Day: January 18, 2020

East Ventures announces that it has invested an undisclosed amount of pre-series A into motorcycle e-commerce Moladin. The round is joined by new investor CyberAgent Capital and several other angel investors.

Moladin said it will use the fresh fund to accelerate its existing products scaleup, build new features such as new car sales category and auto mortgage loans, as well as expansion to new cities.

Mario Tanamas, COO of Moladin explained, “Since its inception, Moladin continues to improve its products and innovate to answer the needs of all Indonesian motorists. This is in line with Moladin’s vision to become a one-stop automotive platform and an inseparable part of Indonesian motorists’ lifestyle.”

Moladin was founded in 2017, starting off by providing a platform for Indonesian consumers to purchase new motorbikes online. Their platform allows customers to transact and complete their purchase in one platform, getting information about motorcycles and bikes, provides an online directory for bikers to find the nearest servicing workshop, and communities to exchange reviews on spare parts and apparel.

In May 2019, the company starts to open its platform for used motorbikes. The featured, the company claims, immediately drew over 8,000 listings with a third of it quickly sold in less than seven months.

Also Read: Indonesia’s motorcycle buying platform Moladin raises US$1.2M to grow regionally

The company also started facilitating automotive mortgage loans in December 2019, and since then has disbursed about US$60,000 in loan amounts.

It’s been reported that by 2025, the Indonesian government plans to increase motorcycle production up to 10 million units a year, signaling how integral motorbike as a part of Indonesian people’s lives is.

“The industry itself is still run traditionally where people have to physically visit different dealerships just to get the specific type or model of the motorcycle they want. We are confident that Moladin can revolutionise the way people shop for motorcycles and becomes the number one all-in-one platform for all motorcycle-things related,” explained Nobuaki Kitagawa, Managing Director of CyberAgent Capital.

In July 2018, Moladin raised US$1.2 million in funding from East Ventures, Malaysia-based Berjaya Group, and Singapore-based Ethos Partners to expand its team and grow regionally.
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theAsianparent, Southeast Asian community platform for parenting, has welcomed the former General Manager of Mumbrella Asia, Dean Carroll, to lead its Events and Intellectual Property (IP) Division in the Southeast Asia region.

theAsianparent claimed that it has recorded nearly 30 million users monthly. The company’s vision is to help parents towards 100 million healthy pregnancies and families.

Carroll comes on board to diversify the business into experiential marketing and offline spaces for theAsianparent’s community of parents. Carroll was most recently the General Manager of media and marketing trade press site Mumbrella Asia, where he launched a series of events and led the team to win various awards regionally.

On his appointment as Head of Events & IP, Carroll said, “It was a no-brainer for me to join theAsianparent team. theAsianparent is already the market leader in the parenting category regionally, and the opportunity to scale up its experiential marketing offerings across the Southeast Asia region truly excites me.”

“With a baby on the way, I hope my insights from being a father will give me diverse perspectives for my work, while theAsianparent community concurrently helps me become a better father,” he added.

Also Read: theAsianparent.com raises “8-figure US dollars” in Series C to expand in Asia, Africa

theAsianparent has an existing footprint in the events marketplace, putting on activations for clients on a regular basis as well as its signature Baby Bashes and Chief Household Officer (CHO) Mums conferences. Going forward, it said to envision more business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) events on a larger scale, alongside a new awards series.

“While it is important for us to drive capitalisation efforts, it is equally important that we meet the needs of our strong and close-knit parenting community. With Dean, we hope to build greater offline presence with our community and provide them with what they need to have healthy pregnancies and families, while simultaneously giving our clients and partners the opportunity to reach greater audiences and forge stronger brand connections with parents and their families,” said Susana Tsui, CEO of Media at theAsianparent.

Last year, theAsianparent raised an eight-figure sum from investors such as Fosun International, JD.com, and Mirae Asset-Naver New Growth Fund, to expand to other continents such as Africa and Asia.

theAsianparent is the flagship brand of multinational tech and digital publishing company Tickled Media Pte. Ltd., which focusses on content and community platforms. Currently, theAsianparent is available in 11 languages in 12 countries.

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Founders with amazing ideas paired with amazing vision can make a real impact.

But getting that seed of an idea off the ground requires a tremendous amount of planning and working capital — capital to market your concept, pay legal fees, finance production, and manufacturing, fund developers, hire employees and get your product or solution out there in front of interested customers.

But where to begin?

You’ll first need to determine the business and capital structure of your startup, given this is something that will help in attracting interest from investors. To do so, establish key players in your management team. Define how they’ll be incentivised, i.e. with a portion of ownership in the company and/or cash compensation, and how business ownership will be allocated.

Then decide whether you’ll need to safeguard personal assets under an established corporation or legal business structure. Additional considerations might be needed if you plan to go public in the near future, such as the number of shareholders and stock option plans.

The next thing you’ll want to do is crunch numbers, asking yourself: “How will we carry our business forward?” To get where you need to go, you’ll need working capital. And to acquire working capital, some startups opt to bootstrap their organization by tapping into their savings or their network of friends and family.

Bootstrapping, though, doesn’t always offer the most realistic path to success nor does it deliver the level of backing most start-ups need to bring a new brand into profitability. It might also strain or even break some of your most important relationships. Those who are serious about success will still need serious investors as backing.

Also Read: 10 tips that will help launch your startup fast

To garner investor backing, you’ll need market research. This provides the groundwork and statistics to prove that an investment in your business is a good one and that it’s backed by an idea with the likelihood of becoming successful. Ask yourself if your idea is reputable and if or how those investors will be repaid.

Is your concept unique and, if so, what’s the actual market potential? Who will buy your product or solution, and how many customers could you ultimately reach? Also, demonstrate that you have founders with the expertise to support this objective. Outline your business and your business model, showing investors how profitable you could make them.

Finally, to become this profitable, how much funding would be required? This is perhaps one of the most challenging questions to answer because there are no real figures on which to base business projections. But as you develop them, be realistic about forecasts around cost and return.

As opposed to hoping you’ll woo investors by painting a rosy picture, try cutting sales projections in half and doubling expenses. Underestimating capital requirements just to attract funding could potentially put you in the red down the road. You’re always better off inviting more than you need to avoid going back to investors later.

Through planning and research take time, it can help you in building the strongest foundation for success going forward. Answer questions proactively and support plans with research and proof to demonstrate your startup’s ultimate potential for success.

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I started Vouch three years ago, leaving a comfortable government job to become an entrepreneur with the added pressures of a young family. Coming from an elite school and having done really well in my time in government, I was confident of success, even cocky.

Dreams of becoming the next Facebook, or selling the company for big money so I could retire before 35 drove me. Alas, leaping into the startup world was a humbling experience that quickly helped erase these delusions of grandeur.

Vouch’s first product was a platform that used big data to help retailers conduct targeted marketing online. Being a first-time founder, I made the mistake of building a product nobody wanted.

I had done surface-level market research, but little to no actual user studies on whether what I was building was something that retailers or consumers actually needed. After building out a substantial product with all the bells and whistles, every single retailer I approached turned me down.

All of a sudden I was a year in, and I had little to show for it.

My “build it and they will come” attitude had put us so far away from product-market fit that we didn’t even have a proper business to try to turn around.

Also Read: Creativity meets entrepreneurship: Why it is the next big thing Singapore needs to thrive

We were dangerously low on cash – overconfidence and hubris had led me to hire an over-sized team of developers, thinking that we would capture the market in three months. It was gut-wrenching when I had to let the team go, knowing that they were paying the price for my poor decisions.

Yet I was unwilling to simply give up – so many people had built and sold companies, with the pedigree I had to be able to do so too. I was still largely driven by pride and the promise of financial reward. I knew that I had to learn from these mistakes, and started searching for new opportunities.

The pivot

At that time, I noticed that there was a significant number of people selling consumer goods on Facebook in Southeast Asia, in particular, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. We had been experimenting with chat as a channel for reaching out to consumers as part of our first product, and it had proved promising.

So why not try using chat as a channel to sell?

After all, these sellers were already communicating with their buyers on Facebook Messenger. They were all annoyed at having to answer the same questions over and over again. They say there are no stupid questions, but they’re really are – most times, the answer to these questions were in their item descriptions, but potential buyers just didn’t bother to read.

The sellers also had trouble keeping track of inventory and sales; many were quite disorganised, or just didn’t have the time to properly log all sales.

Also Read: Bank BRI-Investree partnership earmarks US$143M to support creative entrepreneurs in Indonesia

Seeing an opportunity, I set to work, building an app that helped these sellers utilise chatbots to automatically answer commonly asked questions and manage inventory. I kept going back to these sellers to get feedback and eventually convinced some of them to deploy a minimum viable product (MVP) on their Facebook page.

They loved it and kept asking for more features, which I was only too happy to build, erroneously thinking that I had found product-market fit.

Eventually, when I tried charging for the product, only a small percentage of sellers converted into paying customers because their buyers were simply unaccustomed to be buying from a bot. I was unable to figure out how to solve this problem before running out of cash again. Second time around, I had built a product my customers wanted, but not what their customers wanted.

The second pivot

With the company bank account near zero, and my personal finances drained, it was a truly challenging period. This was also when we found out that my wife and I were expecting our third child.

Also Read: How the world’s most successful founders approach failure

Nevertheless, I decided to dig in and give it one more shot, taking the tech and platform that I’d built and hawking it to various companies. I was lucky to find some corporate customers who wanted to experiment with chatbots and started doing some projects for them, bringing in enough revenue to keep us afloat. I was also extremely fortunate to find angel investors who believed in me and who gave us some working capital.

Our real turning point came when the Singapore Tourism Board held its first Hotel Innovation Challenge, and we managed to find a really great partner in an international hotel chain to pilot using a chatbot to address service-related queries.

His team was really inspiring – they were willing to experiment and iterate with us, not minding that our product was not perfect. Thanks to the opportunity they gave us and hard work on both sides, we found that the ROI on this bot was exceptionally high – the hotel was deriving significant productivity savings, and guests that used the bot were getting accurate, instant answers to their questions, improving their experience. It was a win-win-win for all parties (guests, hotel, Vouch).

We were so convinced by this pilot that we decided to focus entirely on the hospitality industry. Thinking back, this particular experience also further moulded my motivations – I began to realise that we actually had a shot at changing how hotels operated and shape a much better guest experience.

Having lived frugally for the past year, I realised that money was no longer a strong motivator for me. Creating a valuable product for our users and changing the world (or hospitality industry), cliched as it sounds, was now my primary motivation.

Our next big challenge was to get even more guests to use our product. We were trying to change their usual behaviour of getting information from hotel staff, and changing people’s behaviour is always an uphill task.

Also Read: How entrepreneurs can use stress to their advantage

Improving utility

I had recently joined Startup Station Singapore, now Facebook Startup Accelerator, a six-month startup support program for digital-based companies in Southeast Asia. As well as learning core business principles and tools, our team was also introduced to product and sales experts from Facebook, who would become mentors and dear friends, and would help to guide Vouch’s growth.

We defined one of our goals as getting more than 50 per cent of guests to use our digital concierge. One of my mentors – a product development specialist – suggested the simplest of techniques: observing the guest journey, finding the pain points, and leveraging these pain points to drive users to our product.

To get users to change their behaviour, we either needed to give an incentive, or solve a particularly painful problem, and since we didn’t have the money to incentivise guests, we needed to find their problems.

Also Read: The importance of failure: 7 reasons why it makes us better entrepreneurs

It was a simple suggestion, but exactly what I needed to hear. We started to focus on the most important situational uses where a chatbot can add value during a hotel stay, and equally important, where it could not take the place of a human or other more suitable products. What did guests hate about their hotel stays enough to push them to try something new? In what cases would guests prefer to self-service? Armed with answers to questions like these, we were able to tailor our value to guests and the leverage strategic entry points to really drive usage and further increase the value of our product to both hotels and guests.

A little advice can go a long way 

Within six months of the advice from my mentors, Vouch increased its sales by more than five-fold, signing new hotel clients, delivering more services to hotel guests, and expanding into Indonesia. As a founder, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind, and ignore the real questions and issues that need to be addressed in the company.

Candidly, I admit that oftentimes the reason why these issues aren’t addressed immediately is because of fear – fear of rejection, or of being wrong. Speaking to my mentors regularly often helps me realise when I’m behaving irrationally or skirting issues, and these talks have gone a long way to helping us reach where we are now.

Today Vouch is working to enter more markets, widen our product scope, garner different types of clients, and ultimately create a marketplace for concierge services. We also have a clearly defined, simple but highly effective, approach that guides our product development and sales outreach.

Most importantly for me, the experiences that I’ve been through these past three years have shaped my motivations in a way that I feel is more mature and better for the company. This change in heart has also helped to attract people that share the same goal of creating game-changing products, and these people are the key reason why we are where we are today.

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Social networks are one of the most effective tools to promote and attract clients. It is not only big brands that achieve success in social media space. Even small companies and startups unlock their potential, forming a target audience in their niche. But success and profit come only to those who were able to properly organise work in social networks and form the demand for a product or service before the official launch of the business.

Despite the prospects and huge interest in social networks as a direct channel of communication with potential clients, not all owners of small and medium businesses have understood the intricacies of working with them. As a result – lack of clients, sales and complete disappointment in Social Media Marketing (SMM).

The main problem of many small companies and beginning businessmen is a haphazard approach to advancement and actions at random. To get a cool result, you need to structure the work in social networks or clearly form the requirements for the contractor. So how do entrepreneurs organise work with social media, so that even with a minimum budget to get good results?

It is important to understand that business in social networks should work for a single purpose – to bring their owner’s income. It is not possible to earn money and build a loyal audience in social media for free. Like any other advertising tool, social networks require investments, strategies and other resources. However, learning how to use their potential, as well as the possibility of targeted advertising, you will understand that it costs you money.

If your team has an intelligent designer, copywriter or SMM-specialist – great. If not, think about whether you can give your social media communities enough time on a daily basis to prepare and publish a couple of really cool posts, communicate with clients and fully promote themselves?

Also Read: What you need to know about social media tech in Southeast Asia

A quality SMM requires a lot of time, skills and money to be spent on:

– Writing a unique fascinating text, adapting the material to each social network, creating a content plan and schedule of publications;

– finding or processing images in graphic editors, taking photos, and working with video content;

– setting up targeted advertising, moderating ads, finding new ways to reduce the cost of the target action;

– communicating with subscribers, encouraging involvement and increasing their loyalty;

– reading fresh material on thematic resources, case studies and testing new tools.

Are you ready for this? If not, it is better to have a great SMM team that will back you up.

It is also necessary to calculate what budget you can lay down for targeted advertising campaigns. Keep in mind that social networks are not the same as they used to be. Today it is not enough simply to attract subscribers to the community in one way or another. You still need to make sure that they see your publications in their daily news feed.

For example, the Facebook algorithm works so that your posts will only see a small percentage of your subscribers. That is, no matter how great your material is, only 50-150 of your 1,000 subscribers will see it. And in order to get it to the feed to everyone, you need to promote each publication by paid methods.

Also Read: 6 effortless ways to grow your small business through social media

By the way, Instagram has also taken up the implementation of a similar algorithm of news distribution.

Determine your goals: what do you expect from social networks?

Do you want to attract as many customers as possible within 24 hours? Focus on advertising campaigns that guarantee fast results.

If your goal is long-term prospects and growth, then develop a community whose members will gradually become your clients for a long time. It may take a long time before you build trust in your target audience for a service or brand. However, the social media community is doing its best to meet these challenges.

Make a portrait of the customer. In detail!

Without a detailed portrait of your target audience, setting up your advertising campaign will be simply inefficient. So even if you contact a specialist in promotion in social networks, do not limit yourself to the typical “m / w, 20-60”. Think about where geographically your clients live, what kind of education and range of interests they have, how much they earn, what kind of car they drive, where they rest, what kind of entertainment they prefer to eat, etc. This is the case when there are no many details.

Decide on the channels

Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are the four most effective platforms for today. To determine which of them you are on the way, again, ask yourself, which one of them is the most used by your target audience, explore the activities of competitors, look at cases from your industry.

To put it simply, the picture is roughly the same:

• Facebook can be used to help those who target advanced youth, travellers, businessmen, top managers and any other intelligent audience with good-paying capacity. And if you work in B2B segment, Facebook is a must.
• TikTok suits you if you are interested in young and active clients who need Spanchbob cases for iPhone, Korean cosmetics, clothing from China, Converse sneakers on the super discount and handmade. However, as this social media website is fairly new, not everyone understands how to promote their product there. Here’s a great tutorial on how to kick start your account.
• Instagram is what you need if you love and can take many “delicious”, beautiful photos. Fashion, restaurants, travel – you just have to be present on this site!
• YouTube is for those who have something to say or show to the clients. You can use it, for example, for product reviews, expert opinions, or post-training materials on your topic. Having charisma and a good camera is necessary.

It is not worth putting your efforts into all the channels of communication with the customer. It is better to concentrate on a couple of sites that suit you best.

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