The “Tinder” For Professional Networking

Meet Harris Cheng, the Co-Founder & CEO of Jupitrr

Meeting new people and building a strong network are always the secrets to startup success and survival. Raising capital, growing your user base, finding collaborations – they’re all about connections. 

While growing his first venture Freehunter, Harris found that there is a pain point in the business networking market. Instead of spending time on events or sending cold emails, individuals find it hard to connect with people that have the same entrepreneurial interests or professions. This drove him to start his second venture Jupitrr. 

In this interview, Harris shared how Jupitrr helps users build up connections and the important lessons he has learnt from his first startup venture.

Q: What is Jupitrr?

H: Hi this is Harris, the Co-Founder & CEO of Jupitrr. Jupitrr is a smart business networking app where we envision to make business connections efficient and interactive. You can match with relevant connections and have small group chats in any topic. 

Q: What is Jupitrr’s matchmaking algorithm? 

H: There are a lot of factors to make a good algorithm. One of the most important ones is the purpose a user has at a given moment. We ask users every month what they are looking for – a partnership, a co-founder, or a mentor? Industry-match is also important. If you’re looking for a software builder, you won’t want us to offer those who do manufacturing right! 

Q: How do you differentiate yourself from LinkedIn and other competitors? 

H: Linkedin is a recruitment software where 70% of their income comes from talent recruitment subscription. Jupitrr, however, is focusing on making business connections for business owners.

Many Linkedin users also reflected that making connections on Linkedin has a low conversion rate as people usually don’t respond to private messages. Instead of sending cold messages, Jupitrr encourages people to build personal connections first. This approach makes communications much more effective and results in a higher conversion rate.

Q: Why did you decide to start Jupitrr and how does your prior experience at Freehunter convince you that this would be a great idea to work on?

H: I started my first company Freehunter when I was still studying in HKU, where we have grown to one of the largest freelance job platforms in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore with 40,000+ freelancers across 40 industries. Our team worked hard and hit breakeven in 3 years.

While we were growing Freehunter, we found that small business owners and freelancers are very eager to make business connections. We launched a social networking feature in 2019 for freelancers to connect but it turns out that we had found a wrong solution for the problem. The lucky part is, we discovered a huge opportunity and it brought us the secret sauce of Jupitrr. 

Q: What are the lessons that you have learnt from your early days at Freehunter?

H: Be loyal to your beliefs while keeping humble: as you set out on the path of entrepreneurship, you will be bombarded with questions and comments. People will tell you it’s not a good idea and it will not work. Sometimes, they are even the people you look up to. You have to learn how to listen to some and filter the rest.  

Don’t do things that are comfortable, do things that are right: there are things that make you consistently unproductive and grow slow – competitions, awards, press coverage, unnecessary meetings, and many more. Be self-aware on what brings your company value instead of doing stuff that makes you feel great in the short-term. 

You won’t know everything, look for brilliant mentors: it’s easy to wrongly interpret asking questions as something shameful. I’ve reached a couple of bottlenecks during the past years and found that the best solution so far is to talk to people. Good mentors usually have walked the same path as you before. This makes them the best people to seek advice from. 

Q: You have grown Freehunter from a team of 2 to over 10. What are your three most important considerations when hiring new employees?

H: Though we are not a big team yet, setting company values and cultures are essential. Otherwise, you will run into situations like the team having disputes or growing in a very inefficient path. Always tell your team how everyone should behave (culture) and what’s important (values). We have an internal set of metrics when it comes to hiring in the early days of a startup.

1. Cultural fit: whether the candidate has a good attitude, value set and passion. This is the most important criteria among all three. 

2. Skills: both hard and soft skills.

3. Intelligence: whether this person can find patterns in things, consolidate them well, and develop his own way of learning so to have a steep learning curve.

Q: How does your role change as you brought in more and more people? 

H: Founder and CEO is a person who has his head on the clouds and feet on the ground. You’re able to dream of the big vision and can act practical when it comes to execution.

As the team grows, your time is more and more important. It’s common to feel everything is safer when you do it yourself, but picking the right person to work on it is more sustainable. I have spent much more time thinking about how to make every team member to be a glowing star in their field and guide them to find the sense of achievement in their work rather than just me being my own best. Delegate when needed and always be growth-centric. 

Q: Which three books have inspired you the most and you would recommend to all early-stage startup founders?

H: There are three books I like the most. 

1. Lean Startup: it tells you how a product should be built so you find product-market fit fast and efficiently.

2. Blitzscaling: you will learn the way to think, test and pick user acquisition channels.

3. Lost and Founder: the brutally honest journey from a successful founder.

Q: What’s the best advice you’ve been given as an entrepreneur?

H: Ironically, ‘never follow people’s advice’. I don’t mean taking advice is bad, my mentors’ advice helped me a lot. However, don’t BLINDLY follow any.   

Before you achieve success, most people will tell you you’re wrong. Once you succeed, people will find any means possible to prove why you’re right in hindsight. Talking to users, learning about the industry and building the product will often make more progress for you. 

Q: As a non-technical founder, how were you able to communicate your vision and your requirements for the product to the tech talents that you worked with?

H: First of all, try your best to find a technical founder if your company is tech-driven. 

Secondly, be empathetic about what they care about and make them feel their sense of achievement before and during their work. 

Last but not least, know what you want. Be specific about your proposal, ask for feedback, and set a clear schedule.   

Q: How can we learn more about you and your company? 

H: Visit our website and download our app! If you’re interested in my journey, feel free to follow me on Medium. You may also reach out to me on Linkedin.