In an exclusive interaction with SCIKEY, sunny speaks about his entrepreneurial journey, inspiration to start Pseudoscops, challenges faced by the company & also shares some advice for the entrepreneurs & founders embarking on the same journey & much more.

1. Tell us about your entrepreneurial journey and how it brought you here.

Pseudoscops is the fourth company that I co-founded at the moment, and this is the first company that I am running full-time, without the comfort of having a full-time job. I don't come from a wealthy background, and thus this is a significant jump for me. Deciding to embark on this journey is not an easy decision, a daunting task for me, which will be impossible without the support of my wife and my business co-founders.

Out of the four companies, three of them are providing technological solutions. The unique one that I started alone provides photography services. One of the services is to bring couples overseas to a scenic location to take their bridal shots and tour the place without worrying about the logistics. Unfortunately, all of them didn't manage to take off compared to what Pseudoscops is achieving at the moment.

2. What inspired you to create Pseudoscops?

The majority comes from believing that we can achieve more than what we can do under our employer back then. Together with my Co-Founder Adrian, we developed a Facial Recognition System that's operationally proven with Singapore's law enforcement agency, against all odds. We even conceptualised and built a portable version that's self-contained and deployable by a single person within 5 minutes.

With these proven track records, we thought we could achieve much more if we could do what we wanted freely, charting the product development direction and the company. So, after deliberating the idea for few months, we decided to take the leap of faith and founded Pseudoscops.

3. How has the company developed over time?

We founded Pseudoscops and intending to remain within the Law Enforcement Industry. However, with the reality of bread & butter setting in, we need to seek other business opportunities to generate income while developing potential projects on Facial Recognition.

It was supposed to be an introductory presentation, sharing our development capabilities with a famous Singapore brand. Coincidentally, they were also looking for a technology partner that can help them in their business transformation. After a few rounds of conceptualisation and presentation, we secured the deal to partner Lim Chee Guan as their digital transformation partner.

What we are working on is a change in direction from what we intend to do initially. However, this opens up a much bigger potential market for the company. With this partnership's industry insights and know-how, we saw a gap that traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers face. They want to sell online but are deterred by the 'How to' and the issue on 'How much.' Thus, we developed UnitySuite, which aims to bridge this gap by offering them a simple platform that helps them start selling online fast.

The company changed the direction from being a company in the Security industry to one that deals with Digital Transformation.

4. What have been the biggest challenges the company has faced so far?

Apart from the challenging business environment that we are experiencing in Singapore, our biggest challenge is to take down an online eCommerce site during the peak period. Unfortunately, while we have done all the preparations and testing, we failed to anticipate sufficiently the extreme demand and complexity of concurrency users.

The customer's management decision then was to bring the site down immediately to contain the situation. This incident resulted in the loss of trust with my team, and we quickly moved into service recovery mode. I thought that this is the end of the journey for the company. Thankfully, the customer's management decided to give us another chance and walk the journey with us. Eventually, we managed to bring the site up with additional measures and successfully enabled customers to purchase what they need online amid the high traffic. And also integrating to the backend logistically process to ensure smooth fulfillment to the customers.

5. What other tech startups do you admire and why?

I stumbled upon this book named "Rework", written by the founder of 37signals, known as Basecamp now. They shared a different way of running a business and quickly altered and amended the execution when things are not running well, focusing on ourselves instead of always looking at the competition.

During one of the interviews, CEO Jason Fried shared that he doesn't want to grow into a giant corporation. Instead, he wants the company to remain small and successful. In addition, the company focus on one product, makes it good and keep it simple. From what I can find, they have only 34 employees in 2021, worth billions and still privately owned.

They are a company that I truly admired.

6. What advice would you give to entrepreneurs or founders embarking on the same journey?

Don't be fixated to jump onto the investment wagon. When we start up a company, we must honestly believe in ourselves and the company that we are building. Start with a correct culture and develop a product or service that you can be proud of. It need not be something attracting a lot of attention, but the product must be useful to people.

When your product or service gained that critical mass, your customers believe in the value you are giving them. Words will spread, and they will be your best advocate to attract people keen to bring the company further.

Till then, focus on the product and find people who genuinely believe in you.

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