We were lucky to have met Vincent Lau during one of our social gatherings and we had the privilege to feature him in this month’s Developer Feature series. In this post, we ask the 29 year old CTO and co-founder of PayWhere to share on his mission of marrying social media and e-commerce.
Describe yourself in three words.
Futurist. Engineer. Innovator
What motivated you to start PayWhere?
I started a web development firm back in my University days together with a few friends. Hundreds of job requests later, we noticed that people were looking for a fast, easy and inexpensive way to start their own online shop. We decided to address this market gap, and that was how PayWhere started. Incidentally, the earlier business that I started is still around. It is now known as Massive Infinity (MI), and develops both web and mobile applications. MI is also in the BizSpark programme.
Why the merge of social media and e-commerce?
People who sell online actually spend most of their marketing efforts on social media these days. Social influencers are also known to be a factor in driving up online sales conversion. You are more likely to buy something if someone you trust recommends it to you. Hence, Social Media + E-Commerce = Social Commerce is a natural combination.
How did you come up with idea?
The flagship product of PayWhere is the Social Commerce platform TackThis. In searching for a way to easily deploy e-shops across multiple platforms, we took inspiration from how easy it is to embed a YouTube video, you simply copy and past the embed code. Therefore, the idea that you can tack (because the word embed sounds too geeky) your shop anywhere is a hit.
How did you stay inspired throughout the development process?
We started off 3 years ago as just 3 co-founders, and 1 engineer. At that time Social Commerce was pretty new, especially in South East Asia. But like all things tech, it doesn’t take too long before we start seeing competition sprouting out, especially in the US. Since, most of the time it was just 2 (me + 1 engineer) of us working on TackThis, our biggest worry at that time was how to ship code fast enough, and yet stay ahead of the competition with differentiating features.
We found that the best way to stay inspired is to become a user of the product too. Each of us have our own TackThis shop selling stuffs. By putting ourselves in the shoes of our users, we find that not only do we understand their needs better, it becomes easier to come up with useful features.
What are your preferred language/platforms/tools of choice?
Today, we are a team of 10 (half of the team are techies). As most of us came from a PHP development background, our backend system is primarily a LAMP stack, which we deploy as Azure VMs. For the frontend, we are fans of AngularJS.
What tips/tricks would you share with other aspiring developers?
If you feel that you are getting too comfortable with your coding, it means that you are not growing as a developer. Be open to criticisms, be eager to learn more, and always try something new!
Tell us something people might be surprised to learn about you
I am not a Computer Science or Engineering graduate. My major was Materials Science and Engineering, although I do have a Computing minor. Prior to venturing into the web tech space, my specialisation and research was in organic photovoltaics, which was more Physics and Chemistry than anything else.
What’s next for you?
Other than continuing to expand our regional reach with our partners, we will also be launching our new API, and a 3rd Party Developers program in May.
How can people find you if they want to learn more about yourself?
Drop me an email or connect on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/
Follow