Entrepreneurship Journey – The Beginning

by Tai Xiao Fang

I have indeed learnt a lot in Prof Pamela Lim‘s Technological Entrepreneurship Opportunity Identification class. Prior to this, setting up a business and entrepreneurship was extremely foreign to me. However, my group and I have now successfully set up FoOD, an online pre-order for food and food delivery service.

In the course of these 13 weeks, FoOD’s business plan has evolved tremendously. From buying food from Koufu and re-distributing it to SMU students, our business now involves buying famous food from all over Singapore and bringing them to SMU students. This can be expanded to nearby areas such as to workers in Raffles Place and the CBD area.

My entrepreneurial journey has been quite a fun-filled one and it is something that I can look back on and reminisce about in the years to come. In the first couple of weeks, we were still quite clueless about how to run our business and we were focused on trying to get the website up and running as we found that to be the major hurdle in starting our operations. Ambrose did a great job in setting up the website, but in the end, we relied on a very simple method of simply asking our classmates to just e-mail in their orders to FoOD’s gmail account.

What initially started off as what I felt was a relatively simple business idea, seemed to only get simpler as the weeks went by. It involves so much more consolidation work to take orders from various stalls in Koufu as opposed to setting a fixed menu from a famous stall and getting customers to place their orders. This simplified our business by a significant amount. Also, this increased our comparative advantage as we all appreciate good food. These famous hawker foods will attract customers to our business and be more open to our business concept.

Our first shot at business was that of bringing Duck Rice from Longhouse food centre to our classmates. It was a rather successful attempt and we received 18 orders. We earned $10 in total, it was a good start and I was encouraged! Despite some operational difficulties faced, there were no major hiccups and we all enjoyed the duck rice in class. I would say it was by far the best meal I had in SMU!

It made me realize how students, and workers in the CBD area, would greatly appreciate if good food were made accessible to them in their schooling/ working areas.

Our business is indeed very viable and could be expanded to a much greater scale. Despite this being the last week of lessons, for many, it would not be the end of our entrepreneurial journey, but just the beginning of a very exciting one.

Submitted by: Tai Xiao Fang