After reading about the winner of Imagine Cup 2012, I remembered my days as a finalist when I was in senior year for Imagine Cup 2005. I was with a team representing University of Indonesia and brought an app that can calculate the fastest way to get to one place to another using a public transportation. Back then we didn’t have Google Maps so we made our own version of it.
It was an awesome app, at least in our heads. We made our first prototype on an HP iPaq PDA using the Windows .Net mobile (or something.. can’t really remember). But two problems arose: We didnt’ know how to draw a correct map and we couldn’t get the right data from public transportation because there was just not enough information on the net.
We ended up getting the map from a screen-printed version of Cybermap, and generating random possible spots of public transports because we couldn’t get the right data. Everything was hard-coded, the app was a mess and even with those compromises we couldn’t finish the app in time. Even so, we won second place.
It was an interesting experience although we got shot down badly at the presentation. The one thing I remembered clearly is that we were criticized badly on how we try to tackle everything ourselves. We were told that we should have just searched for an available SVG library to draw the map instead of building our own, ask permission from Cybermap to provide us with the needed API, and collaborate with the public transportation company to give us relevant data. In short, we didn’t have to handle everything ourselves and it would have been a lot easier to just work with existing companies.
I took the defeat with open arms and embraced the input dearly. We cannot do everything, we are not and will never be Superman. There are things that we can do ourselves but remember that there’s a lot of other things that other people can do better.
It wasn’t really obvious for me seven years ago but today’s world is full of open possibilities. APIs are scattered everywhere ready to be used, plugins available for free and open source software ready to be exploited and modified.
The best of all is that it’s not limited to the digital world. Many businesses are starting to focus on doing only one thing and one thing right like PayPal for payment gateway, DCourier and Gojek for local courier services, WGChat for your online customer service needs. There are even services that you can use occasionally like Sribu when you need a logo design.
These are services that you can plug-and-play to your existing business model that can help you concentrate on your core business.
If you are in a cupcake business, don’t bother yourself with shipments if you can just use your nearest local courier services. Don’t bother making your own website if you can afford an expert and don’t hesitate to pay for advertising. Concentrate on what you do best: Making cupcakes!
Gantibaju.com always try to focus on our core business of making awesome Indonesian tees. We crowd source the design process to the talented designers all over Indonesia, we ‘outsourced’ our server to Microsoft Cloud Services because we don’t want to waste our time managing server and dealing with scaling problems, we collaborated with Scoop Interactive to make our very own iPad magazine because we don’t know and we don’t want to know how to make an app. We stick with what we do best and outsource the rest.
Sticking to your core values helps you concentrate in making great products that you care about without being hassled on things you don’t want to do. Just make sure that you can actually afford the services that you want to use.
Aria Rajasa is the CEO of gantibaju.com, a clothing startup backed by a very strong designer community. His passion in entrepreneurship has gotten him to establish a number of companies in technology and design industries since leaving university
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