Stuck in a dead-end job, I felt depression creeping in. I passed up a chance to go to college so that I could earn more money. I thought that I could do it without a degree, but I was not having the luck that I thought I would have. I wanted to go back to school, but I worked 50 hours per week and had no time for school. I was exhausted every night when I came home as it was. One day, in the lunch room, one of my coworkers was talking about some guy named Ewen Chia and the online class he had been taking from him. He told me I should look into it and why.

As depressed as I was, I really had no faith that what my coworker was talking about was the real deal. I had no faith in most everything as it was. And I really feared that spending my money on the course is something that would not be worthwhile. I told my coworker this, and he invited me to come over that night to sit down and listen to what Ewen had to say for a couple of hours. I took him up on the invite. At the very least, I would have some good company that night. But I found myself interested in the course the very first hour that I sat down to watch it that night.

My coworker said that I should buy the course, and I knew he was right. He could see the fire in me. And after I got the course, he and I spent every night on the phone after that coming up with a plan for our new Internet businesses. We worked on our strategies and really helped one another. By the end of that month, we were ready to get our products online and start selling. If everything worked out, we hoped that we could ditch our jobs working for someone else and strike out on our own. It worked.

Success can be measured by how deeply a product or service is capable of penetrating a market. How much a business is able to dominate the market is an important measurement of success. However, when there a over a billion people in a market, is it still an important measure when there are so many users utilizing a multitude of similar services? I’ve been working in mobile apps development in Singapore, finding a measure of success here in Singapore that escaped me in the United States. Competition is fierce in the U.S while branding is almost cartoonish. It’s not like that here in Singapore.

There are over 2.5 billion people who are using smart phones in the Asian-Pacific market – the United States doesn’t even hold a candle to the number of users. This is a market where mobile app development is able to find easy niche markets whereas making room against the competition in the United States is a difficult if not impossible endeavor, especially when patent lawsuits are beginning to fly left and right in court rooms across the States. It’s an absurd situation that is stifling progress and competition while the Asian-Pacific market is a thriving treasure trove of success.

I have no regrets leaving the United States. There may be some aspects of living in Singapore that are more difficult but I am finding more success in both my personal life and my professional one. I’m meeting and networking with people who are able to enrich my skills more than I ever experienced back home. The sheer number of qualified employees and employers in Singapore is enough to baffle the mind. I am absolutely content with my moving here but I would also enjoy travelling to China to see if I could find the same quality of work there.