In our recent AQUMON SmartTalk, we invited Victor Lang, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Gini, a Hong Kong fintech startup, to share his experience in starting and managing a startup in Hong Kong. Here are a few key takeaways:

 

1. Product launch: It is not ideal to launch a product with bugs, but versus launching a ‘perfect’ product, the urgency of launching is more important and afterwards your customers will point you in the right direction. 

 

2. Balancing existing customers and future customers: The needs of the 2 groups are different and it is essential to strike a balance. 

 

 

Victor’s entrepreneurial story and how he came to co-found Gini

 

Victor started investing in distressed assets/ real estate in the US after he graduated from university. Subsequently, he founded a bio-tech/ pharmaceutical company that makes human tissues and sold it to a NASDAQ-listed company. In 2016, he left the US and came to Hong Kong to co-found Gini, a personal finance app, with his brother Calvin and cousin Ray. The name “Gini” comes from the term Gini Coefficient (which measures the income or wealth gap within a nation’s population).

 

 

 

Product Launch

 

“If you are not ashamed of your first product, you launch it too late.”

 

Victor talked about the fact that, the first version of any product is always imperfect, especially for mobile apps. The first version of Gini was, in his words “terrible”.  He was determined to set the launch date in the following February a year before the launch, but the company barely had enough engineers and product managers. But Victor was determined to set the date anyway because he understood the importance of timing and goal setting. 

 

During the early days, Victor described debugging via a huge excel worksheet in order to compile similar bugs together for software engineers to solve them. Eventually, they improved the product after their less than ideal first version.

 

Victor’s point is that it is not ideal to launch a product with bugs, but versus launching a ‘perfect’ product, the urgency of launching is more important and afterwards your customers will point you in the right direction. To understand their customers’ needs, Gini has user testing every week and many internal surveys. Gini will also look at and use other APPs for ideas.

 

 

More on existing customers and future customers.

 

Victor outlined the difficulty of balancing the needs between existing customers and future customers. Your existing customers are very important and need to be taken care of as they are already your customers; but existing customers are often ‘early-adopters’; their needs are different from the future users who fall into the ‘early majority’ and ‘late majority’ category.

 

It is essential to strike a balance.

 

Similar to the idea of diffusion of innovations, early adopters need to be taken care of in order for the word of mouth to be spread out, but they are often the minority in the whole cycle. Early majority and late majority account for a much higher percentage of the total customers and their needs are different and innovators need to adjust accordingly (sometimes dramatically). Please see the below graph for more information (the blue represents the groups of users adopting a new technology and yellow is the change in market share):

 

We really appreciate Victor for his sharing at AQUMON’s Smart Talk. It gave a lot of us a lot of creative ideas and motivation to continually improve. Looking forward to our next Smart Talk sharing!

 

 

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