inspiredworlds.com

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We had our third meetup for Mobile Marketing Meetup on “mobile analytics“. About 25 people came to our event at Fishburners, Sydney to hear from 3 talks on analytics. I’ve written a short summary and included the relevant links mentioned in the talks.

1. Crash reporting – Giovanni from WeSync

From the demo, it showed that iTunes crash reports doesn’t seem to work very well, if at all. Hence tools like Crittercism look really useful and you can track where the app crashed, get reports and fix the issue. It looks very similar to the Crashlytics tool (which was bought by Twitter recently). Also check out Crashlog made by Aussie developer Ivan Vanderbyl (and friend of ours!).

https://www.crittercism.com
http://try.crashlytics.com
https://crashlog.io

It was interesting to see that only 2/25 people were using crash reporting tools.

2. Google Analytics – Alwin Chin from Stampii

I thought this was a really good talk. Alwin discussed why they were tracking metrics, use of google analytics for web/mobile and creating custom charts. Stampii were inspired by geckoboard to create a real time dashboard for businesses, and created custom charts using the same technology which was HighCharts / JQuery.  Also some interesting discussion in the end on NFC vs Passbook vs Paywave (creditcard tap system) vs QR codes.

3. Release cohorts – Michael from Storyberg

Cohort analysis is something I’ve come across last year, where you track segments of people from when they sign up. Whereas Storyberg are looking to track users based on feature releases (i.e. release cohorts). Its aimed to be a better tool if you are using lean startup methodology. It does makes sense to be tracking based on feature releases.

At Native Tongue, we’re currently using Flurry and you can set milestones, so we can track if features are being used. I’m not sure if we do a feature release, if we can track the usage in an updated feature though.

Final notes

I got something out of each of these talks and I’m starting to see how different startups are using analytics. I think that analytics is really underrated & underutilised in startups. How can you measure progress if you are not using analytics? You need to be able to track progress, analyse the data and adjust accordingly.

The best thing is that we’re building up knowledge in the mobile & startup community. None of us profess to be experts, since the industry in Australia is fairly young. By sharing what we are doing and the latest things that we’re trying from practitioners in the field, we’ll learn from each other and grow stronger as a group. There’s strength in numbers!

Cheers,

Matt Ho

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As 2012 comes to a close, it’s time to briefly reflect on the year. This is my story of 2012.

I came across this memorable quote recently from an article about startups raising money:

Investors at the seed level are typically less concerned with the fact that a team has yet to pull off market or customer fit, and much more focused on whether it can weather the storm of running a startup.

My own startup journey has a lot of highs and lows in 2012. I can attest that its very stormy! Hence, the team has to be strong to withstand the bumps and bruises along the way.

You need to be able to fight your way out of a very dark hole and into the light. That’s why its called the trough of sorrow. The majority of startups will die in this phase as they attempt to find their way. This is reality. The majority of small businesses will fail within 2 years. This is where we are now with Native Tongue – in the trough of sorrow.

In our first year, there has been a lot of rain, but more like meteorites that have been dropping down from the sky. But we have survived, we’re still intact and I have my sanity.

Buckle in

In the first week of launching our product, Mandarin Madness on iphone in February, we made over $1,000 AUD. It was making roughly $200/day. We were the #2 Australian education app and featured on the iTunes Australia home page. We were a top 10 grossing education app in Australia. We thought awesome!!

I quickly calculated that we would do $52k that year on this one product alone. Lets just bang out a few more products – then we would be self funded! Thats $52k x 3 products = $156k annual revenue. No need for raising seed investment. If it did well in Australia, then a similar Spanish product would “smash” it in the US. And the English product would “erupt” in Asia!

So we started beavering away and launched a whole array of new language products this year – Spanish Smash and English Eruption.

However, the sales in the app store started slowing down. We did our best to prop it up. But we learnt something critical about the app store – the first 2 weeks are critical as you are classified as a new app. You are featured as a new app and can also be in the “new and noteworthy” section. We were also beating a lot of the bigger branded apps (except for Spongebob) when we were featured.

When we launched the Spanish and English product it didn’t fare as well as the Chinese one. In fact, we botched the launches and it fell flat. Our dreams of making $1k/week vanished within several weeks.

If I look back, we should have focused on one product, Mandarin Madness. We should have kept polishing and refining it to get product market fit. We went too wide instead of focusing on one vertical and missed the mark. I’ll explain later on what we decided to focus on.

More meteorites

These were just some of the meteorites that rained down on us in the first year. We thought we were close to getting seed investment from some investors. However, that didn’t come through. We were also faced with dwindling cash flow and our runway fast disappearing.

James, one of our co-founders had to do some contracting work to get by. My personal runway was longer, so I kept focusing on the business, as we needed to keep moving forward. We knew that if all of us went to work, and worked on it part time or we came back to it within 6 months, we’d lose all the momentum we had.

We also parted ways with one of our original founders. It didn’t work out. We moved offices from York Butter Factory to South Melbourne. We pitched at several events but didn’t get much investor interest. A lot of things like this happened in the first half of the year.

Chaotic personal life

I also had my own personal situation to figure out. I had moved from Sydney to Melbourne last year, and I had been staying on airbnb and then living with a friend. But I had to find a more permanent and more cost-effective place to stay. I found a place in Northcote and was about to sign a lease.

I came back to Sydney for Christmas and NYE. I found out a few days later, that the landlord decided to kick us all out, citing that the property needed repairs. They gave us 3 months to vacate (in March 2012)*. I didn’t have time to deal with it, and it was only until the last two weeks that I started looking for a new place. It was hectic and we had only 8 days to find a place to live. So I banded together with one of the housemates and another friend, and we found a place within a week. We then signed a 12 months lease.

Up until this point, I also had no possessions in Melbourne other than 2 suitcases. I was sleeping on a mattress for 4 months on the floor. I had acquired the mattress from the previous tenant. I also acquired Anthony’s old desk and chair. I had clothes hangers from my friend Tyson. It was a very nomadic life style I was living but it was all I needed to get by.

So my own personal situation was somewhat chaotic whilst in Melbourne. I did my best to not let it bother me. I believe that if you can settle your personal life, it will be much easier to focus on your work. I watched a interview video by Steve Blank who believes that entrepreneurs make sense out of chaos and often had a dysfunctional personal life. When things are organised, they actually don’t do that well. So maybe there’s something in that.

The dark months

With our runway dwindling, I was on the path to going broke while paying rent and living expenses in Melbourne. So I decided to move back to Sydney and live with my folks. Both my brothers had moved out last year and we still had several empty rooms including my old room. I figured if I could cut down on my costs, I’d live to fight another day.

There was some adjustment period, but it was fine. My family had missed me while I was living in Melbourne, and I could also take care of my grandma during the day as she lives with us.

But that period between May & June was probably my darkest period this year. I had to move back to Sydney, slightly dejected and I wasn’t sure what I would do – even if I would continue with Native Tongue. Because the team was going to be separated in two different cities which would make things difficult.

In a way, I was also slightly relieved. I felt at times I was stuck in Melbourne, unable to see my family and friends. I flew back to Sydney several times for weddings and for Christmas, but it was always brief. However, money was tight, and I needed to save money. Paying $230/week for rent alone, plus expenses for bills, food + entertainment expenses was too much in an early stage startup.

Things start picking up again

But somehow we made it work.

I started hanging out with my friend Alvin at his place as he had just resigned from his job and was working on Pocketbook. Bosco then joined him, and the 3 of us started co-working together in his apartment. I couldn’t afford to go to a co-working space (even though they are great), but this was just as good. I had two guys that were working on another startup and it re-created that startup vibe. I was excited to work again on my own thing, and I felt like they were extra members who would give me ideas and inspiration, and feedback.

There were certain events that happened in the next few months which gave us a shot in the arm. I pitched at the Sydstart event and was awarded 6th place in September. In October, I made it into Tech23, one of Australia’s most prestigious technology conferences. The top 23 up and coming companies were selected. We made the short list and I got to present again. You can read my insiders perspective here. We were amongst the best tech companies in Australia.

We were able to get several great blog reviews of our products and formed a partnership with a language blogger for a competition. We also had interest from several schools for a trial. I was also featured in the BRW in an article on “How to make the perfect pitch“.

We also got around the distance factor, and I was speaking to my co-founder every day on the phone when we had to or communicated via email.

Renewed focus

We felt stretched with the number of products in our portfolio – we had over 10 products! So we decided in June 2012 to concentrate our effort on one product for one platform and in one market. We released a free version of Spanish Smash (Personalised) on iOS for the US market, as it has a large number of Spanish language learners (6 million).

It was initially only available in English and then we added Korean and Russian translations. Its now doing about 180 – 200 downloads a day. The upsell rate is 5% for in-app-purchase modules or to the full paid version. This app now represents roughly 35% of our total downloads. We still haven’t “cracked” the US market, but downloads are increasing month on month in the US. The app is also reguarly featured in Russia, Korea, Netherlands and now in China.

Our airbnb moment

I noticed there was a new word game called Letterpress which was simply brilliant. I showed my co-founder and he liked it too. I predicted that this new app would be popular. We had our “airbnb moment” where we thought we could fund the business with some crazy idea. I knew the story all too well as I had worked at airbnb.

Airbnb sold boxes of Obama cereal at Obama’s inaugruation. So we decided to make a cheat app for Letterpress and sell copies of our cheat app. We actually made it in one week, but decided to work on it for another week to polish it up. We submitted it to the app store with a free version and upsell for $0.99. It only sold a few copies and started dying. We kept iterating on it and recently rebranded it to LP strategy and have about 1,000 downloads to date and its one of the top ranked cheat apps for Letterpress. I believe that we have the best cheat app for Letterpress, however its quite crowded now as there about 20 of these apps now in the app store.

But the one thing it did was show that we could make mobile apps and we could do it fast. We could respond to market conditions and opportunities, and we had a strong resolve. We could figure out a way to survive.

We also applied for the Startmate incubator on the final day. Out of 220 applications from around the country, we were one of the 20 teams selected for interview. We ultimately didn’t get in, but meeting with 15 of Australia’s top investors in one afternoon and getting their feedback was worthwhile. It also validated our efforts to date to make it to the final round.

Backup plan

We had a back up plan in case we didn’t get into Startmate. We decided we could try consulting on behalf of the business rather than as individuals. We would make apps for other people. We’d already made roughly 10 apps in total. So we created a landing page on unbounce and prepared some keywords for google adwords.

As soon as we got word that we didn’t get in, we re-calibrated and our backup plan kicked into gear. We started running the google adwords campaigns. Within a few days, we started getting clicks and enquiries. We have a number of enquiries we are following up on, and this is how we are going to fund our business. Partly through growing and also by doing work for other people. When I spoke to a lot of startups, this is what a lot of them had to do to get by in the early days. If you’d like to build an app, check out our consulting page.

Snapshot

This is where we are now. We believe that we will lose nothing by revealing our figures, in fact it will help us measure our success.

- Revenues: $1k/month in revenue. Annual revenue approx $11k.
- Downloads: 90,000 downloads. This is across our 3 games. On iOS, Android, Amazon Kindle.
- Monthly Active Users (MAU): 18% iOS.

Ideally, we want to be doing 10x in terms of revenue ($10k/month) to be self sustaining.

What we need to do in 2013

1. Focus on a product and customer segment.
2. Improve the game mechanics
3. Increase user retention
4. Increase life time value (LTV)
5. Grow the consulting business

Final word

Thanks to everyone that has supported Native Tongue – friends, family, colleagues, our customers, and the startup community. If you are in startup, then don’t forget your hard hat and your raincoat, cause its going to get rocky in 2013! You have to learn how to withstand the meteorites

I’m out like 2012,

Matt Ho.
@inspiredworlds

*The landlord & agent took us to court over property damages, even though we were only there for a few months. We ended up getting most of our bond back and I invested my bond money into my housemate’s new startup. Double down ftw.

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Building an app is half the battle. The other missing piece of the puzzle is distribution and marketing.

So we decided to organise a mobile marketing meetup with some startups in this space to discuss these issues. It was inspired by this discussion on From Little Things. We decided the first meetup would cover the topic of “How to get PR for mobile apps”. You can check out our event here on eventbrite.

For our first meetup, we had a pretty good turnout with 15 people. The crowd was mainly comprised of app developers, product managers for apps, app marketers, and people with web apps looking to go mobile. It was scheduled to go for 1 hour, but it ended up being 2.5 hours. People just wanted to talk about mobile!

There was actually a lot of self-taught marketing experience in the room – people with some of the top apps in the Australian charts. So I’ve written a summary of some of the key learnings from the meetup. Its mostly about PR, and then we started covering other topics organically.

1. A targeted approach to each journalist

How you approach a journalist is important. Alison from ChillWithMe said that sending targeted emails with specific information for each journalist was critical. Networking with people at the SXSW conference before they launched and letting them be the first to know about it. That’s how they were able to get into PandoDaily.

2. Develop a knowledge base of relevant industry articles

Daniel from Parking Made Easy kept a spreadsheet of articles about his industry with notes on each article. He did this prior to launching his website. When he was ready to launch, he then personalised the email using the notes about the articles.

3. Contact regional media

Chris from Buuna shared that contacting smaller regional papers was a great way to get writeups. They have more time available and may be easier to get in touch with them. Dain Hedgepeth also mentioned that local newspapers are interested in the “local boy done proud” angle as well.

4. A journalist will write about a group of apps 

It is unlikely that a journalist in a major publication will write an article that will only cover your app. I have previously spoken to Will Glasgow from BRW who suggested that journalists prefer to group similar types of apps together and write about segments. So its critical to understand what industry that reporter covers and if they have reviewed similar apps in the past. You can also reach out to them and introduce yourself if you have a similar app.

This recent article about taxi industry is an example – its about the industry and not one particular app. Personally, I have found positive responses from journalists if they write about our industry (language learning) and I’ll introduce our app to them as a follow on to that article and suggest that I can provide an industry point of view or about mobile apps.

5. Have a press kit available

This was something that I shared. We’ve had over 50 articles written about Native Tongue, and we make it easy for the journalists to find all the assets that they need from our press kit. Michael Fox from 22Michaels blogged that they missed a PR opportunity with MX when they didn’t have images of their products available. Check out the press kit for Shoes Of Prey – I used this for inspiration.

Ben Hamey of Bonobo Labs previously suggested you should have the following available in your media pack: app screenshots, app icon, pictures of people using the app in an everyday setting, FAQ, and press release. You also don’t have to panic to get these assets to them in time and miss potential opportunities. The media kit for Zilla App by Bonobo Labs is pretty impressive.

6. PR for your target audience

I’ve started becoming a big believer of “blog to your audience”, a concept I picked up from Mark Suster. I think the same applies for “getting PR to your audience”. Many people in the room agreed that most PR had a limited effect on downloads. There might be a spike but it wasn’t sustaining and started to taper off as the article became less recent. Sometimes that much hyped spike never came. In the group’s experience, those users that signed up from major news articles also weren’t as sticky (i.e. they didn’t keep coming back). I believe its because they weren’t the target audience for the product.

One of the biggest download days for our app Mandarin Madness came from an education article written in the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s largest English print newspaper. It appeared in the education section and was written by an author that covers education and technology. This result made sense given that parents living in Hong Kong would read it, download it and love our app. It was our target audience.

7. Virality

Yose from Jormy Games had a simple, yet fun iphone app which involves replicating the reaction of shaking a softdrink bottle and having it fizz up and burst. It was one of the early apps on iPhone and topped the charts. At its peak, it was doing 70,000 free downloads a day. He believes it went viral when kids started uploading videos onto Youtube of them shaking their iphones and playing the app.

8. Partnerships

ScribblePics has a white label app to turn your photos into postcards. They  were able to get partnerships with QANTAS, Jetstar, Perisher, and Contiki Tours. How did they do it? Well Peter Bradd simply got on the phone and called them up. A direct sales approach worked. A few people in the room also had examples of how partnerships benefited them to get more distribution.

There are only some of the tips and experiences that were shared. If you want to know more, you’ll just have to come to the next meetup!

Its on Monday, 3 December, 2012 and the main topic is “mobile advertising”. RSVP here.

I’m out like kids shaking Coke bottles,

Matt Ho.

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Great quote and so true via @onstartups

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The other day I was at our local shopping centre car park. It has incredibly tight turns when you go up the ramp to the next level. The parking spaces are very narrow and there are huge concrete blocks next to some of the parking spaces. For additional difficulty points, it was a Saturday and there were a lot of cars inside also trying to find a space. We’ve all been in those car parks and in those situations.

I happen to see a car leaving, creating an ample opportunity to park. It was directly opposite the ramp and also the space right next to the wall. It required a lot of precision to park and I didn’t have a lot of time as there lots of cars backed up waiting for me. I just had to get the car into that space.

Product / market fit

One of the things that people in the startup industry talk a lot about is “product / market fit”. However, its hard to explain what that means and to visualise it. Its even harder to actually achieve.

“Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

Essentially, you have to find a product that fits what the market needs. According to Marc Andressen, for a startup, that’s all that matters. That’s your sole objective.

You may have to keep massaging the product to find that perfect fit. Its like Cinderella being the perfect fit for that particular slipper. I really like this explanation he uses in his blog:

The #1 company-killer is lack of market.

• When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.
• When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.
• When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.

When you have product / market fit, thats when things go gangbusters. You don’t have enough supply to fulfil orders. Revenue just keeps pouring in. You can’t put on enough sales staff to take all the orders.

Naval Ravikant described it an interview as a key fitting a lock. The fit has to be clean, true and precise. It has to slide in and click open. The only way to do that is to keep refining and polishing that key and it is the only key that will open that lock. True product market fit has to be extremely precise.

At Native Tongue we’re still on that journey to find the right key for that lock. Or parking our car into that really tight car space*.

I’m out like tight car spaces,

Matthew Ho

p.s. I parked it in four moves. But I had parked too close to the wall, so it was difficult to open the door. I didn’t quite have car/car space fit.

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You may have guessed from my blog that I like writing!

Here’s my guest article reviewing the SydStart conference for Tech In Asia.

I’ll be guest writing for Tech In Asia from time to time.

I’m out like Friday,

Matt Ho
@inspiredworlds

 

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Why aren’t there more female entrepreneurs?

I’ve been thinking about this question for a while and its crossed my mind from time to time this year.

I can count on my hands the number of female startup founders I’ve met this year: Shelli Trung @3six5dates, Nikki Durkin @99dresses, Nicola Gracie @FitIntegrate, Demi Markogiannaki @weteachme,  Jamie Wong @Vayable, Jodie Fox @Shoesofprey, Lara Solomon @Stepslearning and a few others.

I think that females have some interesting business opportunities in the entrepreneurial space because they can see ideas that males can’t see and are unlikely to understand. They will also be able to address female market needs much better.

Some of the best startups that I have seen this year are by female founders:

1. Taskrabbit: This was born out of Leah Busque’s frustation of not having enough time available to feed her dog and buy dog food. Taskrabbit is a marketplace for services – things you want done fast. For tasks like cleaning, moving, delivery of food, IKEA furniture and assembly.

2. Birchbox is a wineclub for cosmetic samplers from Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp. You pay $10 per month for a box of samplers, and if you buy the full product, Birchbox takes an affiliate fee. I must admit I was highly skeptical of this business, and this is an industry, product and market which I don’t understand very well. What I do understand though, is a subscription based business model where you get new products every month, 45,000 subscribers with 50% subscription growth month on month. Its brilliant and also worth around $40mil =)

Another startup, Pinterest which caught my interest (excuse the pun) has male co-founders, but a growing and loyal female userbase. Pinterest allows you to “create a virtual pinboard – a place where you can post collections of things you love, and “follow” collections created by people with great taste”. It has huge adoption rate and stickiness with females. From the pinboards that I can see, they’re centered around female content (because its mostly females users). Its sends a signal that are unique opportunities for females that are still underserved by today’s websites.

My thoughts are why there aren’t a lot of female founders? This is my hypothesis so hear me out. I don’t think its any one of these factors, but a combination of them.

1. Shortage of female programmers: Tech startups are technical in nature and based on my experience, I don’t know of many female programmers. In the Australian startup scene, most people I know are male and I’m sure that this is repeated in startups scenes around the world. The female programmers I do know are not in tech startups but working in software companies / digital agencies / in house, etc.. Take a read of Jean Hsu’s blog post about her experience as a female software engineer and the lack of females in computer science. Historically, programming has been a male dominated industry which I believe is changing and could be the biggest factor in this list as to why there are not many female entrepreneurs.

2. Body clock and family responsibilities: Females have to think about families, marriage, kids, and these kind of responsibilities a lot sooner than men due to the female body clock. I believe this has some correlation with risk taking, and hence their views on risk. This affects women in all industries, but particularly in the startup industry as explained below.

3. Startups require an appetite for risk-taking: You have to be comfortable with the fact that you are going to earn no income for a while, have no job security and you are taking a leap of faith with your idea. Starting a tech company is an incredibly risky proposition, and the chance of success is so slim and most are destined to fail. This is an industry that is inherently risky and my opinion is that the less responsibilities you have, the easier it becomes to do a startup. This is a controversial point, because there are many small to medium sized businesses started by women so this may not be that valid of a factor.

4. Access to role models and networks: As there hasn’t been a lot of females historically in startups, there aren’t a lot of female role models to aspire towards. The majority of the interviews that I’ve seen and books I’ve read are about male entrepreneurs. A few female startup people spring to mind like Marissa Mayer @ Google who I’ve seen speak and Randi Zuckerberg. With the emergence of successful female startup founders this will encourage a wave of new female entrepreneurs. Having access to networks is also critical for the success of startups, and initiatives like Women 2.0 and Girl Geek Coffees will assist in that.

There must be some reasons to explain the lack of female entrepreneurs in the startup world and feel free to disagree in the comments below. Its worth also reading on Quora on the lack of female co-founders and how females are paid less than their male counterparts.

The situation will change as there are many successful small to medium sized businesses started by women. There are just many more opportunities now to start a tech startup at low cost, startups becoming more of a viable career choice, and increasing number of female engineers and designers which will have a flow on effect in a traditionally male dominated industry. I think its only a matter of time before this changes.

I’m out like 2011,

Matthew Ho

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This had been on my mind for the last week or so. A lot of things have happened this year, so here are some highlights of 2011 in roughly chronological order.

- Places travelled: LA, Austin, New York and San Francisco (twice), Cairns, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo.

- Flew between Sydney and Melbourne at least 6 times. I know this route fairly well now =)

- Been part of the youth leadership team at Padstow Chinese Congregational Church for the first 5 months of the year. Its great to see them doing amazing things. Our youth group is growing up so fast now!

- Started going to a new church in Melbourne.

- Attended UFC 127 in Sydney, my second live UFC event.

- Organised the first SXSW Meetup in Sydney and Melbourne for people from the music, film and digital industry.

- Attended the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. I saw the Startup Bus finals at SXSW and the energy and enthusiasm that the best entrepreneurs and hackers from around the world bring, and I wanted to be a part of that.

- Drove from San Antonio to Washington DC to help a friend move house. My US first road trip was a lotta fun! It was my first time driving in the US and I drove a big Penske truck (like U-Haul) and we were pulling a trailer with a car. We drove for 2 days straight halfway across America.

- Finished up at Next Digital. It’s where I got my foot in the door in the digital industry and I closed a chapter of my life. I’m grateful for the opportunity they gave me three and a half years ago.

- Worked for airbnb, a disruptive accommodation website. Organised their first party in Australia and 110 people turned up. Organised an event where airbnb gave free ice cream to hosts in 14 cities around the world!

- Entered Australia’s first Startup Weekend competition to meet and test myself against the best entrepreneurs from Melbourne. I ended up winning!

- Organised Product Camp Sydney and spoke on the topic of innovation. It was rated as the most popular talk before the conference (thank you friends for voting for me). You can read about it here and here.

- Lived in Melbourne for 6 months. From Burnley to Fitzroy and now Northcote.

- Started a meetup for Melbourne startup founders and hackers called MCombinator.

- Attended events in SF and Palo Alto – Startup BBQ, Zaarly pubcrawl, Startup Weekend SF pre party. It was awesome to meet hundreds of people in the startup scene from the US and the world.

- Cycled across the Golden Gate Bridge which was an amazing experience and hung out with two friends, Vanessa and Dom from Sydney in SF.

- Played my first game of squash.

- Became a godfather to Liam, Ashby’s son and one of my best childhood friends.

- Started up my own company, Native Tongue which came out of winning Startup Weekend.

- Launched a product and exhibited at Techcrunch Disrupt Beijing a few months later. It was exciting to be exhibiting alongside entrepreneurs from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, China, Japan and Australia. We were featured on some of Asia’s biggest blogs like Technode and some local ones too. Best of all we have paying customers!

- Walked across the Great wall of China and got through the Great Firewall of China (hello VPN).

- Joined Melbourne’s newest co-working space, York Butter Factory and a fantastic community of local entrepreneurs.

- Took some salsa lessons and graduated from Salsa Level 1.5 (intermediate), despite missing two classes!

- Turned 30 =)

Phew, that’s been a big year!

I feel like I’ve done a lot this year. I’ve taken some risks and seized opportunities where they presented themselves. It seems like its paid off. Whatever I’ve done, I’ve given it 100%. My 2012 will be about focus and capitalising on the opportunities that I’ve created for myself.

I’m out like 2011,

Matthew Ho

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Been spending the last few days watching a lot of tech videos, no doubt as seen by the blog posts below. I’ve watched the following inspirational videos from leaders in the tech space:

- Drew Houston, Dropbox

- Dave Morin, Path,

- Eric Ries, Lean startups

- Peter Vestabacka, Rovio

- Pony Ma, Tencent

- Fritz Demopoulos, Qunar

The last couple were at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing which I missed as I was exhibiting.

This is one of the more insightful ones by Fritz Demopoulos who is a foreigner in China and was able to build and sell two successful internet companies. He describes how to be successful over there, traits of Chinese entrepreneurs (‘Brutally competitive’), and the types of entrepreneurial opportunities that exist in China.

I’ve watched a lot of videos and I feel that this is part of my tech / entrepreneurial education – to learn from the best out there from the US, Europe and China.

I’m out like the day before Christmas,

Matt Ho

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This is a cool video interview by Scoble previewing the new Path. I love Path – its so intuitive and the design is simple yet mindblowing good. Its one of my favourite apps – I just wish I knew more people using it!

I was in their office back in August and met Dave Morin, CEO of Path. Had a brief chat with him about the old Path. I liked the old product and it had a gorgeous design, but it just wasn’t sticky enough for me to keep coming back to use it. I like the new direction which is a smart journal which you can share moments with your close friends.

This video also highlights the importance of good design and how design culture has permeated throughout the whole organisation.

If you have additional comments particulary on how Path can be improved, add to this Quora discussion.