Kimberly Wan
Co-founder & CEO at Otomate Me
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21 Mar 2021
5 Min Read
Ming Yang, PR & COMMS STRATEGIST
Kimberly Wan’s journey to becoming an entrepreneur certainly wasn’t all flowers and songs. She started gaining experience and learning the trade by joining a start-up company. For 15 months, she went through the basics of business and entrepreneurship. As she was getting a lot more face time and direct insight into leadership and management styles, she managed to learn more on operations, business development, crisis mitigation and public speaking. Equipped with all these skills, she took the step out into the entrepreneur world – with only her determination and passion as her weapons.
So, what is Otomate Me and how did it come about existing?
Kimberly was invited for a guest-speaker online session hosted by BizPod, Taylor’s start-up incubator, the online session was organized to provide students with insights and real-life stories from start-up founders regarding entrepreneurship – how they started the business, how they endured through hardships and also key points on how to make it work.
She explained that even before she and her co-partner started coming out with a product, they went to check the ‘temperature’ on-ground and find out what is it that the people need. They created a survey with Google Forms to get feedback and approached their intended target market. “Build connections, build trust and be gracious in that process.” Kimberly stressed that one way to accelerate a business idea is to get advice from your consumer on how you can help them solve their problems.
Kimberly and her co-partner brought Otomate 1.0 to life without any external investments. It is a smart e-commerce platform that helps businesses automate mundane and repetitive tasks, at scale. Overtime, Otomate 2.0 – Otomailer, was built to further offer custom solutions to enterprises which empower them to collect customer data, segment their customers like never, and engage their customers with greater personalization to communicate meaningfully and intimately throughout the customer lifecycle. With their experience with the first version of Otomate, they learned from its gaps and continuously enhanced their services.
Kimberly also shared tips and insights with the students from her own experience of building a business. Throughout an entrepreneur’s journey, do not be afraid to let go something to get something better. Remember to always take feedback from customers before creating new features and lastly, develop tools that will benefit your customers and continuously improve on that.
The success of Kimberly will help inspire many students who have dreams and hopes of being an established entrepreneur. This is where BizPod comes in. BizPod aims to help students proceed from their ideation stage to successfully establish a start-up business. By surrounding students with a holistic start-up ecosystem, BizPod serves as a guide to help them thrive in the startup community. BizPod also works across multiple faculties in the University to provide students with a multi-disciplinary learning experience.
Co-founder & CEO at Otomate Me