8 questions to Timothy Yu from SnapAsk - A Startup recruiting like Crazy

Can you give a brief introduction about your company?

Snapask help students on homework assignments by connecting them to elite university tutors within 17 seconds to start a one-on-one online session. We started in 2015 in HK, and have so far served over 20K students and quickly raised USD1.8mm to launch Snapask in Singapore, Taiwan and Shanghai.

What was your biggest challenge or the worst decision you had made and had to flip away from afterwards?

The biggest challenge so far is probably to build a sustainable channel to connect online to offline learning experience, which we are going to put extra emphasise in the upcoming year to make sure the student and tutor community is close and active not only on Snapask as a mobile app, but as an experience that can comprehensively improve students performance.

What is your dream and vision for Appedu?

To provide a level playing field for all, starting in education. Education is the social ladder that provide a upward movement for people from different social classes, and as a powerful tool to help alleviate poverty.
However, what is happening now is, quality education is only accessible to a small group of people and they would have a much higher chance to further their studies and eventually a good career. It creates inequality and in long term a wider wealth gap.
Snapask is only a small factor in the equation, but we hope to play well in this small part to create an affordable and quality education resource that is accessible for all, and eventually build a level playing field for people in any part of the world.

How do you get your brand out there? (Did you leverage any connections to other startups? Any other meaningful relationships or connections that helped you?)

We try our best, tell people around us about our story, and let it happen. (haha, nothing special)

TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves More.
   What keeps your team going? What do they value the most?

We value every member in the team, and we are all very clear about our small milestones and ultimate goal. The most valuable factor in the team is communication and I do especially appreciate our team member who are willing to voice out their opinion and dare to make changes, and take up responsibilities.
As we always say, to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.

You are growing your team really fast, how quick can or should a startup team grow? Any advice/ watch-outs?

It really depends, but knowing the objective is the most important point in hiring, having more members can free up founders hand, delegate tasks is a hard topic to learn.

What is the one reason to start a startup in HK? And what would be the reason not to do so?

I am from HK? Haha, no particular reason, location is not a factor of startups success in my opinion.

What is your #Startup Passion?

Learn, share, repeat.