✨ 5 Years, 15 Lessons: What I Learned Scaling and Downsizing a Startup 🚀📉

When I was 23, I started ASIDU, a study abroad consulting agency helping students to study overseas and build a career, and now it is 5 years old. I am very proud of this journey so far, and here are some lessons I want to share with you about what I learned.

On Business - Try not to run out of business

1. Over these past five years, I have seen many dramas in the business world. One thing that I definitely overlooked when I first started my company was to think about how to run this business as long as it can be. Of course, it was very thrilling to finally see my name with the title “Founder and CEO” on a business card, but it should not be the end goal. The end goal is to achieve the startup vision and mission and steer the ship so that the startup can sustain the tides along the way. 

2. Even before I started my startup, I knew that there was a report published by Gartner every year saying that over 95% of startups cannot pass the 5-year mark. This is the biggest elephant in the room that most startup founders ignored, as they were overwhelmed by all the operations, sales, marketing, and product development work. What struck me recently was seeing how other founders’ friends actually stopped running their businesses along the way.

3. Running a business is not the same as running a charity. At some point, people have to pay you, and you deliver certain goods or services. There is always an angel in my head arguing that if the services we provide are free, wouldn’t it benefit even more people and help achieve the startup mission even faster? Actually no. Nobody gives a single F about your company if you offer everything for free.

On Marketing - Marketing is not science and is controversial. 

1. I feel that with a degree in biochemistry and actively working in the immunology research field, it is safe for me to say that I know what science is and that marketing is not science. There is no science in marketing, sorry. A/B testing gives the closest feeling that marketing is science; however, once you obtain the A/B testing results and try to apply them to your business, the trend is different, the time is different, and your customers think differently. Basically, the results you obtained from A/B testing are not repeatable. Otherwise, we should have peer-reviewed journals about marketing science and theories around it, just like how scientists discovered the subsets of T cells and how transcription works step-by-step with falsifiable hypotheses.

2. Today, my company does not spend anything actively on marketing or advertisement. The budget is literally zero, and my business is ranked as the fifth organic search result on Google Search. Not bad. Also, there are over 7,000 monthly sessions on the company website. So, give it a second thought when you want to pay anything about marketing.

   

   Spent $0 on SEO and still ranked #4 on Google Search when you search for “澳門升學顧問,” which stands for “Study Abroad Consultants in Macau.”

3. Marketing X time = branding.
   Marketing X achieves sales in a short time = scammy-ish.

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