A common advice is that many Hong Kong start-up founders strongly believe their businesses either take off or flip completely. The mentality behind is you should start building something or a product. If you build a better app in your niche, you will beat your competition and will take their users. If you cannot build something better, then the market must not have existed in the first place. The brutal truth is that any startup that takes off would highly depend on the approach of their founders and all the co-founding members. Of course, there are a few handful startups would grow naturally on their own without much interference. It is very much like a car engine. Once the engine has been turned on, it keeps going without needing another human to push the car.

But for the local entrepreneurs to even execute the pushing part, nowadays competitions are high, and cost of growth is even higher. Most founders and founding members aren’t able to keep funding their own projects and/or Hong Kong startup business for a very long time (i.e. a few years). One of the sources for startup owners to get investment funding is through some Cyberport funding. One of the funding programs from Cyberport is the CyberportIncubation Programme (CIP). Other funding options include Creative Micro Fund, Accelerator Support Programme, and Market Development Support Scheme.

One of the most common problems when growing a startup is the unscalable operations. This include mainly recruiting your first 1,000 users for your new product. You cannot just buy advertising including search engine advertising, display/banner advertising, classifieds/directory advertisement, and a few more advertisement elsewhere, and expect people clicking on your ads and becoming your loyal users. The illusion is that all the big players in your industry or other industries are already big and have a lot of users. They are using growth tactics that cannot simply be copied and re-used by companies of much smaller scale.

One effective method is you need to a product elsewhere already have a group of stable users. This product has to be a complementary product to the product you have built, or the other way around. Essentially you have created a product that can fill the missing gap of another product. Even with this very good method, it still takes a long time and much hard work to get to your first 1,000 new users.