socialtalkr

Foldees Lets You…
1. Design Greeting Cards & Earn $$ if other people like ‘em & buy ‘em.
2. Buy Greeting Cards. Designer Cards. Prettier than the ones at the store or the gas station.

This is Chak, the man behind Foldees (He is a serious man)

SocialTalkr:

So wanna jump right into it?
Chak Onn Lau :
|Hahah. Ok let’s go. Wutcha got?

SocialTalkr:
Alright. So to start things off, can u describe Foldees in one sentence? Summarize it up!
Chak Onn Lau :
Okay. In three words - designer greeting cards. In one sentence - A portal to connect a bored greeting card market with a deluge of talented greeting card designers around the world.
We open for business on the 31st of August. We’re running our first contest now, which will end shortly before that.

SocialTalkr :
And the contest is for card designers right?
Chak Onn Lau :
Well, how about anyone who considers themselves a greeting card designer?
It doesn’t matter if you don’t have l33t skillzorZz in illustrator (which is the software you need to join)
We have some really simple designs done by average Joes as well,
Tt’s about the idea of the card, which doesn’t necessarily depend on a kickass design.
(SocialTalkr: Here are some samples of Foldee’s Designs. Foldees will start selling these designs by Aug31st, visit the foldees blog to see more)

SocialTalkr
So some designers might not win the prizes. What’s in it for them?
Chak Onn Lau
That’s the interesting part. The prizes are to create a sense of competition amongst the participants so they have something to strive for. Basically, we will accept any card from anyone who’s design we think can potentially sell, and is within our contest rules and each time we sell the card, he/she will get a royalty out of it.

I was just talking with my team about this last night. The competition needs to be there to give designers a challenge - to come up with something cool. Otherwise they’d just be coming up with something that sells, like what they do on cafepress and zazzle

SocialTalkr: This is what the cards look like once you receive them

SocialTalkr
Very cool…so where have u been receiving contest applications from so far? local /foreign?
(SocialTalkr: Local = Malaysian)
Chak Onn Lau
Mostly local. It was a conscious decision from the team because our engine, system and even our organization has never been tested. We wanted to try it out here first, to see if all our programming, admin and everything were good to go

Now that we know, and we’ve learnt so much… we are going to publicize our next contest everywhere!
The contests are basically recruitment drives for new designs. The site will always have something to sell
After 31st august, that is..

SocialTalkr
Can you describe the process of someone buying a card?
Chak Onn Lau
Ok, two methods.
The first is similar to other sites already out there. You go in, pick a card, customize it, and identify a recipient. All you need is either his email address or his physical address, and we’ll do the rest.

The other form is much more interesting. I think it’s a niche market, but I’m very excited about it because it’s something I would actually prefer to do. So same thing, you go in, pick a card, customize it but this time, you download it as a ready-to-print PDF which you then print in the comfort of your own home allowing you to sign-off the card, as well as to write your message in your own handwriting. What we’ll be doing to kick this off is selling prepaid packs.

Each prepaid pack will have 12 sheets of textured recycled paper, and a coupon code that allows you to download 10 card PDFs. We’re thinking of selling these at places like www.inqbox.com and palate pallete for starters (Palette palate is a restaurant where alot of quirky people hangout).

SocialTalkr
So is this prepaid pack in the idea stages or have you already discussed with your sales channels?
Chak Onn Lau
We have discussed it already. You can actually download the card yourself, find the paper yourself, and print it yourself too. We charge only RM1 per card design..

SocialTalkr
Does that mean all your cards follow the same pricing? Regardless whether or not they are contest winners?
Chak Onn Lau
Yup. Makes sense, because if your card is really that popular, lots of people are going to buy it, which means that your royalties will go up too

SocialTalkr
So alright let’s talk about how you got started. How did u even come up with an idea like this?
Chak Onn Lau:
er… we started buying Threadless shirts and thought… hey… this would be great for greeting cards! or rather i thought that. So i wrote up a 3-page brief, called two friends that i was looking at as partners to come to chili’s, late may 2007 and i pitched them the idea.

SocialTalkr:
Where did you go from there? You had good idea. what next?
Chak Onn Lau:
Heh This is something i only admitted recently, but i actually applied for the MDEC Technopreneurs Preseed grant, sometime end June 2007 to give my newly formed team a deadline to work towards. We got the grant in October 2007.
The grant had a small window by which to apply, and milestones for everything… so i figured it would be a good kickstart of the project to sort of “make it real” rather than something we talked cock about at a mamak
(SocialTalkr: Mamak is a Malaysian term for outdoor food stall)

SocialTalkr:
You guys launched sometime in June 2008 right? How long did development take?
Chak Onn Lau
17th June if I’m not mistaken. A long long time, it took way longer than necessary because a lot of that time was spent optimizing my team.

Only one of them is still working with me on the project. Alvin Yu was at chili’s that day, and he still handles all the nitty gritties of the project like timelines, our reports to mdec, msc application, cashflow and stuff like that. but the other guy sorta felt halfway that this whole entrepreneurship business wasn’t his cuppa, so he’s a small, silent, minority shareholder now. No hard feelings.

Unfortunately, he was the programmer at the time, so that’s what sorta threw our project off course for a while until we found someone new

SocialTalkr:
So who is head geek of foldees today?
Chak Onn Lau:
Hahaha, er me! well, it’s a close call
My programmer (who chooses to remain unknown) is quite… eccentric
He’s quite happy about the whole mystery thing
heheh i can say one thing though, he is a programming machine
no sleep or food if necessary, fueled by Cadbury bytes.

SocialTalkr:
Did you receive any investment after MDEC? Are you looking for investors?
Chak Onn Lau:
No and yes. Not at this point in time.
We want to show people that the system works first, then we’ll go looking for investors!

SocialTalkr
So what were your biggest obstacles starting Foldees from an idea to a company.
Were you employed before Foldees?
Chak Onn Lau:
Yup, i did. My former colleagues are now driving Audi TTs and Merc CLKs.
(Socialtalkr: Chak at that time worked for a Malaysian MSN ad space company called Media2.0. At one point, he was also editor of “Stuff” Magazine.)

Anyways, my biggest obstacles were definitely finding the right people, and keeping them motivated and that includes myself as well. You need to find the write sorta brain wiring to do this whole entrepreneurship thing and once you’ve found it, you really need to keep them together, and motivated by whatever means necessary

SocialTalkr
Is your team (3 of you ) full time on Foldees?
Chak Onn Lau
Nope. I’m the only full-time staff. My programmer actually freelances for a few people, so he spends about 2-3 days a week on the project. Alvin has a day job in oil & gas, so he keeps track of stuff after hours, and at our weekly meetings on Sunday.

SocialTalkr:
Last couple of questions, so where did u go to school and what year?
Chak Onn Lau
First off, I am turning 29 this Sept. I went to Taylors, then was supposed to head over to Birmingham, but the currency crisis, in combination with my parents finding out i was smoking kinda revoked my trip.

So after getting my UK trip cancelled 2 weeks before i was supposed to go, my parents put me into APIIT instead. Spent two years there, then went to Monash. I was actually in a bunch of Monash ads around the world Radio in Malaysia and apparently even on London tubes. it’s frickin classic man. Funny as hell… something for the grandkids someday.

Anyway, after APIIT I went the Monash Caulfield in Melbourne, joined the school Mag, and realized that i loved writing.That’s when i came back and decided on a career in journalism. I worked for The Sun, for a month. Then, as we say, “The Sun went down”. I got effectively retrenched after a month’s work.

Then I joined a struggling dotcom in Cyberjaya (so I know how it feels) called VQ interactive for 2 years. They created an online agent… like an animated character that welcomes you to a site and guides you around. Quite cool stuff actually, but there were alot of competitors, and honestly, the only thing cooler about our agent was the responses me and this other guy came up with for just about any question you can think of…

SocialTalkr :
So is Foldees your first own venture? Have u done anything before in the past?
Chak Onn Lau
This is the first, so going by laws of probability, it’s probably going to fail horribly, and people will make fun of the “fold” in our name.

SocialTalkr :
Any influences/ motivators? What made u get up one day and decide to run a business?
Chak Onn Lau
Well, my friend, who owns RedtoneCNX (one of the 5 companies that managed to get the WiMAX tender in Msia) passed me a book called “Anyone Can Do It”.

It’s a really good book that tells you the story of how a brother n sister in the UK went from just having an idea to making a really successful business. i read it and thought two things… “that sounds like fun” and “I think i can manage that”

SocialTalkr
The coffee shop story, right?
Chak Onn Lau
YUP, that’s the one! Great book, bad title.
So after that, I was writing a whole bunch of business plans for various things and bouncing them off Alvin. We developed some of them pretty far, with profit, cash flow calculations n stuff, and finally we found one that sounded feasible for our experience, applied for the grant and the rest is hopefully history. J

SocialTalkr
Very nice! Thanks for interviewing Chak!

Links Summary

Chak Onn Lau’s FB Profile
http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php?id=681164975&ref=mf

Visit Foldees – buy a designer greeting card
www.foldees.com

Read the Foldees Blog
http://foldees.blogspot.com

Foldees FB Group
http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/group.php?gid=24818896619

Malaysian Govt Technoprenuer Pre-seed Grant
http://www.technopreneurdevelopment.net.my/cms/AllProduct.asp?CatID=122