Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

Pivot, Pivot, Pivot Until You Find Traction

Mr. Princeton had put me in contact with an ISP in Hong Kong, and I was able to convince it that if we had its data, we could help it generate additional revenue by selling its data to marketing companies.

I was able to convince the ISP to give me six months of data to attempt to do this analysis of the wealthy Chinese.  I did this by offering a profit share model and absolutely no upfront cost on the ISP's part.  Because the data it had was useless to it at this point, the ISP decided to give us a chance to try and monetize the data.  This was our first major win as a company. Mr. Data and I went to work on the data, and discovered that it was not very good for this purpose.

The reason it was not useful was because the ISP only had access to the IP address and not the actually URLs of the websites the people had visited.  IP addresses point to specific servers on the Internet, but don't actually tell us what those servers are hosting.  At this point, it appeared the data was basically useless.

However, because I believe in the technique of RSF, relentless solution focus, introduced to me in the book Executive Toughness by Jason Celk, I went to work thinking of another way to make use of the data.  I looked at what our data did well, and it became clear that it did location pretty well.  We were able to tell the foot traffic of the area with a high level of accuracy.

Armed with this new direction, we went to work determining the viability of this vector as a business.  It turns out that the location-based data is scarce in Asia.  In Hong Kong, the census gives you an idea of the type of people in the neighbourhood, but it doesn't give you much idea of the number of people walking around.  We figured that using the data of people walking around, we could help real estate agents sell locations more effectively.

This too proved to be a false lead because it turns out that real estate agents don't care about having this data because they'd rather say in general the flow of traffic than numbers.  This data is useful for potential buyers, but not for sellers.

In the words of Eric Ries in The Lean Startup, it was time for a pivot.  Using my connections to the Hive, I stumbled upon the founder of one of the largest outdoor advertising companies in Hong Kong.  I offered to give a talk to his directors about the topic of big data and how it could help them identify more physical ad spaces to buy.  Because I had location data, I could tell them where good billboard locations would be.

Within minutes of the meeting it became clear to me that they did not care to buy more real estate for ad spaces, but needed to move their current inventory.  One of their major problems was that they had no data on how many views each of their billboards actually attracted.

This has become a problem because the new generation of marketing executives are more data-driven due to the advent of Internet marketing, such as Google adwords and Facebook ads.  These new forms of marketing give them a clear picture of the dollars spent resulting in number of customers acquired.

Hearing that this was their actual problem, I told them we would attempt to solve the issue by using the data we had on hand.  They were happy to let us try.  However, after looking into the data we had, it became clear that it was only for China, not Hong Kong.  Once again, this was a dead end, so we informed the advertiser that it was not within our power and pivoted once again.

Our final pivot would be an attempt to make a system that would tell us about the ideal location to open a retail store.  Using a combination of the data we received from the ISP and various websites, we were able to put together a report that would tell us the cost of rent, labour and competition of an area.

This is the final pivot of my big data company before I sold my shares.  As you can see, it takes many tries before you land on something with value, and even more tries before you can exit.  The initial idea is just a starting place. As you explore the space of your idea, you will realize quickly that you didn't have enough information on the topic.  It will be up to you to decide if you should pivot or persevere with the original idea.