Yu-kai Chou

Being at the verge of explosion

As many of you may know, I have been an entrepreneur for over 5 years now. I’ve worked on a lot of different small businesses, some made cash for me, while others were just a great learning experience. However, I have constantly been moving into opportunities that are more scalable and more impactful. And I think I’m at that opportunity now.

My startup Viralogy is at the best shape we have ever been in a startup. Right now we have

1. An amazing team who are literally the best in my network of over a thousand people
2. A finished product that increases customer revenue by over 10%
3. Paying customers one month after launching
4. Validated with three competition wins, including 1st place at Jason Calacanis’ This Week in Startups – LA competition and TheFunded.com’s Juice Pitcher event

I believe Viralogy has bust through most of the technology and market acceptance risks, and we are in full position to expand our sales and grab more marketshare.

This is the point where you join our journey

Our team is completely passionate about eCommerce Personalization and have worked hard to get to this point. We used $30K to hit all our milestones in the last nine months, and now we’re ready to raise the next round of $350K via individual investors.

We want you to be part of it. As an investor, you will see how a startup grows and becomes a game changing business. I can’t guarantee that we will succeed for sure, but at this point we have an excellent chance of making it big and getting you to retire early

If you are interested in being a part of our exciting journey, here’s a video that explains more on what we do:

Hey guys! I haven’t been able to post much lately on my blog since I’ve been traveling a ton and busy launching our product. The good news is that we successfully launched our product Dynamic Insights and Grade Your Store site, converted a handful paying customers, and have been able to automatically increase their sales revenue by 15%. These days I’m working a bunch trying to do some fundraising. I’m going to try to go back to video blogging again soon though so at least I can be sociable with you guys again.

Anyway, last week I went to Los Angeles and did a pitch at the TWiST – LA event. I won first place out of 10 Startups and got the chance to chat with Jason Calacanis, who is very influential in the startup world and blogosphere, on his live show about Viralogy. Pretty awesome.

Well, just wanted to do a quick update on my life. For more details about the actual pitch, you can check out the post on the Viralogy eCommerce Blog

Even though I’m usually really busy, I’m always there for people who need my help in anything, so feel free to email me for anything, anytime!

Become powerful within your existing friends

There are many people who are not interested in becoming powerful and impactful in the world, but almost everyone wants to be influential and respected among their friends and peers.

However, the majority of the people do not become that, mostly because they are so comfortable with their existing social statuses in their groups that they don’t know how to make it different.

Here are some guidelines to help you become more influential within your circle. Your circle could mean anything from your small group of friends, your class, your department, or your entire organization.

1. Become the best

This is the most straight forward but most difficult way to become influential. It simply means being the best at whatever your group is doing. In fact, most respectable and influential individuals from a group are the ones that have mastered their skillsets the most, whether it be basketball, sales, programming, or just video games.

The way to do this is simply matching talent with hard work and becoming the best. Nothing fancy. Interestingly enough, a lot of people who become extremely successful later on in life still highly respect their childhood friends who were remarkable in a game they played, even if the friends are not very successful themselves.

One key to note is that the activity you excel at must be shared by all the people in your circle. If you are the best at chess in a chess club, you will be respected since everyone is doing it. But if you are best at sales but your circle does marketing and finance, then it doesn’t work as well. Finally, conduct yourself in a manner that minimizes jealously (elaborated in another post)

2. Become useful

If you don’t have the ability to become the best at what you do (by definition the majority of the people), another way is to become useful. This means that you are always there to help everyone out, and always have the right resources handy when it’s needed.

This is much easier to accomplished because you do not need to be the most talented at something. You just need to be the most prepared and most available out of all. If you are the one that brings something when no one else thought it would come in handy, or you remembered a piece of information that suddenly was needed, people will start to trust you. Eventually, as you are there for everyone and people start to rely on you more and more, you start to gain in respect and influence.

One key to note is that you want to make sure you don’t do it in a manner that suggests people can simply take advantage of you. You want to make sure you maintain a strong core and are only helping because you want to help so don’t feel like people can trample over you. Learn how to say no when you have to.

3. Become audacious

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There’s always going to be people smarter than you and people dumber than you

Everyone wants to be successful in life. However, not everyone has what it takes to get there. Life is competitive, and to constantly keep up and excel over your peers is a tough and struggling battle.

Sure, some people believe that they can dominate everyone based on their natural abilities and intelligence, but you would be a fool to deny that there isn’t someone smarter and stronger than you out there (if you happen to be that one person who truthfully qualifies for that, email me and I’ll apologize to you personally). For most of us, gambling that you are the ultimate genius is a risky way of winning any battle.

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It is more blessed to give than to receive

Before I start to write about this topic, I’m going to assume that you are a good natured, helpful, and considerate person who is not trying to suck out the life blood out of everyone around him. If you think my assumption is incorrect, go back to the post where I talk about how Integrity, Sincerity and Optimism are the first three cores of FD Networking (out of six).

In order to level up in the game of life, you need to always be prepared to help others. When you are aiming to become powerful, you are not just yourself, but the group of people you have influence over. When that’s the case, peoples’ business is your business, and you benefit if these business are going well. You should always take others’ welfare to heart and strive to make the group better as a whole.

But sometimes you need help

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No one likes excuses…besides their creator

Often times when someone did their tasks incorrectly and it was pointed out to them, the person would blame it on their tools or environment. It could be pretty frustrating when you are working with people like that and their work/attitudes directly impact how you do.

When that happens, instead of just saying “That’s just an excuse!” and create an emotional response (these RARELY solve your problems and they’ve managed to bring you down to their level of negativity), I find it useful to ask, “I understand that. But is it humanly possible for a normal person to do this correctly, even with these obstacles?” If their response is “No! That’s not possible for anyone to do it!”, then either you should probably drop what your team is doing, or find someone else to work with.

But the chances are their responses will be “Yes.”

Making people understand is better than making people feel guilty

I then followup with, “Then is it possible for to you do it correctly, even with these obstacles?” At this point, most people would say yes too and understand that it’s ultimately up to them to overcome these problems and it’s pointless focusing on the obstacles and excuses. It’s humanly possible for non-geniuses to do it. You can do it too.

The non-excuse is on you

While we realize this is a good way to shut people up and stop them from complaining, it’s also a good idea to apply it to ourselves. When we face obstacles and failures in our lives, instead of focusing why we couldn’t do it, we should again think, “is this humanly possible for a normal person?” And if the answer is yes, stop the complaining and just get it done.

Being cautious can be useful for in life. But being negative creates value for no one.

How to Optimize your Apparel eCommerce Site

My company Viralogy is working hard to help online retailers get higher traffic and conversions. Here’s a guide that can significantly improve the conversion rates of apparel sites. It would be awesomely amazing if you can forward it to your friends who run online retailing sites so they can learn how to improve their performances! Any feedback is welcomed!

Cold-Emailing is frustrating

Have you ever had the frustrating experience where you emailed someone you didn’t know very well, and never got a response? Feels pretty bad right? No one really likes cold-emailing, but in order to strive for more opportunities that wouldn’t regularly show up at your door (customers, mentors, advisors, investors, etc etc), you are often required to contact people you’re not already buddies with.

But what if they don’t respond? Should you email them again? But haven’t they already implicitly rejected you by not responding? Aren’t you annoying them? The entire experience can be very demoralizing.

A story of Yu-kai Chou RECEIVING cold-emails

However, before you give up hope, I want to share a couple quick stories. In 2007, I went to an entrepreneurship event hosted at the UCLA Anderson School called StartupLA. I signed up for the spontaneous 1 minute pitch at the event. After the event, I was catching up with a lot of work so I only made sure I followed up with a handful of key people that I had to meet.

However, I got an email from a struggling entrepreneur that the judges didn’t really like during that time. He said it was great meeting me and wanted to catch food/coffee sometime together. Being in my stressful catchup mode, I felt warm about the email but ultimately ignored it (I didn’t want to appear like an asshole and reject such a polite and sincere offer).

A couple weeks later, I received another email from him, saying that he knows I am busy, but it would be great if we could catch coffee sometime. I actually did kinda mean to respond to that, but it sat in my inbox for almost a week, and it felt a bit awkward responding with “Sorry I didn’t get back to you earlier…” so I also kinda let it go…

LUCKILY, this guy had the persistence of the Uppercut (will talk about soon!) and emailed me again! By this time, there was no excuse for me and I was compelled to respond to him IMMEDIATELY. We then scheduled to get some dim sum together.

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