At 28, Vivien Wong walked away from an £80,000-a-year accounting job to start making ice cream with her brother.

Growing up in her family’s bakery, she had dreamt of one day running her own business. She says her father’s cancer diagnosis made her take the leap to create Little Moons.

The mochi balls of doughy rice filled with ice-cream exploded on TikTok, but its apparent overnight success was more than a decade in the making.

Wong shares the lessons she learnt along the way and her advice for anyone thinking about starting a business of their own.

One of the biggest mistakes aspiring founders make is waiting for everything to be perfect so Wong recommends following an “80-20 rule”.

“Don’t wait for perfection because that extra 20 is going to take you too long and you might miss the market,” she says.

Instead, she recommends getting a product “80% of the way there”, launching it and improving it as you go – like she did with Little Moons.

For its first five years Wong sold mochi to restaurants and cinemas before she saved enough money to invest in branding and move into supermarkets.

Wong left a well-paid job and moved in with her brother so they could save money and reinvest any profits into the business.

She remembers swapping a polished City environment, where there was always someone else to call for help, for having to do almost everything herself.

“All roads lead to you when you run your own business so even though I wasn’t great with IT, I was head of IT”.

She also had to learn about machinery, product development, making ice cream and paying wages.

Wong says she even did the company accounts on Sundays rather than pay for a bookkeeper because, at the time, saving the money mattered more than getting the day back.

Wong’s advice to people starting a business is about the importance of knowing your brand and saying no to opportunities that don’t fit.

“If you know what your brand values are, you know how you can apply that to a trend, but you also know when to leave it alone,” she says.

“Pick and choose what you say yes to and don’t try and do everything. Stay focused, know exactly what you stand for.”

She also warns against blindly taking advice from experts – but to listen and think for yourself.

“You realise that advice they’re giving you was probably right for another business but not for your specific set of circumstances.”

She and her brother would discuss advice they received, sometimes take it and sometimes reject it and over time, making those decisions helped build her confidence.

Wong says working with her brother has been a huge strength but there were also “definitely a lot of arguments”.

They had to learn to behave like colleagues at work rather than siblings.

When the company was considering moving from a 5,000 sq ft factory to a 30,000 sq ft site, with annual rent jumping from around £40,000 to £500,000, Wong says she was more willing to take the risk while her brother was naturally more cautious.

But that difference in opinion has helped them make better decisions as they “balance each other out”.

Her advice for anyone working with family is to set boundaries for how you interact in the workplace.

“You have to be really mindful that you’re being as respectful to your brother as a colleague and you see him as a colleague and not a sibling,” she says.

Now that Little Moons has a chief executive and wider leadership team, the pair are less involved in the day-to-day running of the company which Wong says has allowed them to “just be brother and sister again”.

Little Moons became a TikTok phenomenon during the pandemic but Wong says most people don’t realise it had been running for a decade already.

“Everyone says we’re like an overnight success 12 years in the making,” she says.

Before going viral, the company had spent years learning how to manufacture at scale, train staff, export products and supply major retailers.

That preparation proved essential when demand suddenly exploded as the business might not have survived its viral moment without the team and infrastructure already behind it.

“Business is a combination of many, many, many boring things and many boring small steps,” she says.

For anyone watching founders seemingly blow up on social media overnight, she says it’s important to remember that the viral moment is often the part of the story everyone sees rather than the beginning.