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Welcome to the NinjaPear blog, where we will chronicle our journey in building the world's largest first-party B2B data platform.
In one of my earliest articles, I wrote about building a position of continuous survival [https://nubela.co/blog/the-bootstrappers-hierarchy-of-needs/]. Looking back, building that stream of sustained revenue was more than just luck and hard work. It was an act of desperation. I worked hard because I was desperate. I
I wonder if it is a false dichotomy between demanding excellence and being liked. Being liked has it's perks and I am envious of those perks because they are rare and fleeting for me. Unfortunately, I choose excellence everytime. I have no story to frame the point I
Growing up as a teenager, I consumed American drama exclusively and built friendships with fellow American hackers. Inadvertently, I longed to go to the US and even live there. In my interview with NOC, my university's international internship program, I raved so much about the US, and I
Straits Times is going bankrupt, so they made a paywall -- Straits Times Premium. Immediately r/Singapore on Reddit built a bot to repost the blockaded content for all to enjoy. The problem is, traditional businesses do not get the internet. Hell, even teenagers do not get the internet. Let&
I was in the worst (performing) class in secondary school. I am not sure how well it does now, but Anglican High was a good school that ranks in the top ten. I was in the "Special" stream, as were most of my peers. Academically, our cohort sits
Sometimes, I envy smokers because they always seem so relaxed while smoking. My drug of choice is programming. I am lost in my head when I am in the zone, arranging lego blocks of code both in my head and on my screen. I love coding, so naturally, I chose
Warning, technical post alert. I have been programming in the last two weeks, and boy do I miss it. We have been using a variant of CoffeeScript, known as iced-coffeescript [https://maxtaco.github.io/coffee-script/]. It is like Coffeescript, which is like Javascript, but it is also like Python with
I spent a significant bit of my teenage life on the internet. I trafficked pirated content that was sold downstream by pirated DVD vendors, otherwise known as warez couriering [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_group#Courier_groups]. I hacked US military servers and used them to host botnets [https:
Firstly, let’s clarify. Web scraping is not the end-all-be-all. It is, however, a starting point for further value-adding applications such as price sensitivity or sentiment analysis, leads generation for a company looking to scale its sales process, etc. These feats can only be accomplished with the support of large
I watched an interview of Quek Siu Rui, CEO of Carousell, on Bloomberg TV. He spoke about being lucky enough to work on a product that he cares about passionately. But which came first? Passion or traction? Will Sui Rui be working on Carousell if he was not able to
Look what I put together today. I have had my fingers busy this week, getting involved in the actual productization process in our next experiment. Programming gets me ticking. As a decent programmer, the progress of my work is obvious and predictable. Predictable progress in programming is why it is
The doomsayers lament that machines are coming for all our jobs. For all that is good and holy, everyone needs to calm down and let it happen.
My brother is in Dublin, working for the DynamoDB product under Amazon AWS. Before Amazon, he worked for Skyscanner. My brother is quite an engineer with an attitude, and he loves working with smart people who speak their mind sans political correctness. I love that. Then another friend recently jumped
I was pitching right up till I decided to stop working on Sapiengraph. Perfect setup for some awkward emails but it has to be done. This is the email that I sent: > Hi xxx! I want to follow up to provide an update. I sought out an introduction to
Historical note This is a technical writeup about Sapiengraph CCTV, a product we wanted to build in 2019. The original post was written on 8 October 2019. I am republishing it with context, not rewriting history. A small naming footnote, because otherwise it gets confusing fast: Sapiengraph was first the
It is time for the next experiment after Sapiengraph. I have a few ideas, but there are two that I am studying. The first idea is to productize TMP, a task management platform that we built internally that has turned on the capability for us to operate with a remote
I received numerous feedback from people I care about that I might have given up too fast. This is not the first time I have heard of this. So let us address the elephant in the room. I have a short attention span. It is hard to stay interested in
As a boss, I allocate resources in initiatives that will provide a return. Just like how an investor in a venture capital firm would. Instead of financial capital, my resources are human capital. And I take significant risks, so long as they seem sound. With Sapiengraph, the company arrived at
A while ago, I wrote the specifications for a Trello-based CRM known as ZIC (zero input CRM) and tasked it to an intern. Nevertheless, the product's complexity meant that the result would be unstable. And it was unstable. In my experience, it will take a full-time developer a
Pornography has painted a world by which women have disproportionally large breasts. With startup porn, we have the same problem with almost everything. I want to talk about "hiring the best" today. Every CEO, including myself, claims to hire the best in their company. Statistically, that cannot be
Louis Vuitton, The Highest Value Luxury Brand, May Need To Balance Artistic Endeavor and Market Demand High-value luxury goods such as Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Burberry, Gucci, and Prada have high exchange value. Louis Vuitton (LV) is the highest value luxury brand of 2018, with a brand value of $28.4
Business is people, and humans are irrational. Getting things done in a B2B company is about managing this complex web of inter-human relations. I am going on a limb to say that if you are an introverted or aspie founder, you are better off working on a B2C product. In
I am doing something different this time compared to how I used to build ideate and build products. This time, I am not building anything until I see paying customers. And oh boy, it is unsettling to be selling anything without anything more than a brochure and a promise. Eureka
It is no secret that I fired my brother shortly after I hired him. And I dismissed him for two reasons. First, he was not a good programmer due to inexperience. Secondly, as a young company, I could not afford to have my brother learn under my dime. I think
Genetically, I gain fast-twitch muscles easily. I am no different at work. I drive large movements in the company. And sometimes we move so fast that I can't help but to look back and force myself to regroup.