Decentralized Traded Funds (DEXTF) today announced a US$460,000 seed funding round led by LuneX Ventures and SGInnovate, with the participation of the partners at London-based hedge fund CDAM and undisclosed private investors.

DEXTF is a Singapore-based startup that aims to democratise asset management by bridging investors peer-to-peer with asset managers, eliminating the need for intermediaries.

Claiming to be an oversubscribed round, the startup plans to use the funding to work on the completion of its proof of concept and will use the new capital to launch the product and further develop its technology.

In addition to bridging the connection between investors and asset managers, DEXTF also enables fully decentralised custody, allowing the delegation of investment decisions without transferring ownership of the assets.

In a statement, Mario Aquino, Co-founder and President of DEXTF, dubbed traditional asset management as an industry that is experiencing “a period of significant change.”

Also Read: Golden Gate Ventures, Hanwha Asset Management team up to invest in Series B rounds

This transition is driven by the rise of ETFs and rise of ETFs and passive investments, the search for yield and diversification in a low-interest-rate environment as well as the increasing cost of legacy infrastructure with multiple intermediary layers.

“With DEXTF we are building a new asset management paradigm. One that not only helps traditional asset managers dramatically lower costs and taps into new investment asset classes, but also significantly lowers barriers to entry and democratises the allocation of resources to enable a new generation of digital asset managers,” Aquino said.

“Currently the bearer nature and immutability of digital assets means they cannot be safely invested in with traditional methods, especially when the investment decisions are delegated to third parties. In these cases, the custody of the assets is exposed to risks which can be best addressed by a blockchain solution. By combining blockchain technology with the arbitrage mechanism, a further layer of security is being added providing accountability and transparency,” he added.

DEXTF named Mindful Wealth as a strategic partner.

For LuneX Ventures, the blockchain-focused arm of Golden Gate Ventures, this lead investment is the third deal it concluded together with SGInnovate since its appointment to SGInnovate’s panel of co-investors under the Startup SG Equity scheme for deep tech startups.

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Image Credit: DEXTF

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Recently, I’ve been talking to a lot of entrepreneurs about The Dip — The really hard part of starting something new, where it feels like nothing is going for you. Seth Godin has written about The Dip and why it is an important part of the journey.

The Dip is something that anyone who ventures out beyond the walled garden of a corporate job will encounter at some point. The concept is paralleled in the Initiation phase of Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey (pictured below). As an entrepreneur, it’s important to understand that a lot of the criticisms that you will receive from investors and potential clients will likely dissipate if you’re able to traverse The Dip. As Seth Godin points out,

“Extraordinary benefits accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most.” Rather than fight it, embrace The Dip.

The initiation

For background, the Initiation phase of the Hero’s Journey has several smaller parts (there are other iterations of the stages but for the most part this sums it up well):

Tests, Allies, Enemies: A series of tests that a hero must undergo at the beginning of the long and perilous path of conquests.

Approach to the Innermost Cave: The Hero makes final preparations before taking the final leap into the unknown. The Hero will face doubts and fears that had originally surfaced at the start of the journey.

Ordeal: The Hero must draw upon all of the skills and experiences that were gathered on the journey to overcome the final test.

After this, the Hero receives the Reward and begins the Return. As you can see from the above diagram, a majority of the journey happens in the Unknown. This is an area that isn’t visible to people externally. Typically, everyone will see the subsequent success and envy it. Those people won’t understand the trials and tribulations that were faced.

Enduring

Frequently, I find myself consoling entrepreneurs that are negotiating The Dip in one form or another. Media provides a highlight reel of the good times, giving a distorted perception of the struggles that are necessary the fruits of success can be tasted. The Dip is an opportunity to prove yourself.

A common set of questions that early-stage entrepreneurs may face are, “Why you? Why now?” Realistically, few people are just going to fund hope or some idealistic ambitions. There are far more people that are interested in finding people that have solved difficult problems and come through the other side.

For this reason, it’s important to be resilient but at the same time, listen to what the market is telling you (even your advisors might not have the right answers). In the early stages, keep the burn low. This will give you more time to make mistakes and journey through the valley of darkness.

“If you can keep going when the system is expecting you to stop, you will achieve extraor­dinary results.”

Build from a small base

This might feel frustrating in an age that worships consumption and growth at any cost. Why take the time to get the basics right when the opportunity is so simple for you to see? What if someone copies the idea and gets out ahead of you, taking the market from under you?

Momentum starts slowly. Jim Collins’ concept of starting the flywheel is apt. It takes a massive amount of effort at the beginning and the indications of success will likely be missing. However, when compounded over time, all of the small actions add up. Momentum can build up from a freakishly small base

“It is so easy to overlook how powerful it can be to take something small and hammer away at it, year after year, without stopping. Because it’s easy to overlook, we miss the key ingredients of what caused big things to get big.”

Conclusion

Don’t get angry or annoyed when faced with any of the problems that you face at the early stages of a business. Treat them as challenges, problems to be solved, just like any other. The times that frustrate you in the early days will probably be some of the most fruitful and enjoyable times in hindsight.

In the words of the SEALS:

“Fast is smooth, smooth is fast”

Get the basics right and prove that you can execute. The competitors that you’re benchmarking yourself against may not even be there when you come out the other side of The Dip.

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Editor’s note: e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

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Read more at endeavour ventures

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Customer acquisition: an afterthought?

In my interactions with several entrepreneurs and founders, their go-to marketing strategy is “social media” or “content marketing”. This is without regard to what the product is because customer acquisition seems to be an afterthought. Some throw out random words include Facebook, Google, SEO.

It’s worrying that many entrepreneurs building great products don’t know the basics of customer acquisition. As I read through the available material online, it’s remarkable that a simple step-by-step guide for early-stage customer acquisition doesn’t exist.

We end up with comprehensive acquisition strategies that mention every possible channel the founder can think of. But this doesn’t work.

With limited runway and time to gain traction, simply throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks simply won’t work.

Here are all the acquisition channels available to you

The Traction Book

Here‘s everything you need to read to get it done. It’s a great list, but holy cow! A list of blogs which link to other blogs which link to other blogs? You can’t read everything on that list! Even if you tried, you’d be paralysed with too much disjointed information that don’t piece together.

In the end, you won’t really know what to do and go back to throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the wall. But there is a better way.

A 3-step guide to customer acquisition

Every single business is different. That’s why it isn’t quite as straightforward as telling you what the best channel is. But it is as straightforward as following a process.

There is a simple process to figure out which channels are right for YOUR business.

Step 1: Intent vs Interest

The first question to ask yourself is :

Is my product an intent-based product or an interest-based product?”

It’s a pretty simple question to answer. Put into simpler terms, are users already looking for your product i.e., demonstrating intent to purchase?

If they are, they’re looking for it on Google. Imagine what search queries your users could be using, type them into the Google Keyword Planner and check out the suggestions and volumes that come back. If there are significant enough volumes, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the channel you should focus on.

Say your product is a platform for people to discover divorce lawyers online, an intent-based product if ever there was one. SEM is your channel — thousands of potential customers are searching for your solution. You simply need to capitalise on the existing demand and win at SEM.

Think about it. How many people are going to subscribe to a blog about getting a divorce? Or how many customers do you think you’re going to get by advertising on Instagram? Those channels simply will not work.

An intent-based product is something that your users don’t care about at all — until they need it. Other examples of intent-based products are flights, hotels, storage, cleaning services, home services, property agent services, loans, funeral services, and mortgages to name a few.

Once you validate that those users on search are the right customers for your business (i.e., they are converting at scale), you can then focus on the other pillar of search — Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) — and follow Brian Dean‘s methodology to rank on page 1 of Google.

Alternatively, your product could be an interest-based product. SEM will definitely not work for you – there’s no one looking for what you offer on Google. Unfortunately for you, things might be slightly less simple for you than those damned divorce lawyers.

Step 2: Who are your customers?

If your response to this is :

Everyone is a potential customer …

You’re wrong. You may have a great product — but if you don’t segment your market, you won’t be able to speak any of the different segments effectively.

Start by coming up with at least one ideal customer persona. There are two simple questions to ask yourself that would help you formulate the ideal customer:

1. Who would this product/service deliver value to?
2. Where do they hang out online?

Let’s say you launched an app in Singapore that connects parents of toddlers with other parents so the kids can make new friends.

Let’s go through the questions.

1. Who does the app deliver value to?

• Parents of toddlers aged 3 – 8.

2. Where do they hang out online?

• They likely spend time on social media
• They read parenting sites like TheAsianParent & SingaporeMotherhood

Using this information, we can now craft a first draft ideal customer profile based on this.

• Demographic (Gender): Male & Female
• Demographics (Age): 28 – 40 years old
• Demographic (Parents): Are parents of 3 – 8-year-olds
• Spends time on Facebook, Instagram(?), Parenting sites

Step 3: Reach them where they are

Using the information above, you already know where to reach them — Facebook.

Throw in the information above into the Facebook ad editor and it’ll let you reach your ideal customers in a couple of clicks.

35,000 young parents living in Singapore that Facebook know about. There’s your audience, and this is a potential acquisition channel.

But we found another channel when coming up with our ideal customer. Remember those parenting sites before? They sell display ads on their site. That means you can reach their readers whilst they’re reading this parenting stuff.

Let’s take a look at TheAsianParent. Three display ads easily accessible through Google’s Display Network on their homepage – getting you access to >300,000 Asian parents for an average of S$1.25 (around US$0.88) per click. Seems like a pretty great, the deal doesn’t it?

TheAsianParent stats. That’s a lot of Asian parents to get your app in front of, fast.

That’s only 1 site. Add the other parenting sites on the Google Display Network and you can easily reach hundreds of thousands of users using those sites every week.

Why all paid?

So I know I’ve been recommending paid channels only in this post. Are there free channels you can consider — totally. Those simply take a little time for you to figure out if they work. As I said in the beginning, time is of the essence and paid marketing gets you traffic onto your site today and helps you figure out what works so you can figure out next steps.

It’s not the end-all. It’s simply the first channel that helps you to learn more about your customers. It leads to developing other channels in the future.

• If leads from SEM are converting, you need to invest in SEO at some point.
• If leads from GDN are converting, a content marketing strategy is likely to have a place in your marketing mix so you own the content they read.
• If leads from Facebook ads are converting, try out a referral programme that gets your users to share your product on social media.

Tips & tricks

Pick one channel

As I was writing this article, I came across Neil Patel’s take on marketing channels for brand new businesses.

One thing that I definitely agree with him on is to pick one channel and invest your time and effort in it.

It’s easy to set up an Adwords campaign or Facebook campaign, watch it crash and burn $1,000 and declare that it’s a hack, call me a few names and declare it’s the wrong channel for you.

I did the same thing at my first marketing job. Tried a couple of channels — nothing worked. But that’s because I was (a) using the wrong channels, and (b) doing a bad job on the right channels.

If you’ve gone through the above steps 1-3, you know your customers are on the other side. You can be sure of it. So you won’t be in danger of using the wrong channels.

So we know you’ll be using the right channel. If you’re not seeing conversions, break it down and figure out why things may not be working.

• Do you have a low click-through rate?
• Why aren’t people clicking on your ad?
• Is your ad relevant?
• Is it attractive? Does it make people want to click?
• Does it show up for the right search terms?
• Go really, really deep into that channel. It won’t be a waste of time. I can guarantee you’ll learn something about your customers.

The only way you should abandon a channel is if you’ve got a definitive understanding of why it isn’t working.

For example:

SEM is not the right channel for us because we’re offering a premium intent-based product. After studying search term reports, we’ve identified that users searching on Google are looking for “discount” or “cheap” products. As our strategy is to price high, the users searching on Google are not our target audience.

Make sure you’ve got fundamentals in place

Everything I’ve mentioned above won’t work without some basics in place.

1. You need analytics set up on your site. Without it, you can’t track anything including conversions and there’s simply no way for you to know whether something is working or not.
2. Don’t send users to your home page. This should seem pretty self-explanatory, but it happens surprisingly often. When users click on an ad, they want to go to a relevant page, not navigate around your site to find whatever the ad was talking about. Don’t make it harder for them to convert.
3. Understand the channels before you start. Google and Facebook have complex workings. Yes, they’ve made it incredibly easy for you create an account and start running ads but you will lose money if you don’t understand how they work. Whilst it’s strongly recommended you work with someone who has some level of experience on these platforms, you can choose to go it alone. If you do, read up on Adwords or Facebook before you get started.

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So you’ve got a space at LaunchPad, a few hungry graduates you call ‘employees’, a Slack chat up and running, and you’re all set to be known as ‘The Genius Behind The Next Big StartUp’.

But I have some bad news. It might be the idea of a lifetime, but starting a tech start-up in Singapore may be something to regret in the long run. Despite its reputation as the region’s start-up hub, the conditions here are far from ideal, especially if for those who are just starting out.

Here’s why:

Expensive tech talent

Key to every tech start-up is strong tech talent, and chances are, you’re not going to find that in the Little Red Dot. Look around — tech startups are springing up every day, but graduates with software expertise are rare gems.

Plus, the ones you can find here are often expensive. The head of the Singapore International Chamber of Commerce recently recounted to The Straits Times difficulties faced by Silicon Valley technopreneurs in Singapore. They found a “shortage of good IT developers” with “unrealistic remuneration expectations”.

Don’t expect stellar quality either — he went on to say that these technopreneurs were “disappointed with the quality and quantity of output”. Ouch.

Expensive, well, everything else

IT geeks aren’t the only expensive realities in Singapore — everything else one could possibly need, from office rental to transport can quickly wipe out a young company’s funds.

Also Read: Baidu’s iQiyi said to have filed for US$1B IPO in the US

I’m not the only one saying it; property consultancy firm Knight Frank named Singapore the most expensive city in Southeast Asia for tech start-ups. Need I say more?

No promiscuity

Maybe it’s our conservative Asian values, but we somehow don’t seem to realise that promiscuity pays. Racking up experience at one firm and bringing it to another start-up isn’t stealing ideas, it’s spreading valuable insights and contacts throughout the start-up ecosystem! That brings the whole sector forward.

But remember, promiscuity is NOT job-hopping. That’s just not cool, man.

Also Read: A good chatbot is a USED chatbot

Last word: If you want the benefits of Singapore, but not its high costs, offshoring may be your best bet.

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Keith Tan is the Singaporean entrepreneur behind Start Now, a social enterprise that was acquired in 2015. His current venture, Wonderlabs, was co-founded with Ivan Chang. It operates 3 offshore software development centres in Indonesia, employing 125 software engineers in Yogyakarta and Bandung. Read more of his musings on entrepreneurship here.

Copyright: prestonia / 123RF Stock Photo

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I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg wakes up every morning, checks the news, and dies a little inside.

At the end of June, his company crossed 2 billion users. Since its IPO in 2012, Facebook stock has risen by nearly 5x and the company continues to see incredible growth in the world’s emerging market.

Facebook is the most powerful social media company in the world.

Except it’s not.

That company is Twitter. And, as I will argue, in one moment last night, I realised that this company with slow growth, boring product updates and no profits is the most powerful company in tech.

Come on man…

It is a ridiculous claim, but hear me out, because it starts with a change in opinion.

For about a year now, I have told anyone who would listen that I think Amazon is the most important company in tech, and that it wasn’t even close.

The only other company I would even consider was Google, just because of its sheer volume of information. But Amazon is going after the infrastructure of capitalist economies which I believe will fundamentally alter how we live in the next couple of decades.

I pointed to skyrocketing stock prices, dominant market share (both in e-commerce and cloud computing), and a sense that the company is just scraping the surface of its potential.

In terms of pure financials and money-making potential, I still think Amazon is the clear leader, but my argument was confused with power. It is an easy mistake to make, as that distinction is often blurred, but it is still a mistake.

By Wall Street metrics, Twitter is a dying company (just look at its stock price, dummy). It will never compete with Facebook, and Snapchat has zoomed past in terms of potential. Wall Street tells me that Twitter will go down as a historical footnote of the second startup revolution. Hell, even I wrote that Twitter was dying.

But I forgot that the vast majority of people are not investors, and the masses don’t particularly care about their opinions.

Also Read: Can overfunding kill a startup?

Last night, my inner-teenager rose from the ashes and reminded me that, not only is the finance sector’s view of impact warped, it is incorrect.

So, let’s set the stage.

Donald Trump Jr.

The problem Twitter has is a push-pull between its loyal users and attracting new customers. I would argue that the problem is the most extreme of the major social media platforms.

Twitter is hard, it requires effort and most new users get either frustrated, bored, or both. (Snapchat is also hard, but far less boring with only a few friends).

I recently told my friend with reinvigorated Twitter-interest that she needed to sit down and add 2,000 accounts to follow. Until that happens, Twitter’s usefulness will be opaque at best.

But this required-investment is also Twitter’s strength, and it is particularly why journalists love the platform.

What Twitter has that no other social media can replicate is a sense that it is alive. It sleeps, it gets angry, it is often sarcastic, funny and aggressive. It really never gets happy, but so be it.

A lot of journalists can keep their account open all day, and promptly ignore it. What they are waiting for is the moments when Twitter explodes (and no social media platform has figured out how to replicate a Twitter-explosion). It is a ‘lead’, and now the reporter can do the follow-up research.

For people who are really good at Twitter, they can “feel” the network.

For example, last night I was watching Netflix and had my account open. Usually, if Twitter is open and I don’t pay attention for an hour, it will notify me that I missed 50-60 updates, all on various topics. When I turned off my show, I checked Twitter and saw 600 updates.

What just happened!? There was a David Brooks column that angered some people, but this seemed out of proportion.

Within a minute I had figured it out.

Donald Trump Jr. had just released an email chain admitting he had met with a Russian lawyer to discuss dirt on Hilary Clinton during last year’s US election.

An important point. Trump Jr. did not tell a journalist, who then blasted out the story. He just just dropped the files in his feed and watched the explosion.

Here's my statement and the full email chain pic.twitter.com/x050r5n5LQ

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 11, 2017

Which led to this hilarious tweet from an independent journalist.

I…worked on this story for a year…and…he just…he tweeted it out.

— Jared Yates Sexton (@JYSexton) July 11, 2017

But it was one semi-sarcastic tweet from the New York Time’s tech reporter, Mike Isaac, that led to my epiphany.

twitter dot com: we may have product and revenue struggles, but we also played an instrumental role in taking down an administration

— ?_? (@MikeIsaac) July 11, 2017

Does Mike Isaac think the Trump administration is over? I doubt it. But he is making a point: this unprofitable company with slow growth has done more to alter modern history than Amazon, Facebook or Google.

If that sounds hyperbolic, here are some examples.

Prove it

So far, I have explained why Twitter is valuable to reporters, which does not support my thesis that it is the most powerful company in tech. So, let’s make that argument.

It boils down to a few things — the 140 character limit, the minimal algorithm and the dumb luck that one of the most powerful people in the world is practically addicted.

Let’s get the obvious example out of the way. Donald Trump would not be President of the United States without Twitter. A lot of factors led to his election, but Twitter is very much one of them.

Ironically, it also might be the vehicle of his demise.

Twitter is Trump’s direct connection to his base, and his go-to tool for pissing off the left. He has a Facebook account, and guess what? Nobody cares.

Trump could Facebook the way he uses Twitter, but he doesn’t; that right there gives Twitter a significant edge.

Now, let’s broaden out a bit but stay in the same general arena.

In 2011, the Russian online activist name Alexei Navalny went after a parliamentary election and in doing so motivated a protest-movement that nearly took down Russia’s President Vladamir Putin. His core form of organisation? Yup, Twitter.

In the process, Russian officials blamed then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton of supporting the opposition, which lead to bad blood that came full circle five years later.

US intelligence agencies all agree the Russians meddled in the US election with the purpose of ensuring that anybody besides Clinton became President. Many people point to the Navalny protests as the moment the antagonistic relationship began.

Finally, if he can navigate Russia’s power-system, Alexei Navalny may very well run for President in Russia next year.

Also Read: News Capsule: The 5 stories that rocked the Asian tech community today

Moving south to Iran, in 2009 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected President with 63 per cent of the vote despite reports of irregularities. It sparked a massive protest movement called the Green Movement that was highly dependent on Twitter for communication.

Despite its eventual failure, the following elections in 2013 and 2017 resulted in a strong mandate for the moderate leader Hassan Rouhani.

If anyone uses the term ‘Twitter Revolution’, they are speaking of the Green Movement.

The most important Twitter-enabled movement was, of course, the Arab Spring. Over six years after the people overthrew the Tunisian government, its hard to think of an event that has more dramatically impacted our world.

Much of the impact has been negative, but it’s the Arab Spring is the most significant event of the last 6 years.

If we look in our own back yard, Twitter was absolutely essential to the success of Occupy Hong Kong in 2014. Part of the reason the protest movement was able to survive for 72 days was because it would pick and choose its locations (and times) to ‘wake up’ and when to ‘sleep’.

To give an example, if rumours circulated that police activity would ramp up, the message would be blasted to the community and within hours the two main locations (which were often fairly empty) would suddenly be filled with tens of thousands of people.

Twitter was the critical means for this communication. WeChat was not as powerful as it is today, but even if it were, privacy/censorship concerns essentially rendered Chinese social media pointless.

Facebook’s algorithm makes this kind of communication nearly impossible. Followers would discover the police are coming to clear the camp eight hours after the protest was over.

Twitter is real-time, and therein lies its power. With the stroke of a thumb, Donald Trump can send thousands of newsrooms into a frenzy, a man in Russia can nearly take down an authoritarian regime and local students can create the most important before/after historical moment in an Asian financial hub.

Will Twitter ever compete with Facebook on the MBA business metrics? No, that seems extremely unlikely.

But that’s not the point.

Other tech companies impact people, Twitter impacts power.

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