mig33 in view of steven goh!!

guys and girls,

the following comments written by steven goh,the CEO of mig33. hope it helps get to know some unknown history of mig33:)


mig33 ..


mig33 is a lot of fun.

Over 7m users across hundreds of countries, 160,000 chatrooms, 30m messages a day (almost all in our own platform), dozens of community bulletin boards (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mig33+phpbb) is a pretty cool thing. On the world’s biggest website for mobile content, more people search form mig33 than games, s*x and msn (http://www.getjar.net/site/topsearch).

Getting here hasn’t been easy. We’re not a standard internet company. We’re focussed on finding success in a new world. The shift in computing power from the desktop to the mobile, the rise of the application environment on the phone, and the decline of walled gardens (giving rise to greater customer choice) has given us the opportunity to build something truly unique. This also isn’t a typical internet company funded by the promise of online advertising revenues. We’re very realistic about what it’s going to take build out the services to support tens of millions of users.

To that end, we sort to find the right shareholders who could help us make mig33 everything it can be.

After a year of proving the basic business up (building a community, demonstrate monetisation potential, etc) and with the active involvement of some of our shareholders, we were able to secure some top Venture Capital firms - Accel , Redpoint and TVP.

Working with them, we’ve moved the company from Australia to Silicon Valley, built out a customer service and operations centre in Malaysia, and a development centre in Nanjing, China. We’ve been built up the Team with people like Francis Yu and others.

The last few months have been pretty hot. 2008 is only going to get better.
After Sanford … Project Goth, X-TXT and mig33



I think that doing mig33 was a surprise to a lot of people but not my closest friends.

After 7 years of Sanford, I was ready for something new.



From our staff conference. I’m the fat dude with the white t-shirt on the left. Mei Lin’s wearing the yellow t-shirt and is the second person to the right of me.



Team presenting their ideas at the staff conference




I’ve long since come to the conclusion that I’m completely unemployable in any other role than entrepreneur and/or board member. Sanford taught me many things (personally and professionally) about having a truly great startup experience and making it a success. It’s a pleasure to have seen it continue as a profitable brand to its new shareholders long after i was gone.

Sanford’s Big Day OutTeam PresentingPresenting the Integrated Plan

Limitations

The three key limitations with Sanford though were in my mind, threefold: capital strategy, choosing a business with some global scale, and personal.

On the capital front, getting the right sophisticated shareholders on board who could help build the business was a problem. We didn’t do so until late into the piece and after the shareholder register was as fragmented and unstable as it was.

On global scale, I was forever envious of peers in other countries who were able to attract better company valuations in spite of their smaller size but with the prospect addressing a larger market. We did try very hard to internationalise the business, but the Securities industry around the world is notorious for creating low scale suppliers to each of their markets as a result of local regulation.

And on a personal basis, at times I let the business overwhelm me. I’d failed to surround myself with management, board members and shareholders who could help me grow and make the company everything it could be. A real turning point was putting myself through executive coaching and taking Clive Hall on board as Chairman. The combination of both helped me grow as a person and meet all the challenges that one of the worst Bear markets would bring. It was with much sadness and regret that I overlooked my personal life in this period and my marriage to Yien (wonderful person that she is), failed.

In spite of all of the above, I think the company was a real success. We’d won countless awards, appeared in the media over a thousand times, and were consistently ranked highest by customer satisfaction by AC Neilson Consult. When it was acquired by IWL in 2003, it was the second largest online broker in Australia and was 20% larger than E*Trade Australia by revenues and daily contract notes, and with our Virtual Broker service had a substantially larger customer reach.

Project Goth Pty Ltd, X-TXT and mig33



So in 2003, I was kicking around the State Library researching the next business.

Mei Lin Ng (marketing manager at Sanford), reached out to me and we brainstormed a few ideas. The rise of the application environment on phones and the decay of the walled garden. Mobile telephony was (and in many cases still is) very expensive. In 2003, the CEO of NIKE proclaimed NOKIA as a major competitor. Sales of Chocolates and Confectionary in the UK had fallen for the first time in decades. And I saw a report in the UK that smoking and drug use had fallen. All as a result of mobile phone expenditure crowding out other vices (shoes, chocolates, cigarettes).

So in the early hours of some weekday in August 2003, Mei Lin blessed the company with the name Project Goth Pty Ltd. We are not into dressing up in black and running around parks scaring young children. She was an avid fan of the SIMs and the first family in that name was the ‘Goth’ family. So that is where the name came from. And the first product was X-TXT and was launched in early 2004.



X-TXT was about GPRS chat and cheap SMS. It was a product very similar to Cellity and Tex2. After several months and a bucket of cash in marketing, it was pretty clear it wasn’t going anywhere. We had all of 3,500 registered users and only a couple of dozen active ones. But we did have a lot of feedback about what customers did want and we’d learnt a lot about what it was going to take to have a success in the independent mobile world.

So in early 2005, we scrapped X-TXT, rebuilt the management and development team, and started working on mig33.

We launched mig33 in December 2005.

- Steven Goh

(source : steven goh's blog )

Wow!

Congratulations Steven!

And Mig33! :bravo:

Thanks for the Share Riz!

It's a gr8 experience

awesome article & pics
very nice

wow!!! its just awesome....thanks riz

i wish all the best so that mig33 goes a far way!

i will be happy if i can contribute for it

WOW!!!
That is so long.. and yet informative..


And whew!
i read it in one single breath..

Where can we find his blog?
I wanna learn more about him

thankz riz bro for sharing these information.well i like to know more about it...

well. thats amazing.. i liked the frank atmosphere in the pictures

very nice topic ...
thanks for informing riz ...

nice one riz keep sharing