Entrepreneur profile

Hongwei Liu, CEO and Co-Founder, Mappedin

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Hongwei Liu is CEO and co-founder of Mappedin, an interactive navigation platform that maps the indoors to help people find their way.

Name: Hongwei Liu

Title: CEO and Co-Founder

Company: Mappedin

Years in business: 4

Business location: Kitchener, ON

Number of employees: 35

Chief product: Indoor navigation platform

Website: mappedin.com

First of all, how is business these days?

Better than ever. More and more brick-and-mortar businesses are recognizing that the digital experience is just as important as the physical one. Mappedin helps our customers digitize the indoors and build search and discovery experiences, particularly for retail. Our revenue grew by 500 percent last year, and we've never lost a customer. We've now filled out an office that two years ago looked gigantic with 36 people.

What led you to start your own business?

It's hard to find a pivotal moment. Mappedin started as a side project in school. We wanted to help people find stuff on campus, so we built something we thought would be cool. It got incrementally real over the next five years--we had our first customer, first employee, first investor, and so on.

What sources did you use for startup capital?

Everything. The first $12,000 was from my savings account. We stumbled upon our initial customer, Conestoga Mall in Waterloo, and struck a deal to install our solution on two directories. We got paid licensing over the next three years, but we needed to front the cash to buy those directories first. After that, we got some small prizes and grants, followed by a $375,000 strategic investment from Esri Canada and a subsequent venture capital investment to grow the business.

What do you think is your biggest business strength?

An investor once joked that I "could sell ice to an Eskimo," which is funny to me because I was a really shy kid growing up. I think my biggest strength today is that I'm an engineer who learned how to sell, whereas most of our competitors are salespeople who hired engineers. We live and die by our product, and I'm glad I'm still able to stay close to it.

What do you enjoy most about owning your own business?

It's the closest economic activity to a competitive sport—you win by being better. For most of my life (and any young graduate's life) I was told to follow rules and jump through hoops. School is an optimization game that relies on how things are graded. Building a business is real. We win by building the best product, working harder towards deadlines, and showing up more prepared. I once drove nine hours to Montreal to grab coffee with a potential client and said I happened to be "in the neighborhood." They signed eight months later.

What's your least favorite part of running a business?

There's no excuse for losing, but there are uncertainties in business that I cannot control. That, and filing a second tax return every year.

What do you think are important entrepreneurial skills to have?

First, the ability to learn really fast—whether it's your customers and their challenges, new technologies and markets, how to fund raise, how to hire, how to fire, etc. Every six months is different, and no course can teach you this stuff.

Second, the ability to take action. When doing something new, it's impossible to have perfect information. Avoid the temptation to analyze things to death and just start doing. Even doing something that doesn't scale is better than doing nothing. Counterintuitively, the only great business ideas left are the ones that look unappealing and unscalable at the beginning.

Lastly, the startup adage: The hardest part of being a founder is managing your own psychology. It's hard to be rational when you feel like you've lost four coin flips in a row and are betting on the fifth.

What are some challenges you've faced in business and how did you overcome them?

It's always tough to focus. How do we prioritize between customer A and B when both came in asking for something slightly different but mostly aligned with our vision? Do we build the new website or update print copy? Do we hire for sales or marketing first? And finally, what's the distinction between important and urgent? At certain times, it can get quite overwhelming and you end up making bad decisions.

I'm very lucky because I found great mentors from the beginning. The Waterloo Region has a "pay-it-forward" culture, and early on, people volunteered their time just to listen and help. Esri Canada invested early and showed us how to build a lasting business and really value our customers. Later, investors took the time to coach me and Mitch Butler (my co-founder) into becoming better leaders. We still make mistakes all the time, but we're better at learning from them quickly without slowing down.

What do you wish you'd known before you started out?

I wish I knew everything I know today. There really was no aha moment, just a lot of tough lessons.

What is the smartest move you have made with your business so far?

Instead of competing with existing consultants on their terms, we built a product platform. The facility management world has been updating their maps the same way every three months for the past 40 years: they have an internal team of CAD operators producing a new leasing/site plan. Consultant A makes it look pretty on paper, Consultant B makes it look pretty on the website, and Consultant C builds it into brochures or mobile apps. Every three months, it's all thrown away and redone.

No one has built anything to make that better because it's easier to keep getting paid for the same work. We entered the market doing that work but quickly found it to be so tedious that we built better tools for ourselves. Now, those tools are what make Mappedin unique to our customers.

How do you find new customers? What do you do to make sure they become return customers?

We target the world's largest retail and property management companies who invest in best-of-breed technologies to create a premium experience for their customers. It's a fairly defined group of people, so we take the time to really understand the industry and players. When we believe there's a fit, we reach out to explain how we think we can help. Most of the time, we've won by the time we make it to the demo. Early on, it was hard to get the demo meeting; it's easier now that we've established ourselves.

All of our customers renew, and most of them will adopt more features from our platform as they become available. This is because we invest heavily in our products and in customer success. Unlike the incumbent agencies, we license our product to our customers and rarely make any money on setup. Our success is very aligned with our customers getting long-term value from our products and services. We think in terms of years.

What's your management style with employees?

Anything I'm asking someone to do, I've done myself (and would do again). On average, Mitch and I are probably 60 percent tactical; our managers are probably 75 percent tactical. We're pretty transparent about everything that isn't human resources-related, and we have a monthly town hall where people can ask me anything.

What are some other companies or entrepreneurs you admire, and why?

I admire Elon Musk and Steve Jobs as entrepreneurs for building incredible businesses and betting it all on products that went against the grain.

As for companies, I really admire what Esri has created; they implement a geographic information system. We also drew a lot of inspiration from Valve Software and Netflix in terms of their company cultures.

Do you have a favorite inspirational quote?

"In a world that's changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks."—Mark Zuckerberg

What new initiatives are you working on?

We have a road map of ideas and hypotheses to test that could take two years; our customers help prioritize and align the next six months. We're always working on better ways to index the indoors and make it discoverable for users. I'm excited about some announcements to come later this year.

What advice would you give to someone hoping to start a business similar to yours?

I'd tell them they can always message me if they have a specific question or problem in mind. We wouldn't be where we are today without others paying it forward, and I try to do the same.

Originally published at https://www.allbusiness.com/profiles/digitizing-the-indoors-qa-with-hongwei-liu-of-mappedin-107552-1.html

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