socialtalkr

In Aaron’s own words, EzyPzy is ezypzy is a simple to use & cheap online contacts manager & SMS/Email marketing solution. You could use EzyPzy for example to send SMS’s to your entire organization or group of contacts using their web-based interface. Thats not where it ends; EzyPzy was initially designed for and still could potentially tap on the huge market for Property Listings.

Sky’s the limit for CEO Aaron Gill, who was also 1 of the first few individuals handpicked & selected for the MDEC Preseed Grant in Dec 2006. EzyPzy then went into development mode and officially launched 21st May 2008, just in time for WCIT! Check it out

Aaron Gill, CEO & Founder of EzyPzy

[SocialTalkr]
Okay today I’m interviewing Aaron Gill, CEO and Founder of ezypzy.com
Aaron, can u describe ezypzy in one sentence? What’s it all about?

[Aaron]
ezypzy is a simple to use & cheap online contacts manager & SMS/Email marketing solution. But this sentence describing ezypzy has already changed a few times over LOL

[SocialTalkr]
That’s great. One of things I always wanted to emphasize is how business models and plans change.

[Aaron]
Yup that’s right and don’t forget about how people change too, as individuals & as a team.

Someone introduces EzyPzy during WCIT

[SocialTalkr]
So what idea did u start out with?

[Aaron]
Well our idea was a very simple one. We wanted to allow real estate agents & homeowners to create their own sms keyword that they could print on their For Sale/Rent signage or in their classified ads and interested readers or passer-byes could sms that keyword to a shortcode. For example, SMS ‘ezy condo123′ to 36881 and immediately they would receive a detailed description of the property & pictures as well.

The product at that time was known as PixPocket and that was the project title we pitched to MDeC for the pre-seed grant. The idea is not new, such property keywords are widely used in Australia & UK. However it was new in Malaysia.

After that we thought, why not give our users the ability to manage their business & property listings so we then set about creating a simple contacts management module, so for EzyPzy, we allow users to key in as many phone numbers, addresses, emails & custom fields as they want.

 Essentially, we give users the power to decide how they want to save their information

We then applied the same concept to the property listings … because we realized that local listings &  Singapore listing could have a different set of fields. No point re-doing the system for different countries.
Again we let the users decide what information to store for their listings.

So far so good right? but after a few beers, it hit us that if u can decide what set of fields to save, why stop at just property you could use it for cars, events and etc. So we thought we would do a little experiment and not brand EzyPzy to target a certain industry. We wanted our users to hijack the brand so to speak and decide how they should use EzyPzy.

I think I’ve gone on for too long LOL. As you can tell… it just kept changing

[SocialTalkr]
No worries man i think that just shows how much thought given to your idea.

[Aaron]  
Yes but it can be a bad thing because you’re never sure what your product is going to be, so you’re never really sure when you should launch and that’s what happened to us. We had a working product but we weren’t confident of launching it.

[SocialTalkr]
Ok let’s talk about the history of the company ezypzy then. Who came up with the idea? Who is in the team? And how did you hear about Preseed?

[Aaron]  
hehe that’s an interesting story as well. I’ve actually been an entrepreneur since 2003. Paul Tan (paultan.org) & I have been partners for a while now. We founded hulksolutions.com in 2003 and along the way we’ve had so many ideas but never the capital to kick any of them off because we were just too busy surviving

Anyway we landed our first RM100K project in 2006. It was for the Dubai Ministry of Labour. Of course the consultants of that project were not us la, it was another Malaysian company but they outsourced it to us, we were supposed to migrate their entire Oracle database to MS SQL Server. It was a 3 months project, I was in Dubai for 2 months, we finished it, but Dubai people had some internal politics issues and they terminated the contract with Malaysian consultants who hired us.

So at the end of it all, we were RM30K poorer because of the initial investments we put in to make this project work, like extra PCs, people & travel and we weren’t getting paid, not even a single cent.

So that’s when we set down and said that things needed to change, we can’t be living hand to mouth with every project. It’s a vicious cycle… while you’re out looking for new projects, you have to complete the current one, then you also have to collect payment on the old one. So after this Dubai fiasco .. I thought we should just take a break and re-evaluate a few things. The first thing I wanted to do was apply for MSC status for Hulk Solutions

this was in September 2006, so when I enquired with MDeC, they asked me to attend a couple of workshops like Business Plan development & Financial Management. Since I was there in Cyberjaya for quite a bit, people kind of knew who i was and maybe they liked me la. so when they told me that they were formulating a Pre-Seed programme, they asked me to join.

At that time, Pre-Seed was a closed invitation programme. Someone from MDeC must nominate you before you can submit your plan, so TeDD nominated me and I had two weeks to write a simple business plan and submit about 40 people were nominated, but I think only 20 submitted in time & only 5 were selected. We got approved in Dec 2006, and we started the project proper in Jan 2007.

[SocialTalkr] 
During development, were you still pursuing contract jobs?

[Aaron]
Yes of course. Pre-seed funding is not enough man. At that time Hulk only had 3 people, so all 3 worked on Hulk projects & EzyPzy projects. Then I had to hire 2 more people, a designer & programmer, Because the rm1.5K allowance per person from pre-seed is not enough to cover a person’s salary ,we had to work on other things concurrently to handle the payroll. However, this time we can choose our projects better & not work on any projects just to earn a living so we only maintained 2 clients at that time, The Star & Monsooncup Terengganu.

[SocialTalkr]  
At what point did u release the product commercially?

[Aaron]  
We started beta testing in Dec 2007 actually, at the monsooncup Terengganu.
The organisers used ezypzy as the main announcement tool. They used it to coordinate the press and media folks. For instance, informing them of a photo op with the King or gathering them for a media briefing. They also used ezypzy to blast out the race results to everyone, the spectators, VIPs, media, internal team and etc.

[SocialTalkr]  
That is one heck of a large scale beta test.

[Aaron]  
LOL ya it was … and we did have a few mishaps along the way, but it was the telco’s problem. SMSes did not reach people immediately so time sensitive messages were abit dodgy. For instance, if you send your girlfriend a message to say, “meet me in KLCC in 10 minutes time”, but she receives it 20 minutes later, so somebody’s going to get pissed for waiting … or missing a photo op & etc. 

All in all, people were more forgiving because it was something new introduced in monsooncup. The good things outweigh the bad. so the lesson here is .. Mistakes are alright, just don’t make too many! That’s probably why some sites never take off their “Beta” badge LOL, so that users will b more forgiving when they screw up. We decided from the start not to put up that Beta badge on ezypzy.

The company needs to learn how to deal with angry customers. We can’t be telling them “oh its beta, oh we’re still testing” every time, then your team won’t learn!

[SocialTalkr]  
So what do u think has been your biggest obstacles since u got this idea?

[Aaron]  
hmm biggest obstacles … so many LOL. Number one has always been about talent, but I think that’s a proverbial problem for anyone. I don’t think it’s an exact science no matter what recruiting experts tell you

For instance, my UI designer actually applied for the programming position. When he applied he gave us his portfolio site which was a pretty impressive CSS based site. He started off doing some programming but he sucked so I told him he has no future in programming n he doesn’t have creative direction for fancy designs but his userbility design skills were not bad. He was also a fresh grad, so that’s why he listened to me la and it worked out. 

As for the Programmer hire .. I actually wanted to look for someone senior or at least 3 years experience, so I looked around for freelancers who may need a flexible but steady job. I think I found Devan on TwoGateways.com. We instantly hit it off … and he would work on EzyPzy 2 days a week.

 We eventually I found my full-time programmer who resigned from a friend’s company. Actually, that company used to outsource work to us, so we already had a working relationship so he did not mind joining us. Things are great… we’ve got a strong team

Paul is charge of systems, Kenneth in charge of Operations, Terry lead programmer, Ahmad UI designer and me everything else. We produced some solid work for a year for both Hulk & EzyPzy. and Devan as you know went on to apply for pre-seed himself. I might have partnered him for that as well if I wasn’t too busy already.

[Note] Devan went on to apply for preseed himself and formed Elevyn with Mike Tee. Read the interview with elevyn here

[SocialTalkr]  
Well theres still alot of room for synergy. The pre-seed group has alot of collective talent

[Aaron]  
Ya I tell him what I tell every other friend. We may do different things or take different paths, but as long as we stick together, we can’t go wrong. Ff he had not work on ezypzy, elevyn.com may never have happened right?

I am also helping out someone else right now who wants to apply for pre-seed.

[SocialTalkr]  
Nice. ok let’s talk about the future of ezypzy.

[Aaron]  
After the Web2.0 conference I attended .. I came back with a couple of new perspectives. In order to make ezypzy more of a global application, I have to get rid of the SMS portion because having a shortcode in each country is expensive. Eventually ezypzy will work with different carriers. We still want to see for sale/rent signages with the ezyKode keywords n maybe our branding as well,so we’re trying to work with a large local real estate agency to carry the keywords. Hopefully we can kick start that service.

As for the international ezypzy … I have no idea yet. Was thinking of doing something around the contacts, but Plaxo already does a good job there, or maybe we should just be another plaxo. 

Then there was also the idea to let users create their own forms, like a Form wizard and embed that form in their own site, like how u embed youtube videos. Because we are already coding these forms for some clients, like this page http://www.peugeot.com.my/form407.html. The form is being pulled from ezypzy and when somebody submits, they are automatically saved in Peugeot’s ezypzy account. We’ve done a few forms like this for our users … but we’re tired of doing yet, so probably build a wizard for you to do it yourself.

We even started on a java app u install on ur phone, which u can backup all your phonebook contacts to your online ezypzy account, so if you lose your phone, you won’t lose your contacts. Plus, it can restore from online to ur phone as well.

[SocialTalkr]  
That’s really great stuff man. Is there anything else you wanna talk about?
Advice to entreprenuers? dos and donts? if theres one thing to remember, what would it be?

[Aaron]
Well I would say that being an entrepreneur is not for everyone… sometimes passion is not enough. Its always been a combination of things. What those things are is unique to each individual. For myself personally, given my background, I’ve always been a survivor. The biggest concern at the end of the day has always been about my staff and team because whatever you do, you’re not doing for yourself anymore .. these people’s lives depend on you .. its a big responsibility .. that’s why I say it’s not for everyone, because many people can’t shoulder that burden.

[SocialTalkr]
That’s pretty good advice man. I think that wraps things up! Thanks for your time Aaron!

[Links Summary]

EzyPzy - http://www.ezypzy.com
EzyPzyBlog - http://blog.ezypzy.com/

Aaron’s Facebook - http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php?id=711990355&ref=profile
Aaron’s Linkedin Profile - http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=17505563&trk=tab_pro

MDEC PreSeed Program - http://www.technopreneurdevelopment.net.my/cms/AllProduct.asp?CatID=122
Elevyn Interview with Socialtalkr - http://www.socialtalkr.com/wwwelevyncom-interview-with-founder-mike-tee/
Elevyn.com - http://elevyn.com/