In an interview with Insights Success, the Founder and CEO, of Trik, Pae Natwilai, sheds a light on company’s cutting-edge innovation and shares her insights about the drone innovation and its future. She also explains the impact of digitalization on overall construction process.
Below are highlights from the interview conducted between Pae and Insights Success:
How do you diversify your organization’s offerings to appeal to the target audience?
We have a key set of features which our software can perform and we rarely develop special tools for individual clients.
In order to diversify our offering, we focus on finding user cases and explaining different benefits that each of our clients can receive from using our services. For example, our software has the capability to detect changes in 3D and track it through time.
For asset management companies, they are more interested in seeing the progress of the whole project and track the change against budget. While insurance companies will be using this same feature for comparing before and after condition to evaluate the insurance cost. This is the same technical feature in our software but delivers completely different benefit to clients. By phrasing things into benefit with clear case study, we can diversify our offer to many industries without any change in our core software.
Describe some of the vital attributes that every entrepreneur should possess.
Practically, it doesn’t matter if you have an amazing idea, unless you figure out a way to make a sustainable business, the company won’t last.
How do you strategize your game plans to tackle competition in the market?
In the drone industry, competition is actually good for everyone. Because the technology is still very new, most of the work we do is educating the market of what they can do with drone data. Competition makes our clients know more about drone in general and can see different benefits the drone brings to different industries. We always keep a close eye on our competitors, but we realize that more than 80% of the people we thought were our competitors, were actually very good partners, as we were interested in the same clients but we can provide a different specialty.
What are the frequent challenges faced by women entrepreneurs in the workplaces and what are the ways to tackle them?
I think the key challenge most woman entrepreneurs face in workplaces is most people making assumption that they’re not capable. You can’t change or educate the whole industry overnight. Though it would be nice if we can, one of the ways that I find very practical for me is to establish credibility for myself early on in the conversation. Another way that the whole industry could help is to make successful women and other role models more visible. When General Public is familiar with seeing successful women in multiple fields, people will be more used to the idea that a woman is capable of doing anything.
What were the primal challenges and roadblocks you faced during the initial phase of your career as an entrepreneur?
One of the primary challenges I faced during the initial phase of my career as an entrepreneur is self-doubt. Everyone I met told me I need to find a co-founder to help me build the company, so I thought that is what I need. I wasted over a year trying to find the right person to work with, while in fact I have both the technical knowledge and industry experience to actually start the company by myself. This doesn’t mean that I don’t need a team. I do, I just don’t necessarily need a co-founder to start the company to begin with.
Where do you see yourself in the near future and what are your future goals?
My main goal is to grow the company internationally and have a better work life balance. I would like to establish a better supporting system inside the company to provide opportunity for young people and minority, and support personal growth for everyone in the team. What is your advice for budding and emerging Shepreneurs? Keep going and don’t forget to ask for help along the way. Asking for help doesn’t mean you are weak. It means that you are strong enough to accept your strength and weakness, and strong enough to let other people know that. I would not have made it to today without the advice, help and support of everyone around me along the way.
About the Leader
Pae Natwilai is a trailblazing innovator, technologist and thought leader in drone innovation and digital construction. As CEO and founder of Trik, she has developed and launched software that uses drone photography to create real-time 3D mapping of buildings and other architectural structures. The technology, which represents a revolution for the structural inspection industry, has won Pae a host of accolades, including selection for the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe, Industry list.
Pae completed a B.E. in Mechanical and Robotic Engineering at Chulalongkorn University in her native Thailand. She started her career as an inspection and maintenance engineer at the Thai national oil and gas company, PTTEP, before winning a scholarship to study an MA/M.Sc. in Global Innovation Design at Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art (RCA).
Sources: The 20 Most Successful Shepreneurs to watch in 2019
