YesLLama LLC. 2015–2017

This short post is a summary of my ongoing journey so far with the LLama project. I think it’s a good practice to take frequent stops, look back and evaluate what we gained and pivot if needed. I have learned a lot from the process of running a company.

On a sunny Sunday, October 2015, I was sitting in a small coffee shop in Japantown, San Francisco — creating the first page for the LLama website. Inspired by a quote from Mother Teresa “Do small things, with great love.”, I put a lot of love on that page. That day, the LLama project started.

I reached out to 2 iOS developers in Vietnam and a designer friend Nobuhiro Sato to create the very first version of the iOS LLama app. I was in charge of the back-end and data. In December that year, I asked 2 friends of mine Lih Seng Goh and Brandon Dinh to join the team and recruited a team of data reviewers in Saigon, Vietnam; I also invited Bruce Wang to be our advisor. I appreciate every one member in our team very much — just from the fact that they see the vision, like the idea and especially they put their trust in me.

We incorporated the company in February 2016, YesLLama LLC. was officially started!

It has been a fun and exciting journey for all of us. We have learned so much in such a short time, mostly through doing, mistakes and from each other. There are still many challenges ahead, but we are sure that we will overcome.

Challenges

The first challenge — familiarly with all other entrepreneurs — is time and money. Brandon and I invested a few thousand of dollars in the company to run servers, mostly for iOS development, advertisement, etc… but as you might already know, a few thousands in a startup can only go so far. Since Brandon and Lih have full-time jobs and other life circumstances, my hope is to get funding or a source of income soon so that everyone can come to work in the same office full-time every working day.

Slowly, we gained user traction — from 1–2 download per week to an average of 50 throughout the US! Server logs tell us users across big cities in the US are accessing our data everyday! We see a lot of downloads from China, Japan and the UK, and we are thinking to expand to other markets later down the road. Wherever there is a demand, right? We ‘soft’ acquired a few restaurants and chefs in San Francisco to work with us. We have landed 2 paid-customer in San Diego and San Francisco in October 2017. Things seem to be working out for us at the end, but still slowly.

We have received a rather strange and threatening partnering request in 2016! 🤨 Even though it was quite strange and scary, it only means people are starting to recognize our presence in the market!

The Journey continues

In a founder meeting, I asked the other founders how much longer they can endure. Both of them told me they don’t have a deadline in mind for that.

I have recently reached out by my friend Tim Chang to work on his side project. Thanks to Tim, I have gained a lot more motivation, momentum and insights to move forward. It’s such a privilege to have a good friend working with you side by side to support each other in times like these.

I truly believe that a company which is made of talented and cohesive people with good chemistry will go far, and with a little luck, we can do things beyond that we can even imagine. But we can’t lose touch with reality either; this is why the team has regular meetings to evaluate what we currently have on (or missing from) the table in order to move forward.

What’s on the table?

A good product supported by many users, customers and a great team.

• User traction: 7000+ monthly impression, 2000+ monthly unique visitor. 70x visitor gain since 2016; 20,425 visitors gained as of Dec 2015. (data as of November 2017.) We constantly improving our product based on our users’ feedback — this is the key.
• Customer interests: we were reached out (and reached back) by restaurant owners in the Bay Area, LA and San Diego that they wanted to work with us. Based on their feedback, we are working on a better plan to land more and more customers seamlessly and frictionlessly.
• Great Team: A strong and cohesive team is the core of any strong company. We hear countless numbers of stories of companies which were on the edge of breaking up just because of the team culture is downgraded, and how they fixed it just in time (MailChimp, Patagonia, Delta Airlines, etc…) I can proudly say that we do have such a talented team and great culture — and we determine to keep it that way going forward.

It is also important to me that I need to grow in any environment. I read somewhere that this is a big reason employees will not stay at a company if they feel that their growth is stagnant. Personally, I have grown a quite bit running this company.

What have I learned?

Technical skills: during the time that I was not working for someone else, I have been programming in Ruby on Rails and Javascript almost every single day since 2015. I’m confident to say that my programming skills are improving and people are trusting my skills and work (Pillow Inc. contracted me as a Senior Software Engineer to consult them with how to improve their backend system.) Beside programming, I had to wear many hats including dev-op work too. It’s been very fun.

Thicker skin: if you happen to know me in real life, I’m not the most shy person you have ever met, but definitely qualified for an average introvert nerd. I have grown a bit of thicker skin when it comes to cold calling, door to door advertising, taking rejections, not being the nice guy, or other awkward human interaction situations. I gotta do it.

Patience

Perseverance

Trust my own instinct more

Communication and Timing