I have a friend, also my partner in a few business projects until recently, who has been a website designer for the past three years. Late last year 2015, he contacted me and told me he wanted to start getting serious in his business. He needed to settle down and would like to develop a reliable source of income. He wanted to start a Travel App project with me and told me that he was confident in marketing it to obtain a total of 1 million download in 12 months' time. With 1 million downloads, he will then approach large travel-related companies like Singapore Airlines and many restaurants and hawkers in Singapore for advertising fees. He wanted to go with the model of Facebook Ads and Google Adsense. He wanted to charge them $1 per day of advertising fees, which is about $30 per month. If we have 100 restaurants and hawkers come on board. we would have a Passive Income of $3000 per month. It sounded really great. That was all it was! Something that sounded nice but with no concrete results.
If you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you will see the bright red logo of the Travel i SIN (renamed to Travel i SG) mobile app which brings you to the Google PlayStore to download. My friend has also created a Facebook Page to promote this application, which he recently removed me from being an Administrator for the page.
After 6 months in April 2016, we didn't achieve that. We only obtained about 50-100 installations. By then, we each had already put in about $100 to subscribe to a mobile app development for the creation of the Travel I SIN app and creating a Facebook Ad campaign for about two and a half weeks during the movie season of Batman v Superman. He also signed up to some services that could put a few hundred likes on the Facebook page every day.
Late in April 2016, after a consultation with a business coach, I realised that ALL THAT WE DID WAS WRONG! Immediately, I told my friend everything that I could remember from that consultation.
At first, he was resistant to some things I conveyed to him from the coach. He told me that we hadn't failed. We just needed more time to prove we were right. I was frustrated.
He also told me he was new to marketing but he was willing to learn. I passed him many ebooks on Marketing. But after two weeks, he told me he had read just a little. I wondered whether he was willing to learn.
So I demanded for a change in direction. I suggested we came up with digital travel guidebooks for people in other countries to purchase and download. I told him about this in May 2016. It took him one month to come up with a list of places to visit in Singapore. The first place that he wanted to visit was Gardens by the Bay because it was rated the best tourist attraction in Singapore by TripAdvisor. It took him another month to come up with a half-done draft of a detailed guide to Gardens by the Bay. It was of poor design quality. I was very disappointed because he kept telling me he's a professional designer. He
It was only then that I know he was just boasting. The more serious issue is it seems he has no idea he's doing that! Or perhaps, because he has been living that way for years, he has got into the bad habit of telling people in a confident way that he can do this and that without actually having the knowledge and skills to do it!
So I started my own Travel Blessings Page at Facebook in June 2016 to promote a flight & hotel booking service and also to promote tourism in Singapore. This is a down-to-earth honest Facebook Page that seeks to earn genuine followers. I can't delay the progress of developing a travel business because of my friend's laziness, slowness, bad habits, huge ego, arrogance, lack of business sense and marketing skills.
He is in a partnership with two other friends of his, and the partnership is called Nogaku Sketch. They have a Facebook Page for their partnership. It was initially started as a web design firm but because there are many free and excellent platforms to design basic websites and blogs he found he needed to revamp the business. He wanted to go into Marketing. He wanted to use the Travel i SIN project as a showcase for the marketing expertise of Nogaku Sketch and start getting marketing projects from small and medium businesses.
We have a common friend in his partnership who was good in marketing. So I assume he has learned something from this friend of mine and wanted to test all the things he has learned about marketing on a separate project (this is my fault, I assume that he's trustworthy and capable and knowledge just because he was with my marketing friend for three years).
Now, when I call him, he rejects my call.
He unfriended my from Facebook.
He unliked all my Facebook pages.
He refused to respond to my SMSes.
He kicked me out from my Admin Role at Trave I SIN (or Travel I SG) Facebook Page.
Yet he was the one who promised to bring in $3000 per month from this project.
He was the one who said he would leave no stones unturned and would do whatever it took to achieve the aim.
Lack of Eagerness to Learn
My friend kept telling me he wanted to do marketing, kept telling me he's learning. But he also told me (because of some difficulties) he can only read 2-3 pages of the marketing ebooks that I passed him. Some books are thick, consisting of 200-300 pages. It would take him one year to finish all the books. Yet he kept telling me that he wanted to do marketing and was willing to learn.
A person who is eager to learn will devour all the books in 1-2 days.
Lack of Humility
He did not have marketing knowledge and skills, and yet when he told me he could obtain 1 million downloads, he spoke as if he knew how to do it. He presented himself so confidently and so convincingly.
He boasted that he was a professional designer yet he couldn't come up with a properly designed travel guidebook for just one tourist attraction in Singapore in 4 weeks.
He boasted that he can do video editing. But 6 weeks after visiting Gardens by the Bay and videoshot the whole Light Show event while he was there, he still couldn't produce that video and put it up on the page.
He sounded so genuine that he would learn about marketing but his actions did not show he was eager to learn.
Meanwhile, I wish him all the best and I will honour the promise to myself, to establish a travel business in Singapore. I will present you a series of travel guides on Singapore and you get all my insights of the best places to go, best food to eat and where to find them, how to use the Singapore public transport effectively to travel free-and-easy around the island, unique places to shop, where to find pockets of nature and tranquillity in Singapore and how to explore the historical facet of Singapore.
Like the Travel Blessings Page to get updates. Find it on Instagram and Tumblr as well.
What about you? Do you want to find success in your life? Then start with the basics. To construct a tall building, you have to building a strong and deep foundation. Likewise, to succeed in your life, you must build a strong foundation. This foundation includes your attitudes and beliefs in life. From this incident that you have just read, it will do you good if you are humble and honest with your own capabilities and acknowledge that you need to learn a lot and learn quickly. You must be eager to learn too! All successful people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet learn everyday! Bill Gates carries with him a luggage of books wherever he travels.
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