I dropped out of law school to start a snack brand that’s now a household name in Singapore. Here are the top 5 things entrepreneurs should know before taking the leap.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Chris Hwang, the 33-year-old cofounder of The Golden Duck, a Singaporean snack brand. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m Chris Hwang, cofounder of The Golden Duck. At 23, I dropped out of law school to start the snack brand, which, a decade later, is now sold in over 3,000 stores worldwide.

The Golden Duck is a gourmet snack brand that reimagines Asian flavors like salted egg yolk. Our vision has always been to be the Ben & Jerry’s of snacks.

We started small. In 2015, we launched with just one product — salted egg yolk chips.

At the start, our capacity was so limited that we made the products in a home kitchen. As a result, we could only make about 50 packs of chips a day.

As it started getting more popular in Singapore, we scaled up the business.

Adding staff, maintaining quality, and controlling the processes when we scaled up were some of the most challenging parts of our journey.

We’ve also weathered many storms. The pandemic was a very bad time for the business, and all our tourism revenue evaporated overnight. We had to reduce our workforce from 200 to 120, and tell friends we’d brought on board that we won’t be able to work together anymore.

From my 10 years of experience running The Golden Duck, here are five pieces of advice I’d give to anyone thinking about starting a new brand.

1. Get started and test cheap

If you’re thinking about it and you’ve not yet, just get started.

You don’t have to quit your job. You can do something on the weekends, but start building a road map.

Nothing is stopping you from testing it right now. You don’t have to spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars building things, especially in the age of AI.

So, if you have a dream, just get started.

You might fail at first. This is actually my fifth startup, but the failures gave me the fire to keep putting my back into it and working crazy hours.

And when you start, test with as little capital as possible.

I’ve seen people start businesses with $5,000 and rake in multimillion-dollar revenues now. I’ve seen people start businesses broke, and some have scaled up enormously.

I think people don’t do this enough. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to test a business idea.

2. Know your customer

Really get to know your customer.

Fall in love with them, give them a name, know where they stay, have a whole idea about how they spend their budgets, and what things they care about

With this method, we found success in Singapore, Hong Kong, and a few other markets. However, to scale this globally, we need to identify this customer so we can speak to them.

Our target customer is 30 years old. She doesn’t need to drive a car, but some of them do. She lives 15 minutes out from downtown Singapore.

She loves her food. She is very active on social media, whether it’s Instagram or TikTok, and she loves sharing the best bits of her food journeys. She has big dreams.

You need to be specific about who your customers are to market effectively to them.

3. Innovate for your customer, not yourself

You have to innovate for what your consumer wants, not what you want.

I love snacking. Often, I am my customer, but not always. Do I have the same taste buds as the Italians? Or the French? I don’t.

And I need to recognize that. So, if I go to those markets and try those products and see what their best sellers are, I know what I’m going after.

Then my challenge is, can I make my product better for you, not better for me?

4. Today, authenticity is king

People all around the world are creating authentic experiences.

We all know what sour cream and onion taste like, and we all know what barbecue tastes like. But why not have sour cream and Sriracha, one of our newest flavors in the canister line of chips that we launched in 2024?

By now, everybody knows what truffle flavor is, but why not have truffle wagyu? Again, that’s one of the flavors that we launched.

And I see a trend that people are looking not just for interesting one-off experiences. They’re looking for interesting new staples.

So, I think there’s a very strong case for not just Asian flavors but all flavors from around the world. There’s a huge opportunity there.

5. Fail small, rectify fast

I know that many entrepreneurs have shared the advice of failing small, so I’m not going to beat that drum anymore. I think everyone knows what it means.

But rectifying after the failure is super important. So you fail small, and then what? Do you just sit there and say, “It didn’t work?” No.

Entrepreneurship is all about evolution. Most businesses don’t find their niche until a good one to two years in.

That means you have to iterate. OK — maybe your customer doesn’t like it this way. Perhaps they like it with a little bit more salt. Maybe they don’t like chips. Maybe they want a packet of potato wedges instead of chips.

If you don’t rectify after each of those small failures, then you’re just going to call it quits too early.

Because entrepreneurship is like life. It’s all about evolving, changing, and growing.

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