The Founder-on-Founder Podcast series is a weekly podcast hosted by Olivier Raussin, managing partner at FEBE Ventures, an early-stage Venture Capital fund supporting outstanding entrepreneurs in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. The podcast features tech entrepreneurs with a focus on Southeast Asia’s innovation business and tech landscape.

The podcast highlights stories from outstanding entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia on their journey, revealing previously unknown insights and offers advice on running a tech company.

Featured in this episode is Vidush Mahansaria, a technology entrepreneur with several years of experience in the tech and finance industries across the US, Europe and Asia.

 

“I started working for Grab under Ming, the president of Grab. It was an amazing experience, getting to see the launch of food delivery, mobile payments, the acquisition of Uber and more. After that experience, I decided I needed to spend more time with other best-in-class companies founders around the world to broaden my perspectives.

So I hopped over to the other side and joined ICONIQ Growth, which is a large tech investment fund in San Francisco. After meeting a wide variety of entrepreneurs and understanding their companies, I decided a year ago that it was time for me to make my own leap of faith. Thus, I became a founder and started Vara with one of my best friends from college.”

Also Read: War of warungs: Decoding the race to win the warung game in Indonesia

Vara’s product, Bukugaji, is revolutionising the labour market in Indonesia. The truth is that the vast majority of companies globally employ less than 20 staff. In fact, most of these companies manage their employees and payroll completely manually.

Bukugaji is a powerful and lightweight staff management platform that caters to both small companies as well as their staff. It has also recently been selected as one of the four startups in Southeast Asia to be in the Lightspeed Extreme Entrepreneurs 2021 cohort.

Starting up during the pandemic

After growing up in Thailand and studying and working across the US, Europe and Asia, Vid decided to start up back in his home region of Southeast Asia. The unfortunate circumstance and timing of the pandemic resulted in a 12,000-mile gap between him and his co-founder.

And that hasn’t been the only challenge: “Building for a language that we don’t speak, in a culture that we’re not familiar with, in a geography that we’ve never lived in is hard enough, anyway. Doing that from a distance while not being in the same room has been an undeniably challenging experience. At the same time, however, it’s led to incredible personal discoveries around creating and scaling a product-led company by leveraging global best-in-class talent.”

Discovering an exciting market opportunity

As any former investor would, Mahansaria entered the Indonesian market with “a thesis in mind, a product that we wanted to build, and a problem we wanted to solve.” This initial foray into the startup world was met with challenges when his initial ideas fell flat.

This led to an “entire process of pivoting, trying, building and experimenting with deliberate iteration.” Over time, by “listening to your users and what the market wants” compounded to an exciting market opportunity “for whom we can truly innovate and build around.”

Growth is also important, he said. “It’s important to make sure that the baseline of what you’re building is strong, because you don’t want to be filling up a leaky bucket. As a result, focusing purely on growth is a dangerous game because at some point that growth needs to be sustained. If you’re not retaining your users, for whatever reasons, you will not be able to compound your growth efficiently.”

Mahansaria also goes on to share his experience with fundraising (Vara is backed by Sequoia), team-building, and other interesting insights. “Dive deep with core market insights and establish a strong perspective of what the world should look like. The stronger your determination  in the future you want to create, the more likely it is that your narrative with investors will reflect that passion and vision.”

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. This season we are seeking op-eds, analysis and articles on food tech and sustainability. Share your opinion and earn a byline by submitting a post.

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In today’s digital world, one of the biggest goals for startups is being recognised and trusted by their core audience through the art of brand awareness. Whether engaging with influencers, partnerships or simply posting content, social media is a powerful tool for building trust. 

Businesses can use social media to maintain and strengthen existing customer relationships, while also having the opportunity to generate new leads. Forty-nine per cent of our global population uses some form of social media, and that means a big portion of their prospective buying audience is on social media. 

In fact, 54 per cent of consumers say they use social media to find new products or brands. With social media acting as a powerful channel to connect with customers, it’s crucial that business leaders understand how to unlock their full potential to drive success.

However, knowing where to begin can be a daunting task, particularly if you’re a startup with a small marketing team or a sole trader wearing several operational hats. Building public awareness and trust in an oversaturated social media marketplace is no easy feat.

However, there are some simple social media best practices that startups can adhere to, allowing them to maximise their efforts, campaigns and budgets. Here, we explore the social media best practice that startups of all types can use as a guide to drive customer engagement and brand recognition. 

Analyse the audience

The first social media best practice tip? Learn everything you can about your audience. If you don’t know who your audience is, you can’t give them what they want. Whether you’re targeting baby boomers, millennials, sports fans, new parents and every intersection in between, it’s best to drill down on audience demographics to increase engagement. 

You may have already built out your buyer personas, so you can use that as a foundation for your social media strategy. Otherwise, you can use native social media analytics to understand your audience demographic. Social media analytics can help you to gain a deeper insight into your audience demographic, including who they are, where they’re located and how engaged they are. 

Also Read: Circus Social secures US$1M to help businesses make decisions from real-time social media conversations

Demographics can tell you a lot more about your customers. You can gain an even deeper understanding of who they are through social listening. This social practice will help you to find out what your customers are talking about, how they’re talking about your brand and products — and what kind of topics they care about. 

The average person spends two hours and 25 minutes on social media per day, so social listening allows you to harvest key insights to fuel different aspects of your social media strategy, from the way you approach customer service to publishing. 

Build a customer-first social media strategy

Creating meaningful connections with consumers on social media can be a difficult task. We’re often told of the importance of seeking out your audience on a diverse range of channels and creating unique content that speaks to consumers in the cluttered landscape. One of the best ways to do this is by building a customer-first social media strategy. This means designing a strategy that’s centred around your customers and is chiefly focused on fulfilling their needs and meeting — if not surpassing — their expectations.

For example, rather than posting content whenever you feel like it, post content that appeals to your customers at an optimised time to ensure maximum reach. This is bound to attract and engage consumers more effectively, in turn boosting your social media performance and customer relationships. 

Drawing on one of Metigy’s customers as an example, Share with Oscar is an on-demand platform for booking a private parking space. Instead of predictable posts relating to parking pain, Share with Oscar ties its content to cultural moments, such as a visit from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle; the platform posted a tongue-in-cheek article about the Royals not being able to find parking at Bondi Beach.

Also Read: Watch out, these startup social media marketing strategies are bullshit

The Share with Oscar team then used Metigy’s AI tool to help identify the best time of day to post the content in order to deliver optimal results — and the post generated more than 13,000 views with a spend of just AU$10. Showcasing the true power of well-timed content.

The majority of marketers believe that their efforts through social media marketing have been ‘somewhat effective’ or ‘very effective’ for their businesses, so it’s clear that startups building a customer-first social media strategy will ride the wave of successful social media marketing. 

Personalise the experience

It’s not enough to know what your customers are saying, but you also have to respond appropriately at the right time to strengthen the relationship. In most cases, this means responding as quickly as possible to let the customer know you’ve heard them and that you’re working to find a suitable solution or response.

Social media has become a new interface for customer service. Nearly six in 10 consumers would unfollow brands on social media because of poor customer service, while 29 per cent would unfollow them if they ignore posts or mentions from people. 

Regardless of the channel, social media connects people with their family and friends. So, even when consumers interact with brands over social media, they want to feel comfortable as if they were talking to a friend. This is exactly why you should always try to keep your responses and conversations as personalised as possible. 

In addition to using their first name, you should apply a friendly tone that would make consumers feel comfortable and welcome. If you have multiple teams or employees monitoring your social media accounts, it’s best practice to create a style and tone guide, to ensure consistency across communications. The overarching goal is to make the interaction as humanised as possible, mirroring a face-to-face interaction.

Tap into trust and transparency 

Trust is at the heart of every strong relationship, especially the relationship between brand and customer. Transparency is critical to this. After engagement, transparency is the second most important factor that makes a brand best in class on social media. 

So, the lesson to startups is that if you make any mistakes, own up to them. If you’re making changes or updates to your business, let your customers know. If there are any problems with your product or service, keep your customers notified and let them know that you’re working on resolving them.

People trust other people, so a customer-first social media strategy can also mean putting a human face to your brand to win people’s trust. Make sure you regularly publish content that showcases your employees or C-suite executives to remind your customers about the humans behind the business.

Also Read: Achieve your social media marketing goals with these 4 strategies

This could mean showing what’s going behind the scenes of your brand, how your employees work or showcasing snapshots of company events.

Today, social media has become an absolute must for startups of all shapes and sizes. However, without following social media best practice it can be difficult to drive strong results. It’s possible to build an engaging and successful social strategy if you put social engagement at the centre.

The main focus should be applying a customer-first approach and working towards better understanding your target audience and discovering what makes them tick. 

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. This season we are seeking op-eds, analysis and articles on food tech and sustainability. Share your opinion and earn a byline by submitting a post.

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community or like the e27 Facebook page

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Sayurbox, a farm-to-table e-commerce company in Indonesia, has raised an undisclosed amount of Series B investment in a round co-led by public-listed automotive major Astra Digital International and Syngenta Group Ventures.

Global Brain Corporation, Ondine Capital (based in China and Southeast Asia), investment company Strategic Year, and other undisclosed investors also participated.

The capital will be used to support Sayurbox’s ongoing development of supply chain infrastructure, accelerate its growth in its existing markets, and expand into newer regions of Indonesia.

Last week, there was a news report (in Bahasa) that Astra had invested US$5 million in Sayurbox earlier this year.

Founded in 2017 by ex- gojek executive Rama Notowidigdo and Amanda Susanti, Sayurbox is an online grocery marketplace providing thousands of affordable and high-quality vegetables, fruits, meats, seafood, and grocery items sourced directly from local farmers, producers, and suppliers.

The company not only promises better prices for farmers and consumers but also reduces the agricultural waste caused by supply chain complexity.

As of now, Sayurbox operates in Greater Jakarta, Surabaya, and Bali.

Also Read: Indonesian e-grocery startup HappyFresh raises US$20M Series C

“This partnership is an important step to unlocking the potential that digital innovation brings to agriculture in Asia, and complements Syngenta’s commercial strategy to work with digital startups that connect farmers with multi-stakeholders such as traders, buyers, suppliers, and consumers,” said Djony Bunarto Tjondro, Director of Astra.

“We see huge value in the transformation and digitalisation of Indonesia’s food supply chain. With leading technology, superior quality product and stable service, Sayurbox sets in the best position to capture it,” added Ondine Capital founding partner Randolph Hsu.

“We are excited with the demand we are seeing for Sayurbox in Java island, as well as other regions in Indonesia. With like-minded investors who believe in our vision, we will seize this huge opportunity to continue to bring goodness to all; from the homes of local farmers and producers directly to more Indonesian households, providing freshness in one box and convenience at your fingertips,” Sayurbox co-founder, Amanda Susanti, added.

Also Read: Sources: Tokopedia is involved in a funding round for Sayurbox

As per the data obtained by Tracxn, the Indonesia online grocery sector is heavily crowded with 69 startups competing with each other.

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Image Credit: Sayurbox

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Over the past quarter, the e27 Memberships team has been working tirelessly to bring onboard a prestigious list of Experts onto the e27 platform. These Experts come from varying areas of expertise from different industries and verticals.

The goal of the e27 Experts Program is to create a platform for mentors and coaches to share knowledge with their fellow peers and members within our e27 ecosystem through private 1:1 sessions.

We hope to equip every aspiring individual with relevant mentorship, useful feedback and open up more partnership opportunities for everyone to up-skill themselves and attain their individual goals.

Check out these 5 verified Experts that you can connect with for advice, mentorship, and other partnership opportunities:

Geoffrey Handley
General Partner at Haitao Capital
Advisory Boards | Principals & People | Strategic Architecture

Geoffrey is the General Partner of early-stage, cross border investor, Haitao Capital. He is also an EiR at SOSV’s Chinaccelerator (#2 angel & seed-stage investor globally – Crunchbase) and a 5x founder with multiple exits including 2x IPO & acquisitions.

Widely known as an early mobile visionary and published thought leader, he was the Global Board Director & Secretary of Mobile Marketing Association & Founding Director at AsiaPac Chapter. Some of his achievements include being listed under Entrepreneur.com’s Brightest 10 List, Gartner’s Mobile “Ones to Watch”, and W3C Mobile’s Most Influential.

Sign up here and Connect with him

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Jan Wong
Founder & CEO at OpenMinds
Branding | Bootstrapping | Digital Marketing

Jan Wong is an entrepreneur, youth advocate, and founder of OpenMinds; an 8 year old bootstrapped, data-driven martech company based in KL, Singapore and Hong Kong. Starting at the age of 17, he has ventured into eight businesses, a part-time lecturer at the Asia Pacific University (APIIT / APU), a certified e-commerce consultant, published an academic journal during his Master’s degree, sits on the Academic Advisory Board of KDU, Sunway College and Sunway University, a regional keynote speaker in events and conferences, a mentor for multiple startup communities including Techstars Global and NEXT50 Singapore, a regular contributor on BFM radio, a 2-time TEDx speaker, recognised as one of the top 10 new generation businessmen to watch in 2020, listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2017 list and recently published his first book on Building Your Digital Net Worth.

Sign up here and Connect with him

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Rachel Wong
Counsel at Eugene Thuraisingam LLP I CEO of Founders Doc
Legal Advice for Startups I Legal Services I Consultancy Services I Legal Templates

Rachel graduated from King’s College, London (LL.B.) in 2013 with First Class Hons. Since then, she has worked as a corporate M&A lawyer in leading international law firms such as White & Case LLP, Hogan Lovells Lee & Lee and Allen & Gledhill LLP in Singapore and London. She is also a committee member of The Law Society of Singapore (Corporate Committee and the CPD Committee).

Whilst helping one of the founders in their series fundraising process in Singapore, she was impressed by how ‘founder-friendly’ certain venture capital funds and law firms in Silicon Valley were – in particular, Founders Fund. She also felt that the legal community in Singapore could do better in providing more robust legal support for the growing startup community in South-east Asia, whilst taking into account the cultural nuances and trends in this region. With this in mind, Founders Doc was born in 2021.

Founders Doc collaborates with Eugene Thuraisingam LLP, where she spearheads the Corporate Practice, to ensure that founders in South-east Asia get the full support that they need. Founders Doc is, in essence, an in-house legal service provider; whilst the law firm arm serves to support companies in more complex transactions.

Sign up here and Connect with her

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Frank Lee
Managing Director at Tech JDI
Investment | Scaling Tech Teams | Vietnam Markets

Frank is the Partner at TNF Ventures and Founder at Tech JDI.

In TNF Ventures, he manages all aspects of company operations, and portfolio management.
Till date, TNF Ventures has a total of 20 portfolio companies.

On the other hand, Tech JDI is a venture studio building startups and providing venture support services to help fast scaling Series A/B/C tech companies grow their 2nd tech teams in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He manages numerous teams, and has operations in 3 offices between Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang.

Sign up here and Connect with him

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Tamara Singh
Head of Asia Pacific, OMFIF

Following a decade in the United Kingdom and two years in Hong Kong, Tamara returned to Singapore in 2012. A multi-disciplinary Business Manager, her experience spans energy, financial services and fund management, covering trading floors in London, New York, as well as across Asia. Tamara recently departed GIC Pte Ltd, Singapore’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, to embark on a portfolio career as the Head of Asia Pacific for the Official Monetary & Financial Institutions Forum, whilst also fulfilling demanding commitments as a dedicated mother, Coach and Consultant. Tamara is a member of the UNDP’s Private Sector Advisory Group and UNESCAP’s Infrastructure Financing and Public-Private Partnership Network of Asia and the Pacific. She also works with industry groups to drive the adoption of solutions to reduce common challenges within the finance ecosystem and is currently experimenting with the roll-out of a purpose-led virtual community for anyone interested in gender inclusion.

Tamara has degrees in Law and in Applied Accounting, and attained an Executive Masters in Business Administration from INSEAD whilst pregnant with her second child, which she cites as being “efficient but not necessarily recommended”. Tamara is involved with organisations and causes that are focused on equality and education, including sitting on the Board of Conjunct Consulting, South East Asia’s first social change consultancy. She coaches clients including accelerators, social enterprises/not-for-profits and corporate decision-makers.

Sign up here and Connect with her

Happy connecting,
e27 Memberships Team

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“After working at and founding various small and large companies, my co-founder and I realised that the biggest challenge every company faced was the same – their people.”

That was Jay Huang’s lightbulb moment which set him on the quest to solve the age-old problem of hiring for companies.

Though companies have evolved and embraced new technologies, the process of hiring has lagged behind. A resource-intensive task, hiring has long been a drawn-out process where one’s gut feeling was usually the deciding factor in whether a candidate was selected.

Companies argued it was difficult to make data-driven decisions when qualitative hiring metrics such as one’s job fit and personality traits cannot be easily quantified.

Huang had other thoughts. Together with his co-founder Peter Yoong, the duo, with the help of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, attempted to bridge the gap between hiring and data through Pulsifi.

“Before Pulsifi, HR and managers had to juggle between multiple disjointed sources of data on each person, such as their resume, personality and psychometric assessments, video interviews, and performance data to make decisions on hiring,” the CEO explains.

Also Read: How foodpanda CTO approaches hiring and retaining the best tech talent

The Singapore-based company solves this with its People Data Platform. By unifying multiple hard and soft skills data on each individual, it is able to generate a personalised report on the individual’s fit for the company.

The platform’s machine learning model is built upon data from over 50 years of organisational psychology research. Huang added the model constantly improves its accuracy by analysing “tens of thousands” of job profiles parsed through it by client companies.

After processing the data, Pulsifi’s platform develops success profiles and predictive models to ascertain an individual’s fit with an organisation, while providing customised tips to increase individual employee engagement.

Huang claims the platform has over 90 per cent accuracy when predicting the outcomes of people at work, helping Pulsifi’s clients improve quality and efficiency in talent acquisition and management.

The five-year-old company commercialises its platform through a recurring subscription model, which has been the go-to revenue strategy for similar B2B SaaS companies.

As the company charges companies based on the number of candidates or employees, reaching large enterprises is key. Therefore, besides digital marketing, Pulsifi also invests in a sales team that sells directly to multinational companies.

The company already counts Nestlé, Heineken, Reckitt, KPMG, and Singtel among its clients.

Also Read: What metrics to monitor as a B2B SaaS company?

Despite being an HR company and having developed a platform specifically to aid companies in combating poor hiring decisions, Huang shared poor hiring was the culprit of Pulsifi’s early challenges.

“At that time, we were a very early-stage startup figuring our way around. We brought on team members who had skills, but not so much the mindset, capacity and drive to shape Pulsifi in product and business. We ended up wasting a lot of time and resources doing the wrong things,” he remarks.

Noting that early-stage startups are handicapped from the get-go due to the lack of resources, he opined a good hire will go a long way in overcoming the numerous growth challenges a young company would face.

Globally, companies do seem to share a similar sentiment. The talent management software market is projected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10 per cent to hit US$ 11 billion by 2026.

Noting organisations are seeking to move away from traditional resume screening to explore more holistic methods of evaluating candidates, Huang shares people data analytics will play an important role moving forward. “Those organizations that do will significantly pull ahead of those that do not, by providing a superior candidate and employee experience,” he opines.

Having recently raised US$1.8 million in an angel round in November 2020, the Pulsifi team has been hard at work expanding into Europe.

When quizzed on future plans, Huang disclosed the company is looking to raise a Series A round in the second half of 2021 to support its ambitions to scale its platform and cover more talent acquisition and talent management use cases.

With the pandemic placing renewed importance on hiring well and the increased influence of data within businesses, the outlook certainly does look rosy for people analytics platforms like Pulsifi.

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Image Credit: Pulsifi

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