I joined a former colleague to run Tocaya Capital Management in the spring of 2021 after spending three years at a Long-Only Value investor running USD2.5B. At Tocaya, assets were in the USD4-5M dollar range, running a quantitative strategy that exploits price movements after significant news announcements.
Returns were strong, but growing assets which was my responsibility was incredibly hard. I have always been with a strong brand name, and in my last shop we had basically zero resources spent on gathering new assets (that's right, zero cost of customer acquisition). Here, I learnt the hard way what go-to-market channels were. I learnt that having the best product does not mean sales will follow. I learnt that all business plans are over optimistic by nature. Finally, I learnt that listening to what the market wants and incorporating feedback into the product is key.
In 2022, my sister had the idea of starting a property platform in Singapore for direct rentals and transactions. The tag team would work as follows: I would build, she would sell. We built a simple prototype using bubble which took about a month or two of hard work, spent a hundred bucks or so on social media ads and held our breath.
The result? Less than 5 sign-ups. We had a working, functioning product, we saw competitors excel in the market. Why did we not gain any traction? We built way too early. We should have tested the market literally with a spreadsheet and some good old cold calling before trying to build a tech platform.
The hard lesson, always delay a build as long as possible until you can no longer test the market.
In 2023, I decided to join a venture builder to take a semi-break from the ups and downs of inconsistent cash flow and endless consulting side-gigs. A good friend of mine alluded to it as being on the entrepreneurial treadmill.
This time, I had key objectives in mind:
In 15 months, I managed to hit my objectives and as a vindication of my ability, successfully built and secured funding in the mid-millions for a wealth-tech venture.
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