Warning: This entry is rather long and text-heavy. So much that I don't know how many of you would really want to read this but it's just something that I want personally recorded in my blog for me to look back on one day.
It's about... our first year at Nuffnang.
In the Beginning
It's hard to imagine the life I am living now to the life that I lived one year ago. Time flies.Exactly one year ago, at this very same minute, I was tossing and turning on my bed trying to get some sleep.
Nuffnang.com was due to be launched at between 2.00AM-4.00AM on the 27th of February 2007. We had to launch at that very odd time because Ming went to some Feng Shui Master who told us that it was the best time to launch our website.
I eventually managed to get a short hour's sleep and woke up in the middle of the night hoping that the clock would show 2.00AM and we could all start getting to work in bringing the website to life. But alas, it was only 1.30AM and I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to the fingers on my alarm clock tick.
In what felt like an eternity later, the clock finally hit 2.00AM.
I jumped out of bed and straight to my laptop. I saw Ming and another colleague of mine already online on MSN waiting to get to work. We opened up a chatroom and started to bring the website to life. I was nervous. I really was.
The first launch was meant to be a small Beta launch which involved just a few of my blogger friends to test the site with me.
By 4.00AM the website was online and I had made this blog entry on my blog to share with my readers about what the "leetle dotcom" I always referred to really was.
The First Baby Steps
The next day, before I knew it... a number of my friends had started joining Nuffnang to test it out. NONE of them expected to make any amount of money... they were all just being good friends of mine, supporting me in every way that they could. I still remember them today: Cely, WilliamLeong, Jasonmumbles and Rojaks to name a few.
Soon the number of sign ups we had picked up and by the end of the first day we had over 50 blogs signed up with us. This was a huge achievement for us back then.
In our business plan, we were only hoping to hit 300 blogs in a span of the first 3 months so 50 in the first day was... unbelievable. We eventually hit our target of 300 bloggers in a span of 3 weeks but not without problems.
The number of bloggers signing up with us was so immense that we kept having to upgrade from server to server and optimize our code to ensure we can cope with the load better.Nuffnang Opens Up To Malaysia
I remember the first time we publicly went to promote Nuffnang among the blogging community. Wingz, always a true friend and always will be... was nice enough to allow us a spot at the Together Gather blogger gathering that he and his group were putting together.
We set up a booth there to dispense information to our bloggers, but always staying within our bounds to respect the sanctity of a blogger gathering.A blogger gathering is for bloggers to get together and have fun. If any companies like ourselves were to participate as a sponsor or otherwise, we had better learn to behave and not try to hard sell our product way too much to the bloggers.
We had some mixed reactions from bloggers. Some welcomed the existence of Nuffnang, some were skeptical.
The Bloggers Who Believed In Us
Let's face it.
When Nuffnang first started out, we didn't have that beautiful and high-tech a website that we have now. We didn't have a stable of advertisers waiting tied around our belt and we didn't even have the big team that we have today to support the network. Nuffnang was... like it or not... Ming, me and another 2 dudes.Even under these circumstances, a good number of the top bloggers in Malaysia believed in us from the start and have stuck with us through thick and thin since then.
I can't possibly name them all but to name a few... Shaolintiger, Chanlilian, Kimberlycun, Jolene Lai, Suanie, Kyspeaks, Nicole, Xes, Jeff Ooi and last but not least Kenny Sia... all of which who had put their faith in us from the very beginning.
Thank you so very much to all of you. I hope we never ever disappointed any of you.
Finding Our First Ads
Once the first bloggers had joined us, we had pressure. Pressure to find ads to satisfy the growing community of bloggers under Nuffnang. Now Ming and I knew nobody in the advertising industry. Not soul. But we knew we had to find our way in.
We started off by reading magazines just to find the ads on them and writing them all down on a piece of paper to later compile their contact numbers and make cold calls. Cold calls are hard to make. Especially when you're from a very unknown company, worse still a dotcom.
Many skeptics told us that cold calling will get us no where and they had good reason to believe so. But Ming and I didn't have anywhere else to turn to. It's either we cold call... or we sit around hoping that advertisers might find us. We chose the former.
Out of every 10 cold calls, 9 will have us rejected for various reasons ranging from "I not free" to "We no budget" (When they really do have). Only 1 will result in a meeting, giving us a chance to pitch.
Our first clients were Exabytes and a boutique hotel in Singapore called Perak Hotel but they were a good start. In the beginning, we couldn't afford to be choosers. We took anything that came by. I remember servicing the client for one of our first ads.
The client owned a small website that sold parenting items and her budget was only to spend RM100, and on top of that we had to design her banners for her as well. We took the business anyway because there wasn't anything else for us at the time. Those were hard times.
3 months after we launched... in June... we ran a campaign for our very first BIG client: Nike. It was for their very localized "Jangan Togel" campaign and it was our first chance to prove ourselves. I was so excited by it and it meant so much to us just to have that one campaign eventhough the people who gave us that deal at the very beginning probably didn't realize it.
Subsequently, we kept working hard to build our clients and eventually closed more deals. From Nike, to Honda,to Nestle and the likes.
The Growth Stage
From the 6th month onwards, things started to grow really really fast for Nuffnang. We were securing more and more ad deals with more and more clients and our team was growing fast. We not only had hired more but also expanded from Penang to open up 2 more offices, a humble office in KL and one in Singapore.An important component of our growth is in finding the right people in our team. Believe me when I say this... the right people are very hard to find.... and when you find the right people to work with, it's like finding the love of your life.
You go to work every day very happy to be able to know that you're working with the very best, and when you know you're working with the best you know the company you're in is going somewhere.
To name a few of the Nuffnang team that had been essential to us:
Tim 2, Lee Meng, Nicholas, Firdauz, Raff, Samantha, Hui Wen, Skyler, Michelle, Su Ann and not forgetting Suet Li.Ming and I did not bring Nuffnang to where it is today. You guys did... all we did was help.
The Critics Speak
From the birth of Nuffnang to around the 9th month, Nuffnang has always had its skeptics. People, some of them bloggers who always did whatever they could to put us down for whatever motives they had. They bashed us online and offline, downplaying all the things we had done right and magnifying the things we had done wrong.
Fortunately for me, I personally never lost any sleep over whatever any of these people talked about. Most of the time in fact, I never really read any of them eventhough I knew they were there hoping to get my attention.
I ignored it all not because I felt cocky or arrogant enough to ignore them, but because I always believed that an opinion is only as good as the person that gives it. More often than not, that person is either an anonymous blogger or someone who always had ulterior motives that he did not make clear of, making him a person of no credibility.
Furthermore, I decided that if I were to read each and every one of these things that the skeptics wrote, it would leave very little time for me to do what matters... to work.
Kimberlycun once told me
"The worst thing that you can ever do to anyone who's out to smear you is ignore him like he never existed."
Honestly, I never believed it to be true at the time. But guess what.. it really turned out to be true.
Sooner or later, the critics got so worked up they started to cook up rumours. The most recent one that happened last year cracked me up the most.
I was in Singapore sitting with Ming at his home after my cruise when a journalist called Ming up to ask
"Ming... I heard that you and your partner Timothy had a big fight and are no longer in talking terms. So bad that you sent him away on a cruise".
Ming looked at me sitting on his couch, trying very very hard to hold back his laughter when he finally replied to the journalist
"Hey.. actually Tim is here with me right now and we're going through some work together. You wanna talk to him?"
When I took over the phone from Ming, the journalist sounded really really surprised to hear my voice. We cleared things up and we all had a good laugh at the end of it.
Nuffnang today is a company that is growing so fast in both the Malaysian and Singaporean markets it's very very exciting to be at the front seat. Our company has grown so much so quickly that for the first time ever, I actually see myself sitting on a different role.I used to have to handle everything on my own. The accounts, invoicing, HR, admin, marketing, hell I even used to reply the Helpdesk e-mails by myself etc. Today there are people in place doing all that and doing a better job than I could ever do myself.
I find that my role at Nuffnang has changed, not because I have become less important but because Nuffnang has grown up and Ming and I need not babysit it anymore. It can run on its own. My job is no longer to feed it every day but to keep it growing.When I look back that it has only been one year since Nuffnang has started, I can't believe it myself... it certainly felt very much longer than that. I look back and I see not only what Nuffnang has grown into... but what I have learned and what good friends I have made along the way.As such, I shall end this entry of mine with a dedication.
I dedicate this blog entry to all the people that are responsible for bringing Nuffnang to where it is today.
Thank you all for all you have done for all of us at Nuffnang.
I am forever grateful.
If I had missed your name, it doesn't mean that you're any less important... it just means I'm up too late typing this while I should be in bed sleeping by now.
Nuffnang has had one helluva First Year... I can't wait to see what the second year holds for us.
Happy Birthday Nuffnang!