Dawei Li is a recent graduate from Vanderbilt University and a co-founder of Aloa.co, a tech startup that’s striving to make software development easy and accessible for everyone. Since it’s founding in 2018, over 100 tech startups across North America and Europe have used the Aloa platform to seamlessly outsource their software development overseas. In his spare time, he enjoys writing country music and playing at bars/venues in his favorite city of Nashville, TN.
What were the top 3 mistakes you made as an entrepreneur, and if you could start over what would you do differently?
Fall in love with the problem, not the solution
One of my favorite inspirational quotes is: “Fall in love with the problem and not the solution.” Before we started Aloa, we had several other startups that all failed. Looking back on those days, we were deeply love with the solution that we came up with. We were in love with the product that we built rather than the problems that our customers faced day every day. Since starting Aloa, we’ve been heavily driven by customer pain points and have been obsessed with tracking those pain points on a tool called Airtable. Doing so has allowed us to serve our clients on a completely different level and has allowed us to create a wholistic solution that truly solves the day to day needs of our clients.
Playing it safe gets you no where
So grown up as an Asian American most of us were taught to play it safe. We were taught to graduate from high school go to college and become one of four things: a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, or a scientist. We were always taught growing up to get a safe and stable job. None of us were really raised with the mentality to really take on risk, and most importantly, to fail. Failure isn’t really celebrated or embraced in the Asian culture. So I’d say that the advice I received I wish I never followed is to play it safe. Now looking back as an entrepreneur, no one ever gets anywhere in life by playing it safe. The best things and the hardest things to achieve in life always require a certain degree of risk and a lot of times a very large degree of risk. Knowing what that risk is and not getting frightened by that risk, but rather facing that risk head-on is what has allowed me to get to where I am today.
Stop pitching, start selling
The most common mistake that I’ve seen a lot of CEOs and founders make when they start a business is focusing too much on pitching and not selling. In present day startup culture, I just think there are way too many pitch competitions that people are getting themselves into and winning XYZ award for how good their pitch is. However, a lot of the startups that go to these pitch competitions are often times pre-revenue and far from profitability. So instead of focusing too much on the pitch deck or joining pitch competitions, I’d say focus more on creating a sales deck. You’ve got to start getting in front of potential customers to sell your product and start generating revenue with your business. Customers and revenue should be the biggest validation to your business model, not a panel of judges at a pitch competition.
Dawei Li Cofounder of Aloa.co
Top 3 business Mistakes: Deepak Shukla co-founder of SERPWizz
