Showing posts with label Jibao. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jibao. Show all posts

Friday, January 22, 2016

Kevin Chen leads the Sales Kickoff Meeting for
Hwashing Publishing and Jibao team held in
Xceleration Labs Taipei offices this week.

Our very own Kevin Chen, Insitti (a partner organization of Xceleration Labs in Taiwan), leads the kick off sales meeting for Hwashing Publishing and Jibao as they tackle the Taiwan High School market.

2015 cycle had been the initial introduction of Jibao System cloud computing software to teachers featuring it's unique concept map nodes imbedded with text, photos, url links and video. This years version features an innovation easy to use presentation tool, which allows teachers to easy and efficiently grab text, photos, video and urls for their slide building.

More to come as we track their progress!
It's a New Year! Tis the Season of Sales Kickoff!
Friday, January 22, 2016

It's a New Year! Tis the Season of Sales Kickoff!

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Kevin Chen leading the kick off for Jibao-Hwashing Year 2
It's that time of year again! With the guidance of Kevin Chen, founder and lead consultant of Insitti Consulting, Jibao and Hwashing work together at their annual kick off meeting for the coming year's push of the Jibao Solution to Taiwan's High Schools. Mr. Chen teaches the group to search for the hidden needs and not the obvious surface requests made by the target audience. Jibao still going strong! Add oil!

Proceeding held at the Howard Plaza International House in Taipei.


Diane explains the upcoming joint effort. 

Led by Kevin Chen; Jibao kicks off their Year 2 Collaboration with Hwashing Publishing
Saturday, December 12, 2015

Led by Kevin Chen; Jibao kicks off their Year 2 Collaboration with Hwashing Publishing

Monday, September 7, 2015

In Jibao's first push of it's product into the market this past spring (2015), demonstrations of the product both in it's on-line web version and also it's iOS app version to Taiwan's High School teachers gained universal approval. More than 85% of Taiwanese High School Teachers stated that they liked and would use the product in a classroom setting. The thrust of teacher feedback was that they felt it would change the dynamic of classroom lecturing and presentation - making for a more exciting, captivating and interactive learning experience for students.

To this end, Jibao's next phase will be for universal adoption of the Jibao System by spending the summer working with teachers to get better hands on feedback for future improvements. (Please see original blog in Mandarin @ Jibaoviewer Blog)

Teachers and Jibao team members
FROM JIBAOVIEWER BLOG:
We were glad to successfully hold our Jibao Workshop! Teachers brought their classroom materials to share with us at Jibao Offices. The Jibao team worked with teachers to better utilize and apply Jibao in a classroom setting.

Jibao team observing their teachers using the Jibao system
Teacher feedback was "We've been teaching for many years, and know a lot about how to do so, but we are eager to learn more about applying technology in the classroom. Technology is a tool, and if used correctly, it can make the classroom come to life, igniting learning."


Teacher applying what they learned in their preparation of materials for Fall semester.
After this workshop, Jibao received many different perspectives and useful suggestions. Teachers provided the team with new ideas. We look forward to bringing a whole new experience to the classroom for the first day of school!
_____
Guest Blogger: Ting-li Wu
About Ting-li Wu. A graduate of Taiwan's top ranked university, National Taiwan University ("NTU"), Ms. Wu runs the Jibaoviewer Blog @ http://jibaoviewer.blogspot.tw/. When she's not running Jibao's education blog, Ms. Wu is busy helping teachers make the most of Jibao's system in the classroom through a multi-prone effort that includes, but is not limited to, implementation, customer service, product introduction and training. 
Jibao's Future Classroom Workshop: Gaining Insight into Teacher's in Action
Monday, September 07, 2015

Jibao's Future Classroom Workshop: Gaining Insight into Teacher's in Action

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

As a startup founder, you're inundated with stuff to do. If it's not worrying about investors, it's where the next dollar will come from, to things breaking in production or worrying about how to settle team members as they face the uphill climb.

Diane of Jibao at our recent weekend recruiting event.
In this blog, we've talked about not lurching from one idea to another, as well as finding your North Star, but one important thing to do, especially in this day and age of talent shortage and team capability challenges, is to always and continually be recruiting. As a leader, you want to keep up your network of contacts and maintain a stack of resumes of potential hires.

This seems like another big chore, but it's necessary, and potentially not as onerous as you may expect. Now, the advice isn't to drop everything that you're doing and begin running a ton of searches for potential team members, but it's more of adding the resume gathering and recruiting process as an element in your daily routine.

We all know that once the decision is made to hire someone for an identified open position the merely act of getting the word out and cast the net to get interviewees into the office is a 2-3 month process. That 2-3 months for most startups is a lifetime and often includes a pivot already. If you continually maintain a list of strong and prospective candidates for future open decisions, you'd be able to short cut this time, and go straight to bringing folks into the office for formal interviews.

The Jibao team at a recent job fair. Left to right: Hannah, interested candidate, Diane and Chloe of Jibao.
It starts with simple tasks such as picking up the phone and contacting someone to see how they're doing and how's their current work going. Maintaining some semblance of contact, so that when the time comes to actually recruit them, it won't come out of the blue. If your preference is text, than an email or text message wouldn't be hurt either.

Left to right: Tingli, Diane (standing), Chloe and Hannah reviewing resumes of potential candidates
Perhaps once a week instead of desk dining by yourself or going out to lunch with your current team, invite a prospective candidate to lunch. . . especially someone you'd think would make a good future teammate. Of course, don't invite a candidate you've never met before to lunch. . . they might get the wrong idea! But if they're a past classmate, past teammate or someone you've met at a startup event, maintain the touch points.

Left to right: Hannah and Diane hitting the phones to set up initial interviews with potential candidates
If you keep up this process for a period of time, you should be able to maintain either a physical stack or electronic file of many strong candidates for when the time comes to pull the trigger for a hire.

Recruitment and keeping an open file of potential team members is an often overlooked task of a leader, and often the opportunity cost of not preparing ahead of time will hurt your overall effort. So good luck with your recruitment efforts and resume gathering!

By the way, Jibao Team is recruiting engineers. For more info, please go to Jibao's blog.


Recruit, Recruit, Recruit: Keeping a List of Prospective Startup Team Members
Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Recruit, Recruit, Recruit: Keeping a List of Prospective Startup Team Members

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

After two plus years of discussing the idea and white boarding all sort of possible business models, it came time for Jibao's Founder, Kimble Wan, and myself to find someone to help us visualize the new education technology service platform. As I mentioned in my previous post, I'd discovered that I typically can not "visualize for sh*t."

THE CONCEPT
We had been schooled by a PhD Student at National Taiwan University ("NTU"), who we'll reference as Xiao Chang. He told us of the need to help students make connections between concepts, rather than the traditional way of merely listing information. To this end, Xiao Chang had even sketched out his concept in a workflow for us to better understand. Even though concept maps have been around for 50 years, we felt this was a novel concept, and we really liked the idea.


Initial Presentation of Concept by Xiao Chang

MISTAKEN ASSUMPTIONS
Looking to take Xiao Chang's initial sketches and turn them into something more visual, we sought out engineers. This didn't turn out the way, we had hoped. Two months of meetings typically went as such:
"What is it that you want?" asked the engineer.
"We want a new kind of education platform that involves a concept map," we'd reply.
"Where are your specs?"
"We don't have specs, as our idea is evolving, but we have some samples of what we'd like it to look like."
"Sure, but where are your specs?"
"We don't have specs."
"So, this is a new service, unlike any others?"
"Pretty much."
Needless to say, we didn't gain any "fruits of our labor" from the two months of solid meetings with engineering teams. (When I look back now, we must have sounded like a bunch of "loons").

What Kimble and I felt like should have been an easy exercise, turned out to be an odyssey. We knew that one of the big differentiators for the service was this Concept Map. Thus, we didn't want to give up.

Since it was becoming pretty obvious that this tactic of "hiring" the engineer wasn't working, we settled on searching for a designer instead. Designers! They should be able to help us visualize something that didn't exist. After all it is called visual arts, right?

Unfortunately, we ran into the same problem of trying to describe something that wasn't pre-existing. We thought that by presenting many popular concept map-like sites or apps that a designer could come up with something close to what we were looking for. Unfortunately, this wasn't so, and in fact, no designer wanted to take on a project with clients who didn't seem to know how to verbalize their visualization.

Early concept of Jibao concept map

DOCUMENTATION
Persistence. We didn't give up, and instead felt that perhaps some sort of documentation would help. We came up with a 22 page document that acted as a request for proposal (RFP). The document described the basic premise of the problem or current situation, our proposed solution and the how & who would pay. Most importantly, the document included a lot of the high level functions that we believed we would need. This document was sent out to some of the engineers and designers that we had met over the previous four months. Even with the document, we had engineers turn down the request for proposal, because they couldn't be bothered with "applying" or "bidding" for the job. We even had one twenty year veteran team suggest that we do a six month research study (no actual coding) and pay for the research!

WIREFRAME MOCK UP
Through this process, we finally hired a team and got our initial designs out of this process, or what we've come to call internally the "green concept map". With this early working "mock up," we'd already gotten favorable reviews from teachers in controlled settings. The importance of this phase is that we were able to show outsiders something with movement and some "fanciness"; some colors with art and design.

WORKING DEMO
Finally, we were able to connect with Augus Chen of OG Design and Jonathan Shieh of Little Robot Studio to come up with the current Concept Map for the Jibao System. The design not only helped Kimble and I to visualize the Jibao System, but far exceeded what we could have hoped for.

Jibao System GA Version
(Image from OG Design)
PROTOTYPE
With the help of Paul Shih's engineering team, Fable, and our own product developer extraordinaire Tony Ming, we were able to build a web prototype as well as iOS Version that we've been demonstrating to teachers throughout Taiwan since the beginning of the year.

We no longer have to rely on our own visualizations to gain a common understanding between founders and our users. Jibao's evolution, from whiteboard concept to reality, took the steps of Concept Documentation, Wireframe Mock Up, Working Demo, Prototyping and beyond. In doing so, Jibao achieved 80-85% likelihood of use rates after showing the Jibao system to over 100 high schools and 400-500 teachers. This would not have happened if we had merely tried to just "visualize" the product.


Whiteboard to Reality: Part 2 of 2, I Can't Visualize for Sh*t!
Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Whiteboard to Reality: Part 2 of 2, I Can't Visualize for Sh*t!

Saturday, March 14, 2015

In an earlier post, I shared the five basic guidelines for doing sales demos for technology products.

Tony and Haichen working on some of the print materials to support our sales efforts.

Just to refresh your memory, in the previous post on doing a sales demo, the five guidelines were:

1. KNOW your demo.
2. They've NEVER seen it before (meaning your product)
3. It's a STORY
4. Focus on BIG CONCEPTS
5. Fill in the DEAD air

Haichen, Chloe and Augus reviewing Jibao Service.

After working with sales team over the last couple of weeks, I'm reminded of 3 other corollaries:

A. Don't be TOO smart; aka "Keep it Simple."
Do not feel compelled to explain all 247 features and functions. Lots of salespeople doing a demo, want to "show off" their knowledge. This is essentially self indulgent. Your audience doesn't need to know how smart you are, they need to GET your product. Keep it simple. This is similar to the "Focus on the Big Concepts."

Watch out. If you're a high achieving person, especially one who's gone to a very good university, this will be a bad tendency of yours. Stop "showing off." It's not about you. It's about your audience.

B. Don't over explain.
If your audience doesn't ask, don't explain. Don't over explain. When in doubt, consult corollary A: Keep it Simple.

Often times, when you're unsure about your product, or get defensive about the product, you may keep rattling on and on. Stop. Don't explain anymore. Let your audience ask you a questions, don't anticipate what they're going to ask and as a result, keep droning on with answers. And when they ask a question, keep the answer brief. Don't over elaborate.

The other cause of over explaining occurs when you don't have a good written script, and you wing it. Examples of over explaining would be, "here's the icon for the trash can. I don't need to explain what the trash can is for, since you probably know what it is. So, I won't explain what this trash can does. . . " If you don't need to explain it, don't bother saying you don't need to explain. Simply, say, "This is the trash can" and move on!

Nothing says, "I don't know my own product," like a lengthy, unsuccinct answer. You end up coming off unprofessional and unknowledgeable, exactly the opposite of what you're trying to accomplish.

C. Act as if it's a given.
Don't feel like you need to justify things in the product. Use phrases like, "we're like all software services" or "as with most services, we also do the following," this is what we offer as well, or will require you to do as well.

Happy Demoing!
Doing the Sales Demo Addendum: 3 Corollaries to Consider.
Saturday, March 14, 2015

Doing the Sales Demo Addendum: 3 Corollaries to Consider.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Employee Weiya performance at leading hotel chain in Taiwan
Professionals entertaining the hard working employees at one of the leading bakery cafe chains in Taiwan.
With the Weiya season at a close (Weiya - a tradition especially in Taiwan of celebrating Tu Di Gong, the god of wealth and merit, and marking the end of the Lunar Year. It's an opportunity for employers to thank their employees for all the hard work of the past year), it's time to dust off those business plans and focus, re-focus, and/or pivot.

PROS/CONS of BUSINESS PLANS
Lots of debate surrounding business plans, whether to do them or not is the question. The Cons are a startup team hiding out in their business plan process, determined to get their plan exactly "right" before moving forward. Or the concern that putting down every thought in 88 pages of documentation, only to abandon it with the next monthly pivot. Time better spent doing something else? 

Jibao Team celebrating at their Weiya. Left to right: Augus, Chloe, Diane, Hai Chen and Paul.

In sales, we're often taught to "Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan." The Pro of doing a business plan is that it forces you to think through your ideas and the mere act of committing them on paper helps to clarify your messaging. 

Do you need a completely polished and typo free business plan? Its depends. Are you creating it for an investor? Or do you need some guiding principles to clarify your thoughts and share with your teammates and partners? I'm more for the later. Some of the teams under Xceleration Labs guidance have recently committed to paper their business plans (even after months and years of operations). 

BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS
If a business plan sounds daunting, try out the Business Model Canvas, an excellent Lean Startup tool, to help clarify your thinking. There are plenty of excellent guides out there to help you clarify your thoughts. Ash Maurya does an excellent tutorial that you can find on youtube. 

PATISCO
CEO Even Chung of Patisco hard at work on his Business Plan
After you've used the business model canvas to work through your thinking, that should help guide your business plan, as it has guided Patisco's re-focused plan. More to come in a later blog post. Hint: 2015 should see a rapid expansion into more business lines and more geographies.

KUKY WORLD
Another team, Kuky World, had the advantage of attending a business school class and get guidance from one of their Professor to develop a more traditional institutional investor oriented business plan. 

For this exercise, the Kuky team (Yale Entrepreneurial Institute Summer Fellow) was asked to create a more focused and niche marketed plan. This plan should serve as a great jumping off point to build one of the most unique and "kooky" e-commerce sites to come along in a while. 

Kuky World will bridge Chinese designers and Chinese manufactured products with US audiences. Stay tuned, as it should be an interesting entrant into the highly competitive e-commerce marketplace. CEO Mavi Miller is banking on her curating skills to carry the day, and she is quite the fashionista, as an excerpt from the Kuky business plan attests, "For the last ten years, Miller has been passionate about finding unique products. Colleagues, friends and strangers on the street regularly ask her where she bought these items." - a reference to the unique items she may be wearing or carrying at the moment!


That's all for now, we say good bye to the Year of the Horse, and wish everyone happiness, health and good fortune for the coming Year of the Ram. Happy Business Planning!

Aki's name card at Fable/Dr. Finance Weiya.


Dust Off Your Business Plan Startups! It's Post-CNY.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Dust Off Your Business Plan Startups! It's Post-CNY.

Friday, January 23, 2015

"Focus!" says Kimble Wan. "Focus! Focus! That's what Aki tells us." We're glad that Kimble, founder of Jibao, has learned this important lesson in his startup venture. In the beginning of many startup ventures, we often help to try to find the team's North Star. A basic direction and focus that the venture will be about. In some cases, it's what the founders what to be about. This is akin to finding a vision and mission statement.

Jibao Team. From left to right: Tony, Hai Chen, Chloe, Augus and Aki,
discussing a new build for Jibao's March 2015 release.
After finding your North Star, the founders and team are off to the races. Along the way, they are often distracted and lose their way. Typically, this is because they've now tried to step out of the building in an effort to learn about the marketplace and their audience. At this moment, a common occurrence is for the founders to get too much feedback from friends, audience, VCs, consultants and other well meaning people. The result is often the confusion from all the shiny keys. Like a cat in a youtube video chasing every shiny object available, the typical co-founder goes through the same motions of chasing a seemingly endless supply of opportunities.

These are indeed false idols and should be recognized as such.

Step 1: Find Your North Star

Step 2: Focus

Step 3: When in doubt, refer to Step 2 - Focus!

The most tempting advice is when an esteemed advisor tells you of another great idea, or another trend they read about recently on a blog or in the startup media, and then suggest you should follow that idea. Have the courage to follow your North Star, and then have the determination to stay focused. What is focus? Executing your plan against your North Star. Remember this isn't an annual goal necessarily, but instead what is the focal point of the startup.

In the case of Jibao, it's all about providing an educational tool for teachers, our greatest resource and influencers on our children, the next generation of movers and shakers. (See www.jibaoviewer.com and Jibao Blog)

You have a limited amount of money, time and effort. Stay the course, stay focused and good things will happen!


Focus, Focus, Focus! A Startup Mantra
Friday, January 23, 2015

Focus, Focus, Focus! A Startup Mantra

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

This is a continuation of some ruminations on recent and continual advocacy of "Getting Out of the Building." Part 1
Jibao Team hard at working looking for ways to solve customer challenges.
The team from left to right: Gino, Paul, Augus, Kimble and Tony (standing).


Yes, it makes sense to design a product or service by asking potential customers if they would buy it, by offering them a view into a minimum viable product (MVP) or even a pretotype (pretend prototype). That said, how do you make sense of the feedback, how do you know if they'll ACTUALLY buy the product once it's marketed? We all understand the conventional wisdom that you have to ask the right questions. But that seems to leave too much to chance. The random whimsy of the consumer population chancing after the next trend, twitter or lasting posting on Facebook.

A potentially better method is to use the tried and true method of solution selling. Focus not on your product, but on understanding the potential customer's needs (whether explicit or implicit). Demonstrate a mastery of a customer's challenges and that specific domain. That way, you're in a position to make the right and trusted recommendation for the solution (which typically will be your product/service or something that's a compliment to existing product solution). Get a customer to understand that NOT only is their current challenge worthy of making a change, but helping them see the reasons to change NOW. And finally, when they're ready to make the change - to select your product/service as the solution to help them get on their way.

Find a better way. It's not just about getting out of the building, but also finding what your product/service will solve in the potential customer's life. Even if its simply a value add.

Better than just getting out of the building and doing a survey, really dive down to understand a potential client's challenges and their everyday issues. If you, yourself can't figure it out, ask domain experts. Align yourself with someone who's from that particular field. Asking the right experts is sometimes more important than merely asking the customer.

Good luck with figuring out what your product/service solves.
"Getting Out of the Building": Not always the way for a Startup Part 2 of 2
Wednesday, December 17, 2014

"Getting Out of the Building": Not always the way for a Startup Part 2 of 2

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Jibao Team Members at NTU Internship Fair - from left to right: Diane, Chloe and Leo.
This past Saturday along with many other startup teams, ventures and a few incubators, Jibao joined the fun and excitement that is the NTU Internship Fair. This is an annual event that has now reached increasing crowds of young NTU students (and others) looking for a chance to join a worthy startup venture and make a difference.

Jibao team was in attendance as well, and got a chance to meet and greet many intern hopefuls and even a few looking for full time work. The entire event was organized and orchestrated by Jibao's own intern, Chloe. From prepping the schedule to picking the unified color tops (navy blue), the event by all accounts was a success. The day was a great chance for team members to hone their pitch as they spent 3-5 minutes on average to explain to potential interns what Jibao is all about.
Team Jibao demo'ng the iPAD version of Jibao to potential candidate.
In the foreground is Chloe with Leo in the background.

Swooning from the terrific day spent sharing ideas and even getting a few of their own from visits with many talented startup teams at the 3 story venue, the team is busy back at the office scheduling interviews and finalizing candidates for internship positions in sales and marketing as well as engineering. Stay tuned!
We Want YOU!: Jibao hunts for Team Members at NTU Event
Thursday, December 11, 2014

We Want YOU!: Jibao hunts for Team Members at NTU Event

Friday, December 5, 2014

An important part of working together on a startup venture is to take the time out every now and then to celebrate the journey. It is easy to get caught up in the daily grind, pivoting and ups & downs, but never take a moment to "smell the coffee". If you don't take the time together to slow down and celebrate, even small victories or just each other's company, you'll never do it.

Jibao team recently had an opportunity to do so, despite the team's heavy and busy schedule. The team celebrated a six month turnaround from its May alpha build to a revamped iOS summer build as well as a completely rewritten back up with new front end for its web build.

From Left to right: Gino (iOS engineer - Fable), Paul (technical lead - Fable), Augus (designer and front end engineer), Aki (co-founder/mentor), Tony (business and product development), Chloe (intern), Diane (sales), Hai Chen (visual designer) and of course, Kimble (Founder). Not pictured is Rodney (back end engineer - Fable) and Leo (sales/service).

Jibao Team getting into the Holiday Spirit.


The team will be represented at todays (December 6, 2014) NTU startup recruiting event. Please stop by the booth and say hello!
Taking Time to Enjoy the Journey: Holiday Season at Jibao
Friday, December 05, 2014

Taking Time to Enjoy the Journey: Holiday Season at Jibao

Wednesday, November 12, 2014


A terrific update on previously mentioned Kuky activities and their soon to launch website as well as mobile app, as summarized in Yale Entrepreneur, entitled "A Kooky Company" (Please see http://yaleentrepreneur.com/2014/11/10/a-kooky-company/)

Below are some photos of Mavi Miller during her past visit to Taiwan and Xceleration Labs.

Mavi Miller of Kuky in the background working with Paul Chen of Herbuy (www.herbuy.com.tw) in the foreground.

Mavi Miller with the Jibao Team visiting a local photo exhibition on cats!

Mavi sharing her ideas on Kuky with Paul Chen of Herbuy at Herbuy headquarters in Neihu.

A Brief on a Kuky Company: Congratulations again on Mavi Miller and team.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014

A Brief on a Kuky Company: Congratulations again on Mavi Miller and team.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Aki Liao giving a talk at NTU about finding Core Values for a Startup

For Startups, one of the most important factors to success is not getting distracted by all the advice and seemingly endless opportunities and good ideas. In order to help figure out how to stay on track, it is important to determine the company's north star - point of focus and direction.

Through the good graces of Professor Janet Yuvienco, the Jibao team was able to visit with NTU students and solicit their help to give an outsiders' view of Jibao. The first step was to present the NTU students with Jibao's basic thoughts and philosophies. Then we had the students help determine what did Jibao believe? This is what they determined were Jibao's beliefs:


What a treat! NTU still has chalk!

  • Help students find their path
  • Learning can be efficient
  • Learning can be different
  • Learning can be better with Mindmap
  • Teach in a more organized manner
We continued with the student's consultation, and they came up with the following potential company slogan.

"Inspiration and efficient learning leads to talent and prosperity."

After further hard work from our student consultants, they also gave us two potential core values to help guide the company.

Jibao is a commitment to a revolution of Taiwan's education system.

AND

Jibao is a commitment to create a better learning environment.

It is truly terrific to gain the help of these NTU student consultants to provide an outside perspective and help us on our path!  They came up with a slogan and core values statements that would have been impossible for us to come up with, no matter how much we tried. We shall see how we incorporate their help into our sales and marketing materials in the near future.

With their summation as to what Jibao is all about, it should help us narrow down possible choices and eliminate those opportunities that are non-core to what the team is all about. When in doubt, refer to your North Star!
Finding Your North Star: Core Values and Startups
Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Finding Your North Star: Core Values and Startups

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Tony Ming of Jibao providing a timetable of events to update to Hwashing Publishing

Kimble Wang of Jibao/Hwashing talking to the troops

In the startup world, it is often easy to fall into the trap of being busy with general busy-ness and forget to update important stakeholders. One of the critical ones that co-founders often forget is there own staff (which is for another posting) and the other is their sales channel partners.

Convincing others to buy into your venture is difficult enough, getting a partner to be a sales channel is an incredible achievement, BUT the work doesn't end there. In fact, it has just begun. The initial partnership, like a marriage, is the start of a long and hopefully fulfilling relationship for both parties. 

It is important to constantly renew that relationship (water the plant so-to-speak). One of the important things to do is provide a periodic update to your sales partner as to the state of the relationship, the state of audience reaction to the joint sales solution, the benefits of the partnership (especially for the partner's salespeople), the mutual successes you've achieved thus far, and finally a view into the future couple of months.

To this end, Jibao took the opportunity to update their content provider, Hwashing Publishing, at Hwashing's end of Summer sales off-site meeting. Though generally well received and this time with probing questions by Hwashing salespeople, the results will not be known for several months. Until the two teams go out together in the Fall and present the Jibao Map System to more and more Taiwanese high school teachers. Add Oil Jibao!

Partner Communication: Jibao Provides an Update to their Partner
Sunday, August 17, 2014

Partner Communication: Jibao Provides an Update to their Partner

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

One of the most common challenges in startup, especially for the founders, is trying to figure out what's a good idea, a good logo, a good market, and even which of the paths less traveled to go on.  Do you find yourself running to the next idea that some friend, relative or VC suggests? How about all those startup mentors out there who talk to you about business models, having passion and so forth? Are you like a cat distracted by shiny keys? Shiny keys. . . shiny keys. . . and then lose focus. When you don't focus, time is your enemy. Opportunity costs abound. So what do you do? How do you find the right path for YOU?
Jibao focuses on helping teachers.
The Team at a recent introduction of Jibao Map System to teachers at a local high school.
The key is finding the RIGHT path for YOU and your team. There are so many possibilities. So many potentially correct paths. But ultimately, you have to know what's at the core of the team mission. Another way to look at it is, what are the core beliefs that speak to you? Its like going shopping without a shopping list. (By the way, an extraordinary amount of startup founders, that I've had the privilege to meet, face this challenge on a daily basis.) Without a goal in mind, they gravitate to the next interesting idea or recent success story they've read about. When you shop at a grocery store with an empty stomach and WITHOUT a list, EVERYTHING looks good!

 SO. . . figure out your list.  Know what's at the core of your mission.  Figure out what your "destiny" is.  What you were meant to do.  If you've never done this before, these need not be a permanent "list" so to speak.  Just try them on for a focused period of time - a little more than a day and probably less than 3 months.  See if that'll change your perspective and let you filter out all of the noise and focus on the relevant things to keep you moving forward, rather than the lurching from one thing to another so prevalent in startups.
Jibao Team members enjoy a laugh just before they introduce Jibao to some local high school teachers.
From left to right, Suzy, Tony, Ethan and David.
For more on their visit to a local high school please see Jibao Blog
A great example of a team with some focus and getting some good feedback despite all of the challenges is the Jibao team.  What initially started some 3 years ago as an amorphous goal of solving Taiwan's continuing education challenges, has now turned into a very specific goal of enabling teachers in the classroom.

Jibao's 3 core beliefs are: 1. Teachers:  Teachers are the stars.  Let's stop trying to "fix" teachers and instead provide them more support so they can get back to teaching.  Teaching is a profession.  (Just because you know the subject doesn't mean you can teach it) 2. Its about content.  A platform or new software without content is fairly useless and only further burdens a teacher with having to create that content to teach with. 3. Its about editable content. Fixed content such commonly found in e-textbooks and large encyclopaedia-like databases do NOT allow for customization by a teacher looking to teach a variety of students of different backgrounds and levels of knowledge.

With this focus in mind, when others suggest ideas of turning Jibao into an HR training tool or empowering housewives to learn how to cook. . . these may be great ideas, but ultimately not what compatible to core of Jibao's 3 beliefs.  Therefore, Jibao will currently spend time pursuing these avenues.  For a small startup team, focus is key and time is precious.

 So get starting on your own core belief system and see if that won't help you make choices.  Even when its down to what type of logo to have.




Are You Lurching from One Idea to Another? Startup Dilemma
Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Are You Lurching from One Idea to Another? Startup Dilemma

Sunday, April 6, 2014

There are a couple of ways to approach the market.  Do your research, do some surveys and determine if your market will accept your new product.  This often makes sense.  After all, the premise is that you should see if there's a market need before you build your product/solution. 

A common implementation of this method is when retail food companies do surveys and find out that consumers want to eat healthier.  The challenge comes when consumers don't buy the new healthy choices on the menu.  Or worst, because the healthy choice often costs more to produce, consumers won't pay the extra fees associated with the healthy choice.  Just cause they say on a survey they want something, doesn't actually mean they want it.

Jibao Blog


Another common method is to build a product, widget, or cool feature, hoping that it'll be something people want.  Too often this is the engineer's method.  Build something cool and "they will come."

There's no absolute right or wrong way to go about this.  The only question is what happens when your audience doesn't know that it needs your product?  \

For example, if I was to ask you four or five years ago I could give you a viewing screen size of 3" x 2" and tell you, you could watch all of your favorite television shows on this small screen, you'd tell me that you don't need it.  If I was to add that this tiny screen was to cost about 700 USD, you'd tell me I was nuts.  4 or 5 years ago, you'd probably spend such a sum on a giant LCD screen to better view your television shows.  That said, many people currently sport smartphones with small screens and watch entire television shows while they commute each and every day.  Sometimes, even taken to lying in bed to watch the show, hoping to not let the smartphone hit them in the face when it slips from their hand.  And they easily spend 700 USD for a new fancy hand held device.

So what to do?  You may opt to try educating your audience one at a time, one blog at a time. Such is the method that Jibao Map System has adopted.  Besides meeting teachers one-on-one, they also having been curating articles for their target audience.  In this process, they're trying to add value for the Taiwanese high school teacher without just "hocking" a product.  See Jibao Viewer Blog  Give it a try.  Who knows, you may not even know that you need Jibao until you've tried it.
Educating Your Audience: Challenges for a Startup
Sunday, April 06, 2014

Educating Your Audience: Challenges for a Startup

Monday, March 24, 2014

Startup team Jibao continues to work on its teacher's aid to help teachers prepare their lessons by offering a multimedia platform pre-loaded with content from partners Hwashing Publishing and AsiaHowTo videos.  Jibao currently offers two prototype versions - one for iPads and also a web browser version that features editing functionality.  In closed sessions with high school teachers from some of Taipei's top high schools, initial feedback on Jibao's multi-media platform has been positive.

An artist's representation of the Jibao Map System.
In its efforts to broaden the discussion on education, Jibao has started a blog to highlight articles from overseas as well as local domestic sources.  One such article is a great one from www.upworthy.com entitled "The 12 Things You Should Never, Ever Say to Teachers" that Jibao has translated into Chinese for its local audience, please see jibaoviewer.blogspot.tw


Respect Your Teachers: A Startup's Efforts to Change the Discussion on Education
Monday, March 24, 2014

Respect Your Teachers: A Startup's Efforts to Change the Discussion on Education

Monday, March 3, 2014

The Jibao team is in its final stages of completing its prototype and will be premiering its beta version at Hwashing Publishing's internal sales meeting next week.  (Jibao is a patent pending product)

Thus far the team has been working to QC for bugs while also demonstrating the product to high school teachers in Taiwan in closed sessions.  Feedback has been positive, with one teacher stating (regarding Jibao's lecture progress tracking function), "I haven't seen this in other products and it'll be very useful," while another teacher stated, "It would seem to have all of the functionality I would require to do my presentations for class."  

The Jibao difference.  Its ability to be more than an e-textbook.  Combing all forms of media in an easy access panel for teachers to show examples as related to the textbook

International educators has also weighed in.  "The design team made a commitment early on to be learners and to listen to educators, which I believe translated into a learning tool that reflects that commitment," testified one leading educator.  "JiBao 的界面結合了線性及非線性的組織方式。使用者可以隨意展示教材，達到最佳的教學效果," said another.  

Best of all, the Jibao teach was kind enough to immortalize me in cartoon form.

Could this be me?  Immortalized as a cartoon character?
Jibao is coming this Fall to a Taiwan high school near you.  Stay tuned!




The Jibao Difference: An Educational Tool that Embraces Teachers and Educator Experience
Monday, March 03, 2014

The Jibao Difference: An Educational Tool that Embraces Teachers and Educator Experience