Creating a Productive Weekend

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There is a good reason why people say TGIF or Thank God it’s Friday. The next two days (after Friday) are the break or a breather from our routine. Some are spending it with their family, some partying with friends, some having a date with their girlfriend or boyfriend. For me, I realize that after I made the decision to start my own company, it is a pitstop. I spent most of the weekend getting more sleep or catching up with TV series or K-Dramas.

But then it kinda hit me that time is moving even faster. This kinda scares me, and to be honest I didn’t do anything productive while I’m at home on the weekdays, most of the time I got home exhausted and after reading some articles/Tempo/watching one episode of anything, I sleep right away. I felt like I need to do something more on the weekend.

It doesn’t have to be related with the work (in my case, Talenta), although sometimes I spent Sunday night preparing what to do over the week, I leave it nearing the end of the day. I decided I want to do or at least start to do these things:

  • Read books. I’ve always read a couple of pages here and there over the weekdays. Weekend is supposed to be the time where I can do much more than just a few pages.
  • Writing. Whether it’s a blog post like this or regarding the tech industry, if I can do one post per weekend, that would be cool. Or it can be in a form of newsletter (Jon Russell inspired me to do one for Indonesia)
  • Podcast. I’ve always been wanting to do a podcast but there’s always a reason to delay (no time, didn’t have any proper mic, etc) but this year let’s just start with whatever equipment I have and do it on a bi-weekly period.
  • Working out. Time is limited on the weekdays. I should make more time to exercise on the weekend.
  • Doing a YouTube channel. With the video consumption rate going nowhere but up, there is so much opportunity to actually do a quality/niche and get traction in the current market. Moreover, Google Indonesia seems to be promoting more and more local content producers.

How about you? Do you have any plans to make your weekends productive?

Branding an Enterprise Software

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We are at the last phase or stage on our product building and we’re going to launch our public beta very soon (Excited!). With this in mind, we recruited a Sales team and also someone who is more or less experienced with branding. I realized that most enterprise software nowadays act just like consumer apps. They have a “character” or a brand.

To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about it at all before I brainstormed with them. All I can think of is building, building, and building the product and just sell it to as many companies as I can. I was totally reminded on the past few days that in fact, we ARE selling to humans too. We sell to the HR managers and the founders of companies – although we are a B2B/Enterprise Software.

I’m quite unsure how many of you reading this will be on the same journey of building an enterprise software but it is an interesting question when people ask you “How do you want to brand your enterprise software?” – to which I answer “I want to be the Uniqlo of HR software – simple, affordable, but they have an awesome quality”.

Slack and or HootSuite is a B2B software that I am quite inspired in terms of branding, how Slack is perceived as cool, awesome, and simply the best communication tools out there (at least for me). While HootSuite has this friendly owl as its mascot. One of our sales staff also mentioned Zendesk’s Buddha to which she said “I might not remember what Zendesk is, but I definitely remember the Buddha”.

So if you do have experience in branding an enterprise software, would love your feedbacks or probably share it to your friends?

On Growing

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As I have just posted this morning on Facebook, as per January, we are a team of 15:

teamtalenta

Except our intern, everyone is here. More than half of us are focusing on the product side. We just recruited a few people on the Sales team too, getting ready for the launch. I hope this is just a start of something bigger. There’s a lot of excitement for sure, but lots of responsibility too.

If you think I magically recruited 15 people out of thin air, you’re wrong. I would say that this is what thousands of messages on LinkedIn, hundreds of interviews, and a lot of e-mails get you. Recruitment is a full-time job, and as a founder (moreover, solo founder), this takes most of your time (except product).

In fact, I’d love to say to any founders, soon-to-be founders, or bootstrapping founders. IF you think, creating awesome product is hard, try scaling the team. Even William from Tokopedia has hinted of hiring abroad thinking how hard it is to hire/recruit here. Doing startup is hard, convincing other people to join your journey is even harder.

All the best for Indonesia startup founders in 2015 and would love your take on recruitment in Indonesia if you have different opinion (perhaps you can hire tens of developers in 1 week? – we’d love to be your client).