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New businesses start up every day. Entrepreneurs take their dreams in one hand and the risks in the other and weigh up whether to take the plunge. But with the Covid-19 crisis sending billions of people in Hong Kong and across the globe into lockdown, governments scrambling to cope and massive changes to the world economy, surely if you’re planning to start a business right now, the most sensible idea would just be to … wait a bit? Well, not necessarily. There are some surprising upsides to starting a business in the current climate, as well increased risks.

In January 2020, the La Salle Primary School in Kowloon City became the ninth school in Hong Kong to fall victim to cyber attacks, with four of the affected schools reporting serious data breaches. It appears that the point of entry was the WebSAMS, (web-based school administrative and management system), a Government-developed system which allows electronic communication between institutions and the authorities. Currently, the WebSAMS system is employed by 988 schools in Hong Kong, each of which are individually responsible for maintaining their security protections. 

I was thrilled when Mandy Queen agreed to an interview.

In Cred Communications she very rapidly created a very dynamic company able to take on larger agencies and beat them at their own game, which is a story I've always found highly inspiring - espeically as our companies were born in the same year. Mandy brings energy and humour to any interaction and is always a pleasure to speak to.

Never before has it been easier to have a world-changing idea in tech and see that idea through to a finished product. The internet has made the collectivisation of information possible for the first time in our history and mobile devices now mean we all have access to this information from wheresoever we find ourselves killing time. Low barriers to entry, cheap credit and widespread skills mean that almost anyone can wake up one day with an idea, borrow money, hire a small team or agency, and launch a finished product a few short months later.

So all you need is an original idea, and success will follow automatically from that. Right?

Well, not exactly. Three problems:

NOTE: There is an updated version of this entry.

As a web designer, it's actually very hard to know how much the competition is charging. 

I've never been prepared to mislead my peers – many of whom I know personally – by submitting phoney enquiries to root out their fees. I do always ask clients where their other quotes came in but generally they have the integrity not to tell me. This leaves hearsay, anecdote and the occasional glimpse behind the curtain at a competitive proposal. Over the many years that I've been doing this, however, this adds up to a fairly accurate picture, so although the quality of the data on which the following is based is far from perfect, I'm confident that it is still more or less correct. (The plural of anecdote is not data, but over a long enough timeline it does get closer.)

Picture the scene. You're at your desk. The morning is almost over, as is your second cup of coffee. You feel busy, under pressure even, but the first item on today's to-do list has hardly been read, let alone completed. Your computer screen is a mess of browser tabs competing for your attention: a half-read news article, a spat on Facebook about some topic you hardly care about, some Amazon product you don't need, the weather, a half-composed Tweet. New messages flow into your email inbox faster than you can attend to them. You irritably close everything and glance again at your list, trying to balance its urgency with that of your inbox, only to hear your phone bleep. With great effort you resolve to ignore it but then a co-worker strolls by suggesting lunch. Feeling frustration mixing with a rising anxiety you give up on the entire morning, vowing instead to do better in the afternoon, but knowing your day will probably continue in the same manner. They all do.

That a company with the brand-recognition, prestige, and (presumably) budget of Hong Kong's esteemed posh supermarket, City Super, should have opted to use DIY-online-store-building platform, Shopify for their e-commerce website, surprised me - I'll be honest.

I have nothing against Shopify. Awon Golding's beautiful millinery website uses Shopify. Plenty of perfectly nice-looking e-commerce websites use Shopify. But Shopify tends to be what you use when you're testing out a new product (or a new market). It allows you to get your products up for sale fairly rapidly, and with minimal set-up costs. In return for this you pay some punchy ongoing and transaction costs, and your wings are somewhat clipped in terms of the features your website can include.

Trello has changed the way I work.

Inspiring in its simplicity, it is extremely powerful when you get to know it. Its list-based interface lends itself cleanly to multi-stage processes such as sales lead tracking and bug management. Drop incoming sales leads in at one end, and then shunt them into successive lists as things progress, the lists I use on my Sales board are as follows:

• Active conversations

• Proposal sent

• Deposit paid

• etc. 

The board gives me at-a-glance a summary of that whole potentially-complicated area of the business. So perfect for the job that it could have been created to be a sales lead tracker – but it wasn't.