway thinking of ways to partner with big brands and also help their portfolio companies partner with big brands. Over the last couple of months, we've been given the opportunity to present to top executives from General Mills, American Express and Disney.

8) Press

Demo Day, the day to showcase your startup to investors and also get press attention. Every Silicon Valley tech press was there and competing with other 30+ companies to get press attention wasn't easy. Thanks to Hong, my informant, I chased Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch (which you can read more here) into the bathroom and convinced her why she should pick us as one of the top seven. Being a female founder has its advantages! Demo Day is such a great event to build relationships with members of the press. A few months after Demo Day, some journalists actually contacted me to get a quote for their stories.

9) Investors

Some of the investors at Demo Day took a second meeting while other investors I met through other channels took a meeting because we were part of 500. The 500 brand acts as their filter. It has also helped us rise above the noise on AngelList where there are thousands of startups fundraising. Because of that, I actually met and closed three investors on AngelList.

10) Dave McClure

Dave McClure has invested in more than 300 companies and he truly cares about each one of them, but if you need his attention, you just need to yell louder than the rest. Back in February when we just started fund raising, I was struggling. I couldn't get enough meetings. All Dave said was 'You just need a little push.' And that little push started to snowball. I would text him at 1am for help, and he would reply at 1.05am. This guy is not human. He doesn't sleep. Whatever creature he is, I'm glad he's on our side :)

Startup life is never a cakewalk, not even after 500. The 500 experience will open doors for you and it's up to you to seize the opportunities and make things happen. 

[aihui-blog]

Happy Mother's Day, MOM. You are my STRENGTH.

Someone recently asked me if I became an entrepreneur because my parents were entrepreneurs themselves? Were they the source of my determination because they nurtured me to be an entrepreneur from young? It's pretty shocking to tell people my parents never had the chance to go to school. They grew up in a time when Singapore was still a third world country and don't even have easy access to clean water. Going to school then was a privilege. My mom is a homemaker and my dad is a car mechanic. In fact, I grew up most of the time without my dad. I think because of that, my mom was an ULTRA tiger mom.  By the age of 4, she would send us to music, ballet and swimming lessons. For someone who can't sit still, music and ballet is just not for me. Obviously I disappointed my mom quitting only after a week in tutu. Swimming was my love, I'm happy when I'm in the water. I spent the next 18 years training and competing as a swimmer, runner and also became the school captain of the netball team. I'm neither an Olympic athlete nor swimmer but I love this P&G commercial honoring moms of athletes.

[aihui-blog]

10 Best Usability Takeaways from Don't Make Me Think

As a web developer, I can easily write code and whip up new features. But are they usable? Would my users understand how to use them? I've built features that none of my users like or use and I have to painfully demolish my code to remove them! Yes, I have separation issues! I've been coding less now and reading more about design and usability. I've come to realize that I can build new features but that doesn't mean I should. I've heard so much about this book "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug and indeed, he shares so many great insights and helpful tips on usability. I highly recommend anyone doing business on the web to read it! Here are the 10 best takeaways for me:   1) Behaviors of Web Users - We don't READ, we SCAN - We love to muddle through to figure things out - We don't make optimal choices, we love to guess and there's no penalty when we guessed wrong 2) Design Pages like Billboards - Pages should be designed for scanning, not reading 3) Web Users like Mindless Choices - Mindless clicks are fine, as long as it leads to where the user is going - Rule of thumb: 3 mindless unambiguous clicks = 1 click that requires thought (and users don't like think when they are surfing) - Helping users to make choices mindlessly is the key to making a site easy to use 4) Words - Less is more because we SCAN and not READ - Remove half of the words on the current site - Remove unnecessary words like introductory text and wordy instructions 5) Web Users Navigate Sites like They are Shopping in Malls - We are creatures of habit, how we shop and surf the internet is the same. - For example, when we shop at Target looking for ladies PJs, we usually (A) walk into target -> go to Ladies department -> go to Sleepwear section or (B) ask a sale associate to show you exactly where the Ladies Sleepwear section is. - Scenario (A) is coming to a site's homepage -> main navigation -> sub navigation - Scenario (B) is coming to a site and using the search feature immediately 6) What Makes Well-Designed Pages? View a page at least an arm's length away to the extend that you are squinting. See if you can identify these: - Site Logo - What page are you on? (checking to see if the page title is clear) - What are the major sections of of this site, e.g. main navigation - What are the sub-navigations/sections of this page? - Can you recognize where you are on this site, e.g. "you are here" indicators? - How can you search? 7) What Makes a Well-Designed Homepage? - Needs a good tagline - Is it clear to users what's the point of this site? - Is it clear to users where to start? 8) It's a MUST to do Usability Testing - If you want a great site, you must test! - Testing 1 user is always better than testing none. - Test early in the project. - Testing is an iterative process. Test, fix and repeat! 9) How Many Testers - 3 - 4 testers is ideal. - Tester don't need to have domain knowledge about your site content. Anyone should be able to use a well-designed site. 10) What to Test? - Test your competitors' site to see what works and what doesn't. - There are 2 types of testing: "Get it" Testing, to test if users understand the purpose of the site, the value proposition and how it works. "Key task" Testing is to get users to perform tasks and see how well they perform. - Always start testing with the Homepage. Ask users what they think about it and where would they click on first? - After the homepage, get users to test 4-5 tasks and the entire test session should be less than 45 mins.

[aihui-blog]

View of an Overseas Voter - Singapore is no Frankenstein

In less than 24 hours, I'll be casting my first vote.  I'll be voting to elect the future leaders of Singapore in the Singapore election 2011. I've never voted in any election. It's a sad fact that many of my American friends find it hard to believe. Being an overseas Singaporean, I'm not allowed to vote until recently. I'm glad to see the change, but it took 12 bloody years for this to happen! To the rest of the world, Singapore election is a very boring event. In history, the ruling party always wins majority of the seats in Parliament due to lack of contest from any opposition parties. In 2001, the ruling party won 82 out of 84 seats. The same in 2006. It makes one question, are we that happy with the ruling party that they should remain in power, or do we not love our country's future enough to stand up against the ruling party? To me, a progressive country requires 2 key ingredients, astute leaders and passionate voters. A country will not grow and progress without these 2. Why run a country if there are no passionate voters, it's like operating Frankenstein, a country with no heart. After all, it's the people who defines the country, not her leaders.

Singapore election 2011 proves to the world she is no Frankenstein. 82 out of 87 seats are being contested. The founding fathers and ruling party should be proud and embrace the opposition nominees. It takes a lot of love for the country and dedication to be in politics. It's not a game for everyone. The tens of thousands of people who turned up at rally speeches prove to show Singaporeans do care. I've been watching the election from 10,000 miles away. It's definitely very different from elections in the US. The usual hotspots American elections dwell upon are education, healthcare, social security, taxes and the mammoth U.S. deficit. I've been a tax-paying resident in the U.S. for the last 12 years, and issues with education, healthcare, social security, taxes and U.S. deficit still exist, in fact worsen over time. How is that acceptable when these issues are the core foundation of any country? In fact, 1 in 4 children is hungry and living under poverty levels (watch 60 mins story here). So, is the American 1st world governing system that awesome? No human being is perfect, hence no country is perfect either. It's ok for politicians to make mistake, recognize it and fix it. But it's not ok to talk about it and show no results. There is really little to fix in Singapore, as compared to the U.S.. One thing the Singapore government has done fabulously well is education. No matter what's your financial background, you are guarantee a good education. That's not the case in the U.S.. I've friends who are willing to pay $15,000/ year for their kid's private education because they've lost hope in the U.S. public school system. So, what happens to families who can't afford private education for their kids? Waiting For Superman is a documentary that highlights how kids are being left behind. The Economist has recently pointed out Singapore's education miracle. It is the same sound education system that produced these promising opposition nominees. "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” We've learned to fish well to make intelligent choices. It's no small achievement for a country that 's less than 50 years old. Singapore government should be proud and embrace the People's voice because when voices unite, it's for the betterment of the country, not ruin it. The opposition parties aim to bring a different voice to the Singapore government. I don't believe in monopoly because over time, it'll be taken over by complacency. However, is a different voice better? How much is too much? I guess we'll have to wait and see.  It didn't work in the U.S. Maybe that's why only less than half of the U.S. population votes. There are many things I love about the U.S., but I wonder everyday where did my tax dollars go. No matter what's the outcome on election day, it is already a victory for Singapore because Election 2011 signifies progress, passion and love. Singapore is no Frankenstein.

[rebeccalynnmvp-blog]

[aihui-blog]

rebeccalynnmvp:

Engineers make the best marketers because, contrary to conventional wisdom, marketing is not a “soft science.” As a VC, I’ve done due diligence on hundreds of startups and am most impressed with those that run their marketing departments like engineering shops.

Taking an engineering...

[aihui-blog]

10 Facts About Hunger in America

(Source: Love With Food)

[aihui-blog]

Celebrating 35 Years as a Free Woman

I recently turned 35. It's probably safe to say I've reached my mid-life. Given how much I love fried chicken, living past 70 would be a bonus :) Why a free woman? Because not every woman in this world is free to live their lives. Everyday I'm thankful that I don't have to hide behind a burqa, I can drive, I can work and I can fall in love. Simple pleasures that enrich our everyday lives shouldn't be taken for granted. These are the things women in certain nations yearn for but may not ever experience them in their lifetime. Everyday, I'm thankful that I have a free life and not one for sale. I'm a fervent reader of the Afghan Women's Writing Project , a volunteer organization that empowers Afghan women to have a voice, a voice that's not censored or filtered, a voice with it's own rights. Life of an Afghan woman is beyond hard and yet these women fight tenaciously to live everyday. Many stories are heart-wrenching and many have brought tears to my eyes. One especially, which I bookmarked. The title reads "I Am For Sale, Who Will Buy Me?". This young woman was forced to marry a 40 year old man and the only way out was to buy her freedom. In a perfect world, when you are born, freedom should be part of the package. Apparently, in certain countries like Afghanistan, freedom comes with a price tag, a woman's life is priced like a piece of meat in the market. It's absolutely outrageous and makes me so furious. I am SO thankful that I was born in a modern world (Singapore) and I now live in a modern world (U.S.) and in a modern world, freedom and equality is a basic human right. While Afghan women have to find secret ways to write and have their voices heard by the world, we in Silicon Valley are arguing and debating on the topic on why there are so few women in tech. Just because someone noticed the ratio of women vs. men in tech is 4:1, finger pointing began and created a nonsensical talking point out of it. Fact: When I was a undergrad Computer Science student, there were more boys than girls. Fact: When I go to a Ruby meetup, there are more pizza than girls. Fact: I'm in technology, running a startup, and have no babies because it's my choice. It's not a blaming game and I agree with Michael Arrington when he wrote "Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men." While it's not a good sample size, but at my age, most of my friends already have at least 2 kids and I'm the only one running a startup. There is some truth to what Penelope Trunk wrote "Women Don’t Want To Run Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children". Whether women choose to be in tech, it's a choice. Whether we choose to be mothers, it's a choice. Whether we choose to do both at the same time, it's still a choice. At the end of the day, we have choices in our modern world. We are free to make any decision that's best for our lives, because we are free women. Be thankful and celebrate.

Photo source: Kawetijoru

[aihui-blog]

Tax Datelines for a Corporation

Part of bootstrapping a startup is to learn every aspect of running a business, from paying taxes to SEO, from social media to server setup! In a nutshell, do it all yourself! One of the most confusing things is paying taxes and there are so many datelines. It's SO important not to miss a dateline because IRS is seizing every moment to fine you a penalty. These are important datelines for a Delaware Corporation run in the State of CA.

Mar 1st State of Delaware - Due date to file an Annual Report and pay franchise tax http://corp.delaware.gov/frtax.shtml There are 2 ways to calculate Delaware franchise tax. Most corporations would use the Assumed Par Value Capital Method unless their authorized shares have no par value.

In order to use the Assumed Par Value Capital Method, you'll need 3 important numbers

- Total Gross Assets,

- Total Authorized Shares (aka maximum number of shares a company can issue)

- Par value of the authorized shares.

Total Gross Assets is the "total assets" reported on the U.S. Form 1120, Schedule L (Federal Tax Return form) for the relevant tax year. Because of this, it's essential to get Corporate Tax (both Federal and State) completed before Mar 1st even though the dateline to file Corporate Tax is Mar 15.

DE Quarterly Tax Due Dates

If DE taxes is $5,000 or more, then quarterly taxes are due on 6/1, 9/1, 12/1, 3/1  

Federal and State Quarterly Tax Due Dates Quarterly taxes are due 4/15, 6/15, 9/15, 12/15 Where to pay online? Delaware Franchise Tax - http://corp.delaware.gov/achChgInfo.shtml Federal Tax, EFTPS Online - https://www.eftps.gov/eftps/ It's cool that you can schedule federal quarterly tax deduction in advance so that you can set it up once and forget about it for the year. California Franchise Tax - http://www.ftb.ca.gov/online/payment_choices.shtml

My corporation didn't make any money, do I still have to pay and file taxes?

YES, you do! Even when the corporation makes a loss, it's mandatory to pay CA and DE minimum franchise tax. As of writing, here are the minimums:

CA - $800 franchise tax

DE - $75 franchise tax + $50 annual filing fee 

Photo By: alancleaver_2000 

[aihui-blog]

Rails has_and_belongs_to_many VS has_many :through

It's really easy to setup a many-to-many relationships in Rails. There are 2 ways of doing this: 1) has_and_belongs_to_many association 2) has_many :through

I'm not going to touch on the details of each because there's great documentation provided in the above links. However, I do want to point out the flaws and limitations of has_and_belongs_to_many association. Like in this example,

Photo Credit: http://guides.rubyonrails.org

the way to connect the assemblies and parts models is to create a table (named after both models, assemblies_parts) with 2 columns, assembly_id and part_id. It's a table not a model. It's definitely much easier to create a has_and_belongs_to_many association than has_many :through but  has_and_belongs_to_many association doesn't work in most real life situations. 1) Notice there's no id column in the assemblies_parts model? Because of this, there's no way to add additional attribute to this table. Let's say you want to know which assembly/part combination is the most popular. In a has_and_belongs_to_many association, you can't add an additional attribute, e.g. popular_count to the table. 2) As there's no model created, there's no way to add validations or callbacks in a has_and_belongs_to_many setup. I learned it the hard way and had to convert my code from has_and_belongs_to_many to has_many :through. As your app gets more complicated with rules and processes, make sure your associations is setup in a way that's flexible enough to incorporate the changes easily. Moving forward,  my choice is to always use has_many :through because I don't want to create road blocks for myself down the road.

[aihui-blog]

State of the Online Porn Industry!

Here are some interesting stats on the online porn industry, shared by the folks at OnlineMBA.com. The industry is worth $5 BILLION and surprising enough, UTAH leads the WAY!

Via: Online MBA

[aihui-blog]

Life is full of adventure, it's just not a bed of roses!

~ aihui

[aihui-blog]

Ruby Version Manager - Project Pledge of the Month

Soon-to-be released Rails 3.0 only works on Ruby 1.8.7 and above. Can't wait but I still have other projects on Ruby 1.8.6. How can I install 2 or more versions of ruby on one machine? No biggy, Ruby Version Manager (RVM) is here to the rescue. With RVM installed, I'm now allowed to install multiple ruby environments with it's own sets of gems. Life prior to RVM, I used to create different virtual boxes, each box with it's own versions of ruby, rails and gems so that I can keep things separate for testing. It's not the best solution till RVM came along. This is why I made a pledge and donated to show my support for the RVM project!

Here's some instructions to install RVM, Ruby and Rails on Mac OS 10.5:

1) Go to http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rvm/install/

2) Follow direction to install rvm via Github Repository

Run this command in Terminal

mkdir -p ~/.rvm/src/ && cd ~/.rvm/src && rm -rf ./rvm/ && git clone --depth 1 git://github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm.git && cd rvm && ./install

3) Add this line (after path) to .bash_profile

a) sudo nano ~/.bash_profile

b) then add this line of code below PATH

if [[ -s /Users/aong/.rvm/scripts/rvm ]] ; then source /Users/aong/.rvm/scripts/rvm ; fi

c) refresh .bash_profile => . ~/.bash_profile

4) rvm -v in Terminal (to check if it's working)

5) install ruby using rvm 

rvm install 1.8.7

6) Type rvm list in Terminal => to check what ruby versions were created

7) To switch between ruby version => rvm 1.8.7, then ruby -v, it should show you 1.8.7 (or whatever version you've installed in step 5)

8) To go back to system default version, type this in terminal => rvm system

9) Install Rails. Make sure you are in the right version of ruby.

gem install rails -v 2.3.5 --include-dependencies (SUDO is not needed when using rvm)

10) Because gems in each rvm version is independent, you'll need to reinstall relevant gems that are needed for this ruby version, e.g. install database gem 

gem install sqlite3-ruby

gem install rspec-rails

There's also a cool Railscast about Rails 3 and RVM by Ryan Bates here

Love it? You can show your support here:

[aihui-blog]

Ruby Array vs Trie - Which Performed Better?

Recently I took a Ruby class, taught by Sarah Allen and one of the most fun things I learned was profiling. Performance testing is such a crucial part of software development. Prior to Sarah's class, the most common way to store and retrieve data is via an array. For example in a dictionary example, I would normally do this:

To add a word to a dictionary def add(word)   @words << word end

To find a word in a dictionary def find(prefix)  @words.find_all {|w| w =~ /^#{prefix}/} end 

See dictionary_array.rb in my github account for more details.

In class, we were introduced a new data storing structure, called Trie, inspired by Tyler McMullen's LA RubyConf 2010 talk: http://www.scribd.com/doc/27149829/Alternative-Data-Structures-in-Ruby It's like storing each character in a tree and creating branches of a tree based on the word inserted into the dictionary.

To add a word to a dictionary def add(word,subtree=@tree)     if word.size == 0       subtree[:terminal] = true     else       first_char = word[0]       rest = word[1..-1]       subtree[first_char] ||= {}       add(rest, subtree[first_char])     end   end To find a word in a dictionary def find(prefix)     subtree = walk(prefix)     return [] unless subtree     return words(subtree, prefix)   end

See trie_dictionary.rb in my github account for more details.

So which performs better, an ARRAY or TRIE?

We used a profiling/performance testing tool called Ruby-Prof to find out! These were the steps taken to perform the test:

1) Install ruby-prof (http://ruby-prof.rubyforge.org/)

sudo gem install ruby-prof

2) Create a script to do the following: a) Open and read a large data set, e.g. more than 10,000 rows of data. In my experiment, I used a file with lots of products. http://github.com/aihui/ruby_prof_test/blob/master/products.csv

b) Insert the large data set (products.csv) into the array or trie. Add RubyProf.start to this section of code so that we can monitor the performance.

#read file and put words into dictionary RubyProf.start   file.each do |data|    d.add(data)   end result = RubyProf.stop

c) Find products that begin with "fr" in the array or trie. Add RubyProf.start to this section of code so that we can monitor the performance.

RubyProf.start   found = d.find(search_text) foundresult = RubyProf.stop 

d) Write the results of each test into their respective files, e.g. results for adding words and results for finding words.

A dictionary_test.rb file was create for step(2). I switched the "require dictionary_array" and "require trie_dictionary" accordingly, depending on what test I'm running.

3) Run the ruby file and you'll see the results file being produced too. ruby dictionary_test.rb

Results Based on the results below, it shows adding to an array is definitely faster. However, searching through a trie yields way better performance! It took 0.069465 seconds to search through an array while it ONLY took 0.000049 seconds to search through a trie!