Start a Business, Change the World

Start a Business,

Change the World

- Edmond Yap

Revision 10, 8th August 2021

Table of Contents

Intro

Start a Business, Change the World

About the Author

Special Thanks

Are You a Misfit? Maybe You’re An Entrepreneur

What Business Should You Start?

Search For Meaning

Want to Start Your First Business? You Can Do Better Than MLMs

Life is Short, Find Your Purpose

What Are You Willing To Suffer For?

Enjoy the Journey, Or Maybe Don't Do It

Leaving Your Career

To My Poor Employers, I'm Sorry

Getting Started

I Had No Business Starting A Business

Unentrepreneurial Beliefs That Stop You From Starting Your Business

Getting Rid of Fear

At First It Was Jail, Not Passion

The Khan Academy

An Unlikely Start

What Investors Look For

Nobody's Going to Steal Your Business Ideas

Why Raise Money When You Can Bootstrap?

Introducing the Bootstrappers

Choose Your Business Partners Wisely

Nobody's Going to Fund You Until You Understand WII-FM

The Pitch That Brought In RM10 Million copy

How to Sniff Out Toxic Investors

Growing Your Business

Network Like Your Life Depends On It

Networking is a Dirty Word

Growing Your Business - Audience

Growing Your Business – Merchandise

Growing Your Business – Message

Growing Your Business – Marketing

No Money for Marketing? Authentic Marketing Saves Our Asses

Authentic Selling – Truly Serving Your Audience

Build a Word of Mouth Machine for Your Business

Empathy, The Caveman Tool Guaranteed to Grow Your Business

Philosophy Of Business and Change

Get Your Shit Together

Lose Some Friends And Find Your Tribe

Don't Start a Business

You Can Create Real Change

Start a Business, Change the World

Copyright

Intro

Start a Business, Change the World

A Guide to Starting a Business for People Who Want to Make The World a Better Place.

Within these pages, I entertain you with stories of jail and suicide, despair and comedy, struggle and eventual happiness. Within these pages I bring you through a journey of trying to make the world a better place. This book is dedicated to budding entrepreneurs – all of you crazies who see the world not for what it is – but for what it could be. To those of you who want to fix poverty, eliminate corruption, cure diseases and defeat impossible odds. This book is for all of you who live in self-doubt in the name of travelling through the unknown. This book is for all of you rebels and misfits, the square pegs in the round holes, the ones who walk the path less travelled – and for those who want to fix our broken world.

I’m determined to help you to start a business that changes the world. Because that’s the only way I know that will get John off by back. Who’s John? He’s the orphan who changed my life. You’ll meet him in the chapters ahead.

- Edmond Yap

Keep in touch, drop me an email at edmond@pewpew.agency

Or follow me on Twitter, @edmondyap

Or follow my Facebook Group @businessofchange

About the Author

Hi, my name is Edmond and I was an engineer. My dad used to joke that I was going to grow up to be a toilet bowl engineer (yes, he had a strange sense of humour). And his prediction came true. Some of it anyway. I became a civil engineer specialising in water and wastewater. Yes, wastewater is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a nicer way to say toilet-bowl-water.

But I left my engineering career a few years after I started – because I was tired of wading in a swamp of corruption. To soothe my soul, over the next decade and a half, I became a trainer, a self-help speaker, an entrepreneur and a coach for purpose-driven businesses. Many moons ago I built Edunation (it has been rebranded since I left), and it became Asia’s largest free online learning platform for school-going children. Edunation and its sister companies are now helping more than 100,000 kids a month. I’ve since left Edunation to start Pew Pew and Smolpotato.

With Smolpotato we help budding entrepreneurs to start their own home-based businesses. With Pew Pew we help to grow businesses that want to make the world a better place. I started Pew Pew because I believe that responsible and empowered entrepreneurs will go on to solve the world's biggest problems.

Entrepreneurs like you.

Special Thanks

My wife, oh wow. I can’t begin to express how thankful I am for you patience and love. It’s what’s got me through the rough spots and the crazy times. You’ve put up with all my hours of staring at the screen, and you’ve cleared a path that enabled me to live a life of purpose. To my wife Tasha, thank you for believing in me.

Are You a Misfit? Maybe You’re An Entrepreneur

I barely survived school. I was one fail away from dropping out of university. After graduation, I took the first job that came my way because my parents wanted to stop giving me pocket money. Then while working in my first job as a civil engineer, I saw that corruption was everywhere. As an engineer, I had a front-row seat to everything that was wrong with the world. At the time, I thought, There’s nothing I can do.

How could I, a tiny, insignificant engineer, hope to make the world a better place?

Then I spent the next half a decade wondering, What's the point of life?

As the years I spent as an engineer rolled on, I started wondering,

Why work so hard?

Is everyone taking bribes?

Why do we treat our foreign workers like dogs?

Why are there gambling machines in the construction site?

I often wondered about the purpose of my life. I got my answer came only after a string of unfortunate events – jail, death, depression, ignorance, and fed-up-ness.

The answer to, What’s my purpose in life? Only started to reveal itself once I rejected society’s expectations of me. I started to understand my place in the world as I gained knowledge. And with the power of knowledge, I became less afraid of failure.

While I was working as an engineer, my bosses asked me to take our customers to karaoke joints where girls offered up their breasts. I had to drink the night away and then drive my customers home after. I saw my boss self-destruct in a whirlwind of corruption scandals. Got fired. Only for me to rejoin my old boss again after he started his new company. Stupid much?

There were the illegal gambling machines placed in construction sites – so that the authorities could steal money from our underpaid, overworked, and underappreciated foreign workers.

Then I went to jail for unrelated reasons. It was here that I saw the depths of corruption in my country. Handcuffed and stripped down to my bare balls and told to naked squats. I was later expected to bribe the jail guards for food, water, and the right to a phone call. It was only two days, but two days in the decrepit Pudu jail was two days too long. When the 1MDB super-scandal blew up – I was already numb. Numb because I knew bad things happened in the background but there was little I could do. If corruption was common where I worked, I knew it went all the way up the food chain too.

I was an engineer for 5 years. Two years into my engineering career, I knew that I had enough. I knew that I had to leave. I was a round peg while the world was trying to squeeze me through a square hole. The more I tried to fit in, the more miserable I became. So for years, I lived a purposeless existence. I became a horrible employee. I’d fire me too. I was Dilbert. But at least Dilbert had the security of his cubicle. Instead, I had an office made of mud, scorching sun, and heavy machinery.

That’s the real world, stop whining. My family said to me.

But I refused to accept a broken world, mostly because I was so deeply unhappy, I had no choice but to reject the status quo. I went bonkers trying to reject the idea that corruption and unfairness were normal. I rebelled against the thought that we cannot change the world.

I realised that I needed to break away from the bondage of my university education and I needed to chart my own path. I needed to make a difference.

I loved Chicken Run. I related to Ginger, the chicken who looked beyond the fence that trapped her on a farm. Like Ginger, I imagined a better life for myself, a life unconstrained from society’s norms and expectations of me. I became a rebel not because I wanted to be, I became a rebel because I didn’t have a choice. I was unhappy and I didn’t belong.

Do you wish to break free? Do you want to live a more meaningful life? Are you looking for people who will journey with you in your quest to make the world a better place? And are you tired of standing in the sidelines waiting for the world to change?

If you answered, YES! Then being an entrepreneur could be the quickest way to make the world a better place. So pack your bags, bring your sense of humour and let’s embark on a journey of epic proportions.

After twiddling my thumbs for years, I finally decided to leave my job. As the door of my engineering career closed behind me, I screeched to a halt and wondered, What now?

I wanted to start a business.

But what?

What Business Should You Start?

I was in a pub with my friends and we were cracking our heads. We wanted to start a business but, what?

We should start a restaurant! Chong proclaimed.

How about a cafe? Joe chimed in.

Through the night we kept circling. Cafe. Restaurant. Cafe. Restaurant. Cafe. But I wasn’t excited about starting a cafe, or a restaurant. I thought, There’s got to be better ideas! So we continued nursing our beers, hoping that one of us would finally go, Eureka!

But that eureka never came. All we had were empty beer mugs and empty wallets. On hindsight, I now realise that we didn’t have good business ideas because we were trying to start a business for the wrong reasons.

I was trying to start a business for myself – to make money for myself, to be my own boss and to be the master of my time. I didn’t know what business to start – because I was looking inward rather than outward. The problem was the my, or the I.

I had very few business ideas because I was trying to solve an ‘inner problem’ – and my most pressing ‘inner problem’ was money. And if I was trying to solve a personal money issue, then doing anything that made money would have been fine.

That’s why my mind flicked back and forth from cafe to restaurant to cafe to restaurant. They were the most obvious ideas for making money. And the idea of making money didn’t give me the creative motivation I needed to birth worthwhile business ideas.

Years later I realised that starting a business isn’t supposed to be about solving my own problems. Rather, it's about solving other people’s problems. But because I looked inward rather than outward, I couldn’t see all the opportunities that surrounded me.

Once I stopped thinking about my problems and started thinking about other people’s problems, I exploded with ideas. Like fireworks going crazy at New Year's Eve. Suddenly everything I complained about became an opportunity.

Potholes on the road? Invent an instant pothole fix.

Can’t find a good property? Set up an online property marketplace (iProperty started 2 years after I first thought of this idea *facepalm). Comes to show that ideas are worthless without execution.

Too much corruption? Start a training company to help people earn money without resorting to corruption.

Illiterate children in schools? Set up a free online tuition platform like the Khan Academy. Which I ended up doing with Edunation (or what was once known as Edunation).

Maybe we should sit and listen to complaining Karen and bitchin’ Bobby if only for the accidental business ideas they’ll give us.

To get the best business ideas, don’t think about starting a business for yourself. Instead, think about starting a business to solve other people’s problems. Start a business to serve others, not to serve ourselves.

Business ideas are not found in the I, and me. Instead, it’s found in the you, and them.

No problems are too big to be solved. If humanity can create a problem, humanity can create a solution – no matter how big. Whether it’s global warming or world hunger or the extinction of the human race. Elon Musk can't do much if the asteroid apocalypse happens today, but maybe he can in the next few decades. That’s what SpaceX is supposed to be for – to develop the technologies for the human race to leave the planet.

Solving global warming, world hunger, education inequality or Donald Trump are epic projects. But like Elon Musk, you won’t have to solve the whole problem. At least not on your own and certainly not at the beginning. You just need to start with solving a tiny, perhaps miniscule part of the problem.

Want to solve world hunger? Empower locals to build sustainable farms. If this idea is too big, start smaller – start a restaurant that trains at-risk communities. Or smaller – work with charitable organisations who are feeding the poor. Or smaller – stop throwing food away! Then slowly work your way up the ladder of impact.

You might not have the means to solve big problems today, but this just means that you should start your journey today with baby steps. Baby steps still too big? Hamster steps then. But get started. That is – if you want to arrive at your destination within your lifetime. We only have a short time in this world, every minute we believe that we cannot solve the world’s biggest problems – the more self-fulfilling our prophecy becomes.

I saw a lot of corruption as an engineer – it was a problem