Day: February 29, 2020

You have built a tech startup to provide an outstanding solution, but your audience might not understand it in the beginning. 

Yeah, it happens. Sometimes, your target audience is not fully aware of how brilliant your idea is. And the task to explain the concept of your startup is on your shoulders. 

Whether you deal in AI chatbots, provide an e-commerce platform to farmers or run a P2P gadget rental service, you should leave no stone unturned to make people aware of it.

In this article, I am going to share six tips to help you build awareness for your tech startup.

Create tons of useful content

Creating content that benefits your prospects is the first step towards building awareness. Write articles, make videos, and design infographics regularly to make your prospects well-informed.

Use the tactics of content marketing artfully to get leads simultaneously. Tech startups such as Asana, HubSpot and many others built their base by focusing on content marketing.

When people see your content regularly, they will follow you and gradually understand how you and your startup can help them.

Also Read: The A, B, and C of startup branding

Address your target audience’s pain points through your content and educate them about the purpose of your startup. Show people what you do.

Explore opportunities for being interviewed

Appearing in various interviews can provide a significant boost to brand awareness of your startup.

By talking about the latest trends, bringing insights about your industry and showing yourself as a problem solver, you can create a buzz around your startup.

So, reach out to magazines, local radio channels or podcast hosts who invite guests for interviews. Many online publications too, interview budding startups. You can pitch in to check if they are looking for guests.

Keep an eye open for opportunities. And when you grab one, show your authority.

Start a podcast to help the community

Podcasts are popular, and they are perfect to explain your startup idea in an easy way. Pack your podcast with relevant information and content, which will help the community.

You can talk about what you do, answer the frequently asked questions of your target audience and provide actionable tips to get them through their struggles. 

Also Read: The podcast fever: why are listeners tuning in more frequently than ever?

The better you are in engaging your listeners, the higher are the chances of getting people interested in your startup.

Launch a podcast to offer relevant solutions. And your startup will soon be a household name among your audience. 

Choose the right platform to spread the word

It will not be fruitful if your target audience is hanging out on YouTube, and you are trying to entice them on Facebook. Knowing where your audience hangs out is the key to boosting brand awareness.

So, find if they are on Reddit, Twitter or looking out for solutions on a niche tech forum. And be there; listening to them and helping them with appropriate solutions.

Get into the right platform, enter the discussions and spread the word out about your startup.

Adopt a freemium model if you can

People love free products and a freemium model for your tech startup can create plenty of awareness. It will attract many eyeballs to your services.

Even if you cannot go for a freemium service model, you can offer free trials.

Getting helpful features for free will pull in many prospects to use your product. You can also offer incentives or unlock paid services to encourage people to refer to others.

So, adopt a freemium model if you can and promote your offers to your target audience.

Write guest posts

Contributing valuable guest articles to niche sites and renowned blogs in your industry can also help you in creating some awareness for your tech solution startup.

Through guest posting, you make a name for yourself and your newly founded startup.

Along with spreading awareness, guest writing on popular websites would portray you as a thought leader and boost your startup’s branding too.

You should create practical articles to share on the websites known among your target audience. 

Write guest posts that are unique and memorable, and which help you share the idea and the vision of your startup among the readers.

Final words

Popularising your tech startup and getting it the recognition it deserves is not an easy task. But being out in front of your audience, supporting them and marketing your startup alongside will bring the benefits for sure.

So, broadcast your expertise to those who matter and make them aware of your solutions. Suit up and work on your strategy.

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Image Credit: Ann Fossa on Unsplash

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Singaporean VC firm Reapra backs Thai edutech startup Quest

Quest, a Thailand-based coding education platform, has just received backing from a Singapore-based VC firm Reapra and angel investors, according to TechInAsia. The amount raised is a six-digit undisclosed seed amount.

The newly-added capital will be used to further enhance its platform to create a full-stack automated teaching curriculum which will be using blockchain.

The startup has already had a history of receiving US$80,000 in grants from Depa and TED funds for its app.

Quest is looking to raise more funds from Reapra, Depa, and another investor by Q4 2020.

Indian on-demand mobility startup Vogo raises US$20 million for regional expansion

Vogo, an on-demand mobility startup announced today that it has raised US$20 million from Matrix Partners India, Kalaari Capital and Stellaris Venture Partners according to Economic Times.

The fresh funds will be used by the startup to expand regionally and strengthen its IoT technology. The company which provides on-demand scooter rentals claims to have more than 2.5 million users across India.

Also Read: How agritech is transforming life of Indonesian farmers

“There is a large opportunity to disrupt the market with the right offering and a sustainable model. Our growth has been on the back of our unique strengths of having a dock-based model… using IoT tech,” said Anand Ayyadurai, CEO of Vogo.

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Image Credit:  Aaron Burden

 

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In 2008, Ryan Chin, a Singaporean, and Reggie Yam, who hails from Hong Kong, founded a B2B cybersecurity company Nexusguard in Taiwan.

In 2017, with so many cloud incidents, such as website outages due to cloud failure, including the AWS outage, Chin saw a huge opportunity and decided to start a new venture to tackle this.

Chin immediately stepped down as Nexusguard CEO and invited Yam to start a venture, with the funding support from an angel investor.

An AI solution

Headquartered in Taipei, mlytics is an online platform/marketplace, on which businesses can subscribe to multiple top-tier CDNs or content delivery networks (a solution to boost website performance for their website). mlytics’s Machine Learning-trained Artificial Intelligent solution will monitor the internet and automatically route the website traffic to the best-performing CDN. This can boost the performance of a website and avoid outages.

“It would be hard to overstate the importance of avoiding downtime. Every minute your website is inaccessible represents both a financial and customer relations hit. The cumulative effect can lead to catastrophic consequences for e-commerce sites, in particular,” says Chin, CEO at mlytics. “We are trying to address this using our SaaS product.”

Also Read: 6 tried-and-tested branding tips for your startup

In other words, mlytics enables enterprises to buy and install CDN for their website, as opposed to signing up for an account individually via a different portal. All the user has to do is add his or her website to the platform. Similar to Google Tag Manager, once an initial installation is done, they can install any CDNs on their website without having to go through the technical hassle again.

“Traditionally, if you are using only one CDN and if it is underperforming or malfunctioning, your website will stop working,” Chin explains. “But with multi CDNs, along with our AI Load Balancing feature, the system can auto-detect such situation and redirect all the traffic to another CDN.”

For example, if a news portal is using Cloudflare, and suddenly Cloudflare is down without notice, the whole site goes down. Now, if the site has Cloudflare, CloudFront, and Alibaba Cloud CDNs installed, even if Cloudflare is down, the mlytics system can redirect all the traffic to CloudFront or Alibaba Cloud depending on which performs the best.

If simplified further using an analogy, let’s say you’re an e-commerce company located in the US, with customers from around the world. If a US customer places an order, the shipping won’t take too long since it’s domestic. Now, if a customer from Japan places an order, shipping will take longer since you’re shipping to Japan.

To overcome this, hiring a shipping company and using its shipping centre to preload products in Asia can vastly decrease the time of shipping.

“This is how CDN works. You have CDN PoPs (point of presence) at some of the essential locations acting as a shipping centre to deliver the website at a faster speed,” he explained.

Now, let’s say the company you hired for shipping isn’t working for the day without notice, and if a second shipping company isn’t planned, it will delay the whole shipping schedule.

“This is what happens when you use just one CDN and it fails without proper failover planning. If you have a second shipping company (CDN) ready, you can switch the operation over to assure uninterrupted operations. mlytics is this company that helps you hire multiple shipping companies (CDN) and helps you decide which shipping company to use depending on where your customer is located in,” Chin elucidated.

The firm works with multiple top-tier CDN companies, including Alibaba Cloud, Akamai, CDNetworks, Cloudflare, CloudFront (AWS), Imperva, and TencendCloud.

Expanding to Europe

Chin claims mlytics has been “doing pretty well” lately in the Southeast Asia region, and it now aims to expand to Europe in 2020. Its potential customers are medium-sized businesses in the e-commerce, multi-media (video, streaming, news), finance, and gaming.

The company has already bagged some clients — Aurora, an Asian IT solution company; DaAi, an Asian Buddhist TV station company; CloudMile, a Taiwanese firm focusing on AI solution.

The SaaS model means clients can subscribe to the service by paying a monthly fee, and cancel whenever they like without contract and restrictions. The firm also has an enterprise-grade solution, which is customised depending on the customer’s requirements.

mlytics has a staff strength of 50 people, mostly located in Taipei.

Also Read: Ready to spread your wings? 4 ways to tell your startup should

The entrepreneur-duo has extensive experience in building a company and had clear innovative visions, goals, and execution plans on how to address the existing CDN market pain point and weaknesses. As such, they planned to need very minimum capital to get the business off the ground, and manage to get mlytics off the ground (ROI and profitable) from a single angel investor.

Chin started his career as a network engineer. He had worked in some of the biggest network/telecom companies such as Siemens and AT&T. Yam started his career as an IT and network security specialist in Hong Kong and worked his way up to CIO in Nexusguard in seven years.

Lack of trust a challenge

In Chin’s opinion, B2B companies have been constrained by a lack of innovative solutions for the modern world internet delivery requirement. CDNs came into existence in the late 1990s as a means for alleviating the performance bottlenecks of the internet, and nothing much has changed since then.

“The challenge is how to disrupt an industry that has been the same for two decades, and convince businesses to make the shift,” he said. “We’re overcoming it with the right product, but we’re missing that extra punch due to the lack of credibility, social proof, and trust, which is extremely important for a SaaS business model especially in Europe and the US.”

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Image Credit: mlytics

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Isla Lipana & Co./PwC Philippines (PwC) has conducted its second collaboration with QBO, the country’s first public-private initiative for startups, and IdeaSpace, a non-profit that supports early-stage technology entrepreneurship, resulting in the 2020 Philippine Startup Survey.

According to the survey, which covers questions directed to startup founders and investors about their current status as well as their plans, 77 per cent of the founders say that capital requirements are their biggest challenge. Regulatory and business concerns also exist.

Seventy-three per cent of the investors plan to invest up to US$5 million in the Philippines’s startups in the next three years.

The survey further reveals that the country’s startup ecosystem has changed over the last three years. However, challenges are to be expected, despite recent developments.

Diane Eustaquio, IdeaSpace Executive Director, shared: “The 2020 Startup Survey brings to fore the issues we need to address to strengthen and bring the ecosystem towards maturity. I’m glad to know that fewer founders mention that funding is an issue, it shows they are understanding how to address constraints and lessen risks.”

PwC Philippines’s Chairman and Senior Partner, Atty. Alexander Cabrera, is optimistic as the number of growing startups is on the rise. “This year, it is comforting that the majority of the founders are scaling up with them (founders) want to do business, and stay in business.”

Also Read: Why disruption is no longer a buzzword in the Philippines

The survey also features the participation of the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) members, a 70-year-old management organisation whose over 1,000 members represent a cross-section of CEOs, COOs and other top management practitioners from the largest local and multinational companies operating in the Philippines. It encourages investors to support the ideas of the startups and help deepen the bench for future business leaders.

“While we need more investors to help fund our startups, we also need the private sector to help by becoming the customers of our startups. We all need to work together to build sustainable businesses that will provide opportunities for the Filipinos,” Cabrera said.

Changes and improvements in the scene

The survey notes that the Philippines’s startup ecosystem has changed over the last three years. The 2019 signing of the implementing rules and regulations for the Innovative Startup Act or Republic Act 11337 as well as the Revised Corporation Code allowing the incorporation of one person corporations show the government’s support in promoting entrepreneurship.

The recent investments from global investors poured into local startups from the likes of KKR, Tencent, and Ant Financial prove that the Philippines has a promising and stronger startup ecosystem.

According to the founders, the majority of them are scaling up. Majority of the founders are also very confident about the prospects for revenue growth, and almost all are planning to enter new territories in the succeeding years.

Similarly, startup investors are confident about the growth prospects of the Filipino startups. According to investors, fintech, e-commerce, and medical and healthcare technology are the top sectors that will be successful.

The year of scaling up

The investors also said that their top investment considerations for startups are the founding members, business model, and scalability.

This year, the majority of the startups are scaling up with the improved products and businesses, and only 5 per cent are in the ideating stage compared to when the Philippine Startup Survey first launched in 2017.

Back in 2017, regulatory requirements and the general economic/business situation were among the founders’ top challenges. This year, founders are more concerned with market readiness and talent acquisition as they wish to create sustainable businesses.

Also Read: Fintech in the Philippines: opportunities, challenges and why global participation is critical

The startups’ focus on business is also evident in the needed skills that the founders have identified. In 2017, the founders ranked software development as the top skill of its founding members. This year, however, entrepreneurship ranked first followed by project management and sales.

Fundraising climate

While fundraising is among the key priorities of the founders, 48 per cent admit to having walked away from a potential partnership or investment or terminated an existing partnership.

When asked why the founders identified not sharing the same vision as the top reason, the mismatch of personalities with the management team, weak management team, and lack of traction as major reasons for walking away. Surprisingly, having a low valuation only ranked fifth.

In 2019, there were over 20 disclosed deals, which include the US$72 million investment of gojek in Coins.ph as well as the US$175 million investment of KKR and Tencent in Voyager Innovations.

According to the investors who participated in this survey, 65 per cent have invested in Filipino startups, with a significant number saying they’ve invested between US$1 million and US$5 million.

What’s next

While startup dealmaking in the Philippines still lags behind the other Southeast Asian countries, a growing number of domestic and foreign investors are showing interest in deploying capital to the country. The Philippines’s young population, rising middle class, higher smartphone penetration, and ongoing reforms are among the factors that help drive the investors to the local startup ecosystem.

What’s noteworthy this time is more local corporations have started to formally establish their own venture capital vehicles. In 2019, top conglomerates such as Ayala Corporation, JG Summit, and Aboitiz Equity Ventures launched their corporate VC arms with the vision of investing in local and foreign startups.

Also Read: Are Philippines’s traditional conglomerates finally embracing corporate investing?

The investors agree that local startups should enter new markets in the next five years. While the founders have identified other areas in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia as priority markets, the investors, however, think that startups should prioritise Vietnam, Indonesia, and Singapore.

When asked about innovation, the investors identified technology, products and services, and business model as the top areas that the startups should focus on. With the growing number of startups in the Philippines and abroad, the investors are looking for target investees with distinct and competitive products and solutions.
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Picture Credit: 2020 Philippine Startup Survey

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Business

Grab launches accelerator programme Grab Ventures Ignite in Vietnam

Grab announced that it has officially launched an accelerator programme, Grab Ventures Ignite, for early-stage startups in Vietnam as part of the ‘Grab for Good’ development roadmap.

“Grab Ventures Ignite will nurture and support promising Vietnamese startups in their journey to become national champions in Vietnam’s tech startup ecosystem, in line with the government’s national strategy to create 10 technology unicorns by 2030,” Grab said in a statement, as reported in DealStreetAsia.

The six-month programme has welcomed a partnership with Vietnam’s National Innovation Center, an entity under the local investment ministry, to execute the initiative together. GVI also collaborated with Gobi Partners, Vietnam-based Toong Coworking Space, law firm YKVN, and Amazon Web Services to provide support to startups.

According to Grab, participating startups will benefit from a curated immersion programme hosted in Singapore by Infocomm Media Development Authority and cross-border sharing with the startups in the Lion City. Up to five selected winners will be offered up to US$150,000 in investments and in-kind benefits.

The application process is open until April 10, 2020. The target sectors are not limited, but GVI said it welcomes startups focussing on mobility, food, payments, financial services, logistics, e-commerce, or artificial intelligence.

LINE-owned digital currency exchange BITFRONT expands to the US

As part of the continuing expansion of the LINE token economy, LINE Corporation has launched BITFRONT, a global digital currency exchange based in the US. Operated by LVC USA, a subsidiary of LVC Corporation, BITFRONT provides a fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-crypto market for the US dollar.

Also Read: Morning News Roundup: Singapore’s VC firm Reapra backs Thai edutech startup Quest

BITFRONT will become the main digital currency exchange platform for LINE’s token economy. Previously, LINE operated the global digital asset exchange BITBOX, a crypto-to-crypto exchange based in Singapore.

However, LINE has decided to expand its services and become a full-fledged exchange that includes fiat-to-crypto markets, aiming to spur the usage of blockchain by lowering the barriers to cryptocurrency adoption.

By linking other exchanges and order books, BITFRONT provides deep liquidity and users will be able to trade in U.S. dollars by linking their bank account. BITFRONT supports five major cryptocurrencies, including LINE’s digital currency LINK, Bitcoin, Etherium, Bitcoin Cash and Tether, in 15 languages.

Finance

Indonesia’s Telkom seeks to raise up to US$500M to invest in startups

Indonesia government-controlled telco, Telkom, is raising up to US$500 million in funds for startup investments in line with the company’s plan to find a new source of growth, Reuters has reported.

The fundraising is the second fund the company has raised with a goal to invest in startups. Budi Gunadi Sadikin, the deputy minister of state-owned enterprises, said the fund is set to launch soon and is targeted to be around US$300 million to US$500 million in size.

“This is important because Telkom is an industry with very high capital expenditure with declining EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) and flattening revenue,” Sadikin said. “We have to move on from only digital infrastructure to digital platform and digital sources.”

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Picture Credit: Grab

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