Melvin Poh's entrepreneurial journey started with a failure that led him to create Empirics Asia, a platform that crowdsources knowledge from all over the world
How do you seek an answer to a question? For most of us, hitting the search button on Google is the most natural thing to do. But what if you are an entrepreneur looking for insights into an unfamiliar market? It’s a specific problem Melvin Poh faced when he was deciding on entering his first venture in Hong Kong with a friend.
Not one to dive in blindly, Poh tirelessly researched online articles and reports about the local market before he committed to the endeavour. However, after just one year into the venture, the business folded. That failure cost him all of his savings at the time, and left him feeling embarrassed. “In hindsight, I should have spoken with someone who was familiar with the Hong Kong market before I embarked on my business. If I had done so, I could have prevented my mistake,” he reflects.
See also: Athlete Or Entrepreneur? Tech CEO Kimberly Wan Is All That And More
After studying in Harvard University, Poh co-founded The Asian Entrepreneur in 2013 with several classmates with the aim to gather and curate the collective experiences of business experts from around Asia and create a knowledge base to serve curious entrepreneurs.
Even though it initially started as a print publication, Poh always envisioned scaling up The Asian Entrepreneur exponentially. However, his ambition was constrained by the capital-intensive nature of the traditional publishing model. At the time, he only had four writers on staff and to grow bigger would mean hiring more writers.
This led him to explore other methods, which included crowdsourcing, a model most famously used by Wikipedia. Instead of expanding his pool of writers, The Asian Entrepreneur would crowdsource articles and insights from thousands of contributors from around the world. “It was a huge departure from my original vision,” he admitted. “I learned that we have to challenge our understanding and realise there is a better way to do things.”