Makible on Nick Wang

Who am I?

Fri, 11 May 2012 09:45:00 +0000

My name is Nicholas Wang. I was born in Hong Kong and went through its dreadful education system until I was 15, when I moved to Washington State in the US of A. I attended high school in a small town called Issaquah, and then went on to study at the University of Washington. For 8 years, I worked at 2 of the largest internet companies in the world, MSN.com and Yahoo.com, until 2007 when I successfully outsourced my own position to India and I was laid off. This marked the end of my corporate life, working as a “gear” in the grinding machine.

While living and working in New York, I grew more and more discontent with the inequality placed upon us “commoners” by the super rich, top 1% of our society. I wanted to challenge the incumbents and help shift the power back into the hands of the people. When I was laid off in 2007, I decided I will no longer work for corporate America and began to create a web community that will allow people to collaboratively share information about evil businesses. By chance, I met the founder of CUUSOO, Mr. Kohei Nishiyama. He started CUUSOO.com back in 1997 to let people collaborate and submit their own product designs, and if enough people want to buy that product, then factories can make it for the people! It was a revolutionary idea! And I thought if I could help bring this system out of Japan, it has the potential to change the world! Flipping the “mass-manufactured in China” business model around and giving the power back to the independent designers and makers! I moved to Japan to led the creation of the awesome “LEGO models by everyone” site, so now if 10,000 people like your model, LEGO will make it into a real, official product!

While working at CUUSOO in Japan, I created an open source project called “Open Hippel”. My idea was that if we could provide the CUUSOO system free of charge for anyone to use, then people can use it for their own communities. Users can submit issues and ideas, the top ones will get voted up so that resources can be distributed more intelligently. Then, if one of those ideas is a product, it can be sourced back to CUUSOO to be manufactured. I contacted one of my friends in Hong Kong who is a products engineer, we started Makible.com with the idea that it’ll receive product designs sourced from CUUSOO. In 2011, Makible was launched as a startup business and I moved (back) to Hong Kong to join full time as co-founder.

Here’s a talk a gave at Pecha Kucha Tokyo about “Changing the World with User Innovations”:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTqlA3I86lQ?wmode=transparent]

We also used our own system to crowdfund the “MakiBox” 3D printer project (which gathered USD $150,000+ in funds!). Our idea with the 3D printer is that currently, all the 3D printers out there are hobbyists projects that are too expensive and too intimidating for the average consumer. There hasn’t been any groundbreaking objected made with a 3D printer because only hardcore engineers are using it. What we need is to make a 3D printer for the masses. Something that is cheap like a Nintendo or Playstation, and well designed so it doesn’t look like a scary pile of metal bars bolted together! By doing these, I believe we can get our 3D printer into the hands of the gamers, the kids, the dads, the average Joe who has lots of ideas! I believe we can jump start innovations once I put this tool in their hands!

I’ve also been helping my friends at Peer-2-Peer University early on, participating and leading courses, improving its overal community’s user experience.

As you can see, I’m passionate about the “collaborative economy”, enabling users to innovate and solve problems together. I’m now starting this weekend playgroup that emphasize on “child initiated, parents framed” learning, because I think this is one of the most important thing (if not THE most important thing) we can do to change the future! You can read more about my ways of learning in the Reggio Emilia Approach page.

Me Being Awesome at SXSW 2012, Storified!

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 01:57:00 +0000

I storified my time at SXSW… on Storify…

(If Posterous doesn’t embed the story here, click on the link to go see it on storify.com.)

Lean Startup and UX: Why You Shouldn't Build Anything to Start With!

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 19:36:07 +0000

[

](http://www.flickr.com/photos/cloneofsnake/6593023245/in/photostream)At last week’s Startup Monday at BootHK, Jason Crane gave a talk on “How to UX your Startup’s Product or Service…”, there were a lot of good lessons in there, and as a first time entrepreneur who until recently thought he knew everything about agile, lean startup and customer developments, it was an ironic reminder of how little did I really know! It prompted me to tweet out saying I’ll write this blog post about “UX & lean startup & how u SHOULDN’T build ANYTHING to start w/!”You see, I really was no stranger to the whole agile & lean thing. First learned of and started using Scrum back at Yahoo in around 2006, I became quite passionate about it and started attending agile meetups. I brought all that experience with me to Japan, where I directed the development of LEGO CUUSOO, a groundbreaking crowdsource product design service for LEGO! I had to educate the managers on building MVPs (Minimal Viable Product) instead of fully spec’ed out final product; weekly timeboxed sprints instead of long features development; burndown charts instead of Gantt charts… etc etc. It was a great success!In April of 2010, we also arranged for an overnight Tokyo simulcast of Startup Lessons Learned at the Tokyo Hackerspace! That’s where I first heard about the term MVP (which I was already doing), and other great insights in customer developments and continuous integration. Fast forward to late 2011, I moved to HK for my first startup - Makible.com, I talked about doing all of the above… but somehow, things weren’t working out. It wasn’t until we got an unexpected acquisition deal that really snapped me out of it and thought “Hey! I should’ve done this & that!”So, what’s the one thing that I should’ve done before anything else?GET CUSTOMERS!Honestly, even though I thought I knew the importance of lean, agile, MVP… at the end of the day, I was still building without talking to customers! When you don’t talk to any customer, building even just a login page is TOO MUCH!! I was so passionate about my idea that I fell into the same “build it and they’ll come” trap! When customers didn’t come, I was sort of lost for a while, thinking about “how to genuinely connect with a community and serve their needs, so they’ll come on board Makible”. Well, it’s true that genuinely being part of a community helps, Threadless’s co-founder Jake Nickell told me that, but then where do I start? I had no clue! It wasn’t until the recent unexpected development that I finally got my head cleared! I reached out to my successful entrepreneur friends, picked their brains, gotten many good tips! (I must thank Stephen Forte in particular!)So… back to Jason’s “How to UX your Startup”, much of it was about validating with your users early! It’s so true, but I believe a lot of people will still fall into the same trap as I did. The one point from the presentation that I liked most was Lao Tzu’s quote: “The journey of one thousand miles begins with a single step.” Applied to startup and customer development, you could say “The journey of one thousand people strong community begins with a single person!” That’s it! Go out and start with one single person!!Getting back to Makible, I’m now looking for 3 more product designers to work with. (I’ve found 2 already.) The plan is to work closely with 5 designers with a lot of “hand-holding”, get them to use Makible’s site from beginning to end, post up one design each, get their feedback and make improvements. And then repeat for another 5 designers… do a few iterations like this until success! So, if you know any good product designers, please send them my way! You can reach me directly at my email - nicholas.wang@makible.com.