Low-Code Founder : Jerry Hsiang, owner of Remote quizz
By: Melanie Bialgues
Tags: Remote Working, Remote Learning, Entrepreneurship, Founders, Onboarding

Low-Code Founder : Jerry Hsiang, owner of Remote quizz

Inside the mind of an entrepreneur : our founder of the week tells us about his business acquisition strategy and the pivot he made with Remote quizz. Melanie Bialgues Dec 22, 2020·7 min read

What led you to entrepreneurship ?

My background was mainly linked to finance for 6+ years. After obtaining my degree in finance, I served as a management consultant and then as a finance manager and CFO in a variety of healthcare and tech startups and companies.

I was attracted to entrepreneurship as early as university, when I entered an international school in Taipei. The Asian education system strongly encourages students to develop products to create value and to engage in entrepreneurship. That’s how I took a minor in which the school gave us $2,000 to create a fully functional and operational business from scratch. Since then, I love to review and challenge products or companies, and my friends often come to me for advice on alpha and beta versions of their products.

With the Covid-19 crisis, more and more people became aware of the inefficiencies of the American education system. Of course, everything is relative, there is good and bad in all education systems, but, having lived in Taiwan and Japan, I definitely find that Asian systems are more efficient. That’s how I started looking for a way to build a company and a product around education space.

The first step was to acquire Remote Quiz in July 2020 and then to grow it over the last 5 months by developing partnerships with a range of organizations, hiring employees and reworking the product to improve the UX and UI of the platform thanks to Bubble.

Can you tell us more about Remote Quizz?

Many children, in the US and around the world, are obliged to learn remotely because of the global pandemic. This causes two main problems: first, it is difficult for children to stay invested and attentive in their studies (especially when they are between 6 and 10 years old). Second, many parents are forced to become more involved in their children’s education in order to replace the physical absence of the teacher (and balancing this with a full time job).

To solve this challenge, we are an educational tech startup that offers a solution of interactive, personalized and fun quizzes to facilitate the learning of K-12 learners.

With Remote Quiz, educators (both teachers or parents) can create multiple-answer quizzes (“games”) and make them more appealing by adding gifs or images to keep children engaged in the learning process.

We have already launched our first package of questions on math and chemistry subjects and will soon launch a new task and content creator as well as pre-made set of questions covering an entire semester or quarter.

What plans do you have for Remote Quizz in the long and medium term?

Due to the long arduous sales cycle with schools and educational institutions, I have decided to pivot Remote Quiz to an new employee onboarding platform.

Due to COVID, 99% of employee onboarding is done virtually today, which does not generally favor a fun experience. Yet there are two things to consider to create a holistic and comprehensive onboarding experience:

Gather all the information in a simple and accessible format. Get new employees to participate and express themselves on their current knowledge of the company in order to better train them.

I think that using Remote quizz could allow HR managers to find good ways to communicate the company’s missions, HR and PT policy, benefits, payroll payment, heath care benefits etc. For example, by providing fun, useful and interactive live quizzes that will allow HR staff to see the answers simultaneously and adapt their explanations or programs accordingly (if they find that a point has been misunderstood by the majority of new employees).

I am currently testing this model by contacting HR managers around the world to see if they are interested in this value proposition.

What challenges have you met or are you meeting in your projects?

Taking Bubble in hand and taking care of the technical aspect myself was not easy at first, as my background had until then limited me to the use of Excel sheets. Even if the learning curve on Bubble is not as deep as the technical coding, it was still a big jump for me.

Then, there is the “motivation” side which is not always easy to manage when you embark on entrepreneurial projects. Even if developing web applications on Bubble allows me to get out of the world of finance and “relax” by expressing my creativity, I had to take the step to turn this project into a business. That is why I decided to force my hand by acquiring the Remote Quizz platform to be fully committed to it.

How went the development with Bubble?

I knew that Bubble was the most popular No-code and Low-code platform, so I took a direct interest in it.

However, it is not the easiest platform to work with if you don’t have any knowledge in this field. I had a hard time learning everything myself or getting help from friends. Developing on Bubble requires a particularly holistic knowledge in development (DNS, security, UI and UX stuff, data stores, data security …). I also had to integrate APIs, which is quite complex to handle.

Beyond that, Bubble’s development requires the use of good practices to be able to scale the product as the company grows. Obviously, the absence of these good practices is not a problem at the beginning, when there is not a large number of users or when you just built an MVP. However, if you’re planning to grow your solution and offer a wider use, you need to make sure that all these particularities are taken into account, or you risk getting into a lot of trouble later on.

What advice would you give to those who are reluctant to embark on entrepreneurial projects?

The most important thing is to dare to take the plunge. Then, make sure you are well organized and always anticipate and plan your strategic moves over the medium and long term. Every decision must contribute to the success of the company, and be made on time.

I think there are two main ways to start an entrepreneurial venture:

Either you already have a personal motivation to do it and just have to dare and persevere.

Either you do not have enough motivation to be able to fully invest in it. In this case, a good technique is to acquire small businesses as I did to force yourself to invest personally in the project. Since you have already invested money in it, it “forces” you to get involved.

My goal is above all to learn new things. For example, I bought a small trampoline business 6 weeks ago, because I knew it would force me to learn marketing.

If you decide to acquire companies, there are at least two rules to follow:

Compel yourself to learn all the new skills you will need to manage it.

Respect certain selection criteria: the companies you buy must be slighly under-managed, and you must be able to improve processes to make the business more efficient and scale it to make it passive in 8 months or 12 months.

In any case, make sure you have a backup. It is better to go gradually and not take the risk of leaving your job and your nice apartment from one day to the next. It is also necessary to plan things well: make sure you have a proper financial caution and be sure that your family has everything they need. Basically, don’t accumulate the responsibilities to ensure you have a small parachute just in case.

Finally, you have to be able to be versatile and handle a wide range of things. For example, if you own a restaurant, you need to be able to cook a few dishes in a rush if your cook is sick. You don’t need to know how to cook like a 5-star chef, you just need to be able to help out a little bit when you are needed and the success of your business depends on it.