Astro, a quick commerce startup in Indonesia, has received a US$4.5 million (IDR 64 billion) seed funding.
Investors are Global Founders Capital, AC Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Goodwater Capital.
The startup will use the funds to build and strengthen the technology and operations teams and expand into new areas in Jakarta.
Launched in September 2021 by Vincent Tjendra, former associate VP at Tokopedia, Astro offers more than 1,000 products ranging from daily necessities (snacks, fresh fruit, and vegetables) to emergency over-the-counter medicines. The firm claims it does the product delivery in 15 minutes and operates 24×7.
Currently, Astro has serves customers in Senayan, Permata Hijau, Gandaria, Kuningan, SCBD, Kemang, Cilandak, Cipete, Puri Indah, Kebon Jeruk, Kelapa Gading, and PIK (Pantai Indah Kapuk) areas.
The e-commerce startup will expand in the Jakarta area (and parts of Greater Jakarta) by December 2021.
“Astro’s quick commerce service will fundamentally change the way millions of Indonesian consumers buy their basic daily needs, electronics, snacks and pet food,” said Melvin Hade, partner at Global Founders Capital.
Indonesia is in the first place as the country with the most active online shopping population, which continues to grow amid the COVID-19 pandemic. As much as 87.1 per cent of internet users in Indonesia use online shopping services to buy certain products, including food and daily necessities.
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Singapore-based True Global Ventures has invested US$10 million in The Sandbox, an open NFT metaverse platform.
The Sandbox, owned by global game developer Animoca Brands, has raised a total of US$93 million in this Series B round.
SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led this round, marking its maiden investment into crypto assets. Animoca Brands, SCB 10X, Liberty City Ventures, Galaxy Interactive, Kingsway Capital, LG Technology Ventures, Polygon Studios, and Samsung Next co-invested.
True Global Ventures invested in The Sandbox through its blockchain fund TGV 4 Plus, which was launched in 2019 and hit the final close at US$100 million this September.
The Sandbox will utilise the funding to strengthen its platform as an entertainment destination where businesses, intellectual properties, and celebrities can interact with their followers through virtual experiences such as games, live events, and social media.
The firm claims to have partnered with major IPs and brands, including Snoop Dogg, The Walking Dead, deadmau5, Atari, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Care Bears, The Smurfs, Shaun the Sheep, and Binance.
Launched in 2012 by serial entrepreneurs Arthur Madrid (CEO) and Sebastien Borget (COO), The Sandbox started as a 2D metaverse game with more than 40 million players worldwide. Following Animoca Brands’s acquisition in 2018, it developed a metaverse built on the Ethereum blockchain. It offers players and creators a decentralised and intuitive platform to create immersive 3D worlds and game experiences and safely store, trade, and monetise their creations.
True Global Ventures has been a shareholder of The Sandbox since its US$2 million funding round in 2019. It also has a stake in Animoca Brands, a global “play-to-earn” blockchain gaming and NFTs developer.
“We believe that the prominent unicorns in the blockchain sector will be coming from the gaming blockchain area in the short term,” founder Dusan Stojanovic said in an earlier interview with e27. “Later on, companies linked to renewable energy will have a significant impact.”
Licensed by the Monetary Authorities of Singapore, True Global Ventures is a distributed ledger technology equity fund launched in 2010 by serial entrepreneurs-turned-investors. It targets blockchain startups operating in entertainment, infrastructure, financial services, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on late-stage Series B and C companies.
Upon the closing of its US$100 million fund, TGV said it would invest in around another 10-20 companies with cheque sizes ranging from US$3 million to US$10 million.
In addition, True Global Ventures offers its portfolio startups with follow-on investments with its network of over 80 investment partners, including seasoned general partners of VCs, business angels, institutional investors, top corporate executives, and family offices.
The venture capital firm now has a presence in 20 cities, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Moscow, Stockholm, Paris, Warsaw, New York, San Francisco, and Vancouver.
As noted in TGV’s vision statement, the fund believes that multi-metaverse systems based on Blockchain and NFTs would provide true digital ownership of digital assets while also promoting interoperability, open standards, and transparency.
“These metaverses will have new types of distributed governance, where both large corporations and smaller communities will exist side by side more equitably,” the firm stated. “Many of these communities will be owned by the communities and creators themselves.”
Besides, the firm underlined that innovations in this space would drive Web 3.0 adoption and bring these technologies to the masses for positive change.
“We believe that positive virtual worlds, e.g., open, transparent, sustainable, will positively impact the real world.”
Besides The Sandbox and Animoca Brands, the TGV 4 Plus fund has made investments in three other firms, including Forge Global, a global market firm in secondary private markets; Canada Computational Unlimited, a Bitcoin mining company powered entirely by renewable energy; and QuantumRock, an artificial intelligence asset management platform.
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It’s safe to say that whatever qualms Southeast Asia had towards digital transformation, COVID-19 has effectively squashed them. With various iterations of lockdown restrictions across the region, either business go digital or they go dark.
For the foreseeable future, the region is now governed by an explicit digital mandate. As a result of government restrictions to curb the spread of the virus, Southeast Asia saw an accelerated adoption of digital services in e-commerce, food delivery and online payment methods.
With Southeast Asia’s foot still firmly on the digitalisation gas pedal, this has paved the way for “upstart” companies experiencing massive change and growth. There is a significant pool of emerging Series A, B and C companies thriving in the region.
This has become more prevalent, particularly in fintech and e-commerce companies, growing exponentially from 200 people to over 2000 people.
Although tech companies have fallen on the “right” side of the pandemic, this hyper-growth phase presents new challenges. As these scale-ups evolve, there are growing pains to undergo.
There is a massive leap between a scrappy startup of 10 people and an organisation of 50 or 250 working towards their next round of VC fundraising.
The truth is that a lot of these challenges stem from the people within the organisation that have the heart and drive but need a leap in skill and mindset.
Startups need to build a culture of growth and maturity. They need good executors and entrepreneurs and strong leadership and middle management to translate this growth mindset to their junior teammates.
Here are three business challenges that we have observed hyper-growth companies in the region are tackling and our recommendations on what is needed to overcome them.
The gap in leadership skills for new managers
As startups go into hyper-growth, this leads to exponential employee growth and individual contributors are pushed into people management responsibilities. What is unique about these scale-ups as they evolve into full-fledged organisations is that they tend to identify and promote internal talent with leadership potential rather than importing experienced hires.
This is critical to mention because the average age and experience of a manager have gone down – the average age of a manager working in a startup in Asia is someone in their mid-twenties or early thirties. In some industries, such as e-commerce, this could be lower.
Unfortunately, more businesses do not have the capacity, talent and resources to provide impactful training to these new managers.
Formal training tends to be designed for senior leaders with an average age of 40, so there is a gap in training available for such emerging managers.
Hence, you could have a whole decade of the “blind leading the blind”, potentially leading to toxic work culture and employee attrition rates rising over time, much of which might have been avoided with more accessible leadership training earlier on.
As such, businesses need to proactively think about developing their new managers in a standardised and effective way so that they can set them, and ultimately the company, for success.
After all, research by Boston Consulting Group and the World Federation of People Management Associations in 2020 has indicated that middle managers are, in fact, more critical than company leadership in driving employee performance.
Fortunately, we have seen more companies aware of this leadership training gap in their new managers and have taken action. For instance, the Head of People for MyRepublic, one of the fastest-growing telecommunications companies, quickly connected senior leadership training to traditional MBAs but had realised that training for new managers was a gap that could not be ignored much longer.
As such, MyRepublic engaged NewCampus to upskill their middle managers to create the right kind of organisational change as they enter the next growth stage for their business.
Learning and development as a necessary perk
Gone are the days where a cushy paycheck and office perks such as pool tables, gym memberships and stocked kitchens were enough to effectively retain talent. Back in 2018, a Work Institute report had already predicted that providing career development would be an essential tool for employee retention.
In an analysis of over 234,000 exit interviews, nearly one-third of the turnover was attributed to unsupportive management and a lack of development opportunities.
In a survey featuring NewCampus’ latest programme cohort, all 12 managers from scale-ups in the APAC region highlighted career development as the most important factor in staying with their reactive employers, and 30 per cent are in the process of transitioning companies for the lack thereof.
This ties back with retention research which indicates that individuals tend to stay longer when experiencing personal and professional growth.
But at the same time, it’s not sufficient to promote employees without consideration. On the one hand, you have employees who express interest in becoming a people manager but have no training to succeed. A recurring theme we have observed is that businesses lose their top-performing employees by promoting them without training.
On the other hand, you have individual contributors who are great at their job but do not want to lead a team. Promoting them to become people managers is not aligned with their own goals.
Hence, we agree with the recommendations made by EngageRocket’s HR 2022 report. Indeed, the usual approach to manager evaluation and promotion needs to change. Instead of selecting task orchestrators for managerial roles, companies should be promoting those with leadership and coaching or mentoring skillsets.
For those identified as potential leaders, businesses need to actively equip these new managers with all the ingredients necessary for them to be effective people managers. A majority of managers struggle to build relationships, develop and bring the best out of their team.
Hence, companies should help them acquire knowledge and skills such as identifying their leadership style and how it impacts them, learning delegation techniques to boost team output, and learning to diagnose and unblock productivity challenges.
Adapting to a remote and globally distributed workforce
The pandemic has accelerated remote work and proven its feasibility for the future of work. Businesses, particularly hyper-growth startups, have increasingly expanded regionally and distributed their workforce the same way.
We have increasingly seen business leaders having to manage geographies, cultures and timezones. It’s not uncommon for a product leader based in Singapore to manage and lead teams in Vietnam and Manila, for instance.
However, this has proven to be a new hurdle for businesses to overcome. In our recent fireside series, I interviewed over 30 senior leaders from fast-growing companies in APAC.
A common pain point that emerged from our discussion was the difficulty in managing across cultures and doing so in a remote environment. After all, a standard model by startups here is to have headquarters in Singapore with small offices scattered across the region.
Much like what I mentioned earlier, companies need to help set their employees up for success, and they need to tailor their strategies accordingly to make this shift work for them and not against them.
This is critical as a survey by Slack of 9,000 knowledge workers last year showed that middle managers felt the most stress with remote working compared to senior management and individual contributors. They also had the lowest scores in productivity and overall satisfaction.
One way is to up-skill their people managers with remote team management, cross-cultural communication and empathetic leadership to lead in this new world.
Another way is for senior leaders to continuously check in on these managers and gather feedback on what they need to adjust better. Managers unable to handle the transition well could impact their team, so this needs to be addressed.
Conclusion
The pandemic has undeniably accelerated a new world of work. Companies that are prepared will thrive, and those that do not will stagnate.
Ultimately, businesses investing in their people leaders are an important part of de-risking this transition. Leadership skills are no longer a soft skill but a fundamental and necessary skill to have in the future of work.
Companies need to realise that career development and succession planning go hand-in-hand. When employees’ personal goals are aligned with the organisation’s current and future needs, it creates a mutually beneficial environment.
The synergy between career development and a company’s succession planning creates happier and more productive employees, which allow a company to avoid the constant burn-and-churn in Southeast Asia.
Moreover, this allows the firm to experience a positive bottom-line impact while preparing for its future business needs.
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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.
It is well established that the tech industry has traditionally been male-dominated. While this gender disparity has narrowed in recent years, the sector could do well with the diversity of more women.
When I started the fintech startup, I uncovered a pool of highly-skilled and passionate women in tech who desired to find their way back into the sector after taking breaks to focus on priorities brought about by life changes.
My personal experiences as a young woman in the industry do not quite fit into one of your underdog success stories. If anything, my overwhelmingly positive encounters as a fresh face in tech have influenced my outlook on the sector and shaped the culture I have built at my female-dominated fintech startup, Counto.
Here’s how I’m leveraging them to create a thriving environment for leadership in the industry.
Early years in the tech industry
Fresh out of university as an engineer by education, I began my career in the tech space from the get-go, after being campus picked and allowed to start my career at a software services firm. This was during the boom of the IT industry in India, where there were many great opportunities in the sector.
From there, I quickly realised my affinity and passion for the field. I worked my way up, progressing through firms including Morgan Stanley handling tech and IT, and Credit Suisse, where I held various roles in programme management, procurement, governance and control.
When asked about the challenges faced as a young woman in the industry, one concern that often follows, and understandably so, is whether I felt the additional pressure to prove myself worthy of a place in the industry compared to my male counterparts.
My answer to this may come as a surprise, but at each of the firms I have worked with, I was never intimidated by the gender disparity and was always well-supported and backed by my managers.
For instance, in a room full of people or even at a forum, I was always comfortable questioning discussion topics regardless of who was present openly. Undeniably as a newbie in the industry, though, mistakes were bound to happen.
However, when they did, my managers always stood up for me, allowing me to own my mistakes, nurturing and guiding me on how to overcome them. Additionally, when I was expecting, my managers and superiors were nothing short of understanding and accommodating.
The year that I conceived was also when I received a promotion, something I doubt any woman would usually expect.
Looking back, I firmly believe it is this culture of support and trust I received in my early years in the industry that set up a firm foundation for the values I now know are crucial for success. One of my main takeaways for anyone, but especially for a female in a male-dominated industry, would be to be resourceful and refuse to be intimidated by unfamiliarity.
Whether you are at a firm that trusts in your abilities or otherwise, harping on the preconceived notions others may have on you will only harm your confidence, in turn hindering your professional growth.
Conversely, recognising how as a manager, having a sense of understanding and empathy and allowing for flexibility at work can spur employees to stay driven, regardless of their circumstances.
Saba Khan, Co-Founder and COO of Counto
Shaping Counto’s work culture to champion women in fintech
At present, 70 per cent of staff at my automated accounting fintech startup, Counto, are female.
Interestingly, my co-founder, Ishi, and I did not start with the intention of becoming a women-dominated fintech company.
In March 2020, at the height of the pandemic when we launched and realised there was an untapped pool of highly qualified, capable women in fintech. Our hiring process found that many of them were looking to forge their career paths to achieve independence, on top of managing other priorities in life such as motherhood.
As many of them desire to pursue their own goals, independent of family obligations and possess the necessary skill sets to thrive in the industry, we then took it upon ourselves to champion these women and their aspirations.
As a mother of two daughters myself, I can empathise with the various challenges women face, whether that be feelings of inadequacy, juggling pregnancy, motherhood or other significant transitional stages in life.
At Counto, our culture is built based on recognising the needs and priorities of each employee, allowing them to structure their workday however they wish. To illustrate this, all internal communications are done via messaging as opposed to email.
This takes away the formalities of emails and allows employees to set up impromptu calls to discuss matters or share lighter or frustrating moments over memes and emojis. Our internal calls are off video, so employees are not pressured to dress up or look right for calls.
We encourage and have regular video-on casual calls where families (including dogs) are welcome to say hello and meet the team. We also do not own a physical office and are proud to be remote-first. This has opened the doors to hiring incredible talent.
On top of the fact that we started during the circuit breaker in Singapore in March 2020, I believe there is no magic in having structured working hours. Instead, good work can be done anywhere, and this can vary significantly from person to person, depending on their habits and personal circumstances.
Not to mention that the viability of such a work culture is, of course, enabled by the acceleration of technology and pace of digitisation in today’s landscape of work. As a fintech startup, we only need to leverage these developments to maximise productivity while offering employees flexibility.
Setting new industry standards
By showing our employees, especially women, that they are valued and that their unique circumstances are recognised, we can build a motivated and truly productive team beyond the false sense of productivity behind rigid work structures.
In doing so, we also aim to give our women a safe space to work and grow, setting them up for success and leadership, whatever stage of life they may be in.
Whether you’re a woman in the tech sector or any other industry, there is always bound to be a human failure. The critical takeaway is to learn how to bounce back from setbacks. Be humble and own up to your mistakes, but maintain dignity and always take things in your stride.
As someone who has walked the talk, my goal is to impart these values and habits to the women at Counto and positively impact the overall working culture.
Work and productivity are essential, but it is also imperative that accommodating and flexible work culture is fostered. Recognising the needs and priorities of each employee will show that they are valued, which helps build a motivated, resilient and truly productive team.
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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.
Syed would be the highest-ranking Muslim official in the Biden administration if confirmed, but GOP senators are refusing to even show up for the vote.
Former Airbnb Head of Americas Marketing Jennifer Yuen
Despite all our differences, in many ways, we are the same. Cultures diverge, but commonalities bring us together. Airbnb has been an extraordinary platform for allowing people to truly experience new cultures in every corner of the world, and it has been thanks to passionate leaders like Jennifer Yuen.
In this second Global Class podcast episode, learn how it can be better to focus on cross border “tribes” instead of other target demographics, how some markets can influence others (helping you prioritise your expansion plans), how diversity can be a strength, and why “there’s no place called global.”
Jennifer is the former Head of Americas Marketing for Airbnb and was an early team member who launched the business in the APAC region. Previous to that, she led product marketing for the Facebook search product and held marketing roles at IHG, a global hospitality company, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), and AT&T.
The early stages of starting a business can be brutal. Funding is scarce, the team is lean, everyone has to wear multiple hats, and nobody knows you exist. You need to secure funding to grow, but you’re also competing against thousands of other companies. Most importantly, you don’t want to fail.
There’s been a worrying tendency for founders to stray into ‘moral grey areas at this juncture. Essentially, they artificially inflate their attractiveness with misrepresented statistics or sensationalise their offerings to stand out and entice investors.
This has been a problem since as far back as 2013, but with the current startup boom, it’s more evident than ever because more people are doing it.
There’s no hard right or wrong here, but if you’re a founder and you do this, understand what’s really at stake. You’re gambling not just the reputation of your company on this dishonesty but your own as well.
If you knowingly make claims you can’t back up, the trust lost is almost impossible to rebuild when people find out – and that reputational blow is never worth it.
Fear-driven fakery
Fear of failure is a powerful motivator in business, especially in the startup ecosystem. Startups fear that if they don’t play their cards right, they’ll become another contribution to the 90 per cent startup failure rate.
On the other side, VCs fear missing out (FOMO) on the Next Big Thing if they don’t make suitable investments, which could cost them millions in potential revenue.
Many founders focus on trying to spin a good story to attract VCs. Common tactics include exaggerating their numbers, talking up their product and how it will change the world, or even creating fake demand with fake reviews.
They also capitalise on the FOMO sentiment among VCs by framing their pitch in an ‘it’s now or never’ time-sensitive deal, putting pressure on VCs to leap.
This might work in the short term, but sooner or later, it’ll catch up with them. ‘Fake it till you make it’ only goes so far– the Theranos story is an excellent example– and VCs themselves are quickly wising up to the game. Once you’ve earned a bad name, even if you try to start over with a new company, it’ll be much harder to convince them to put their faith in you again.
Why fear failure?
When children fall, we tell them that it’s okay. They can get up and try again. It isn’t the end of the world. It teaches them what they must do to avoid falling again.
This lesson is just as valuable to adults. We’re often so focused on getting to the finish line that we forget the journey is just as important, even if there are a few bumps and scrapes along the way.
Failure is the greatest teacher, as they say, and once we’ve learned our lesson, we can adapt. From Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, we saw that it wasn’t the strongest or the most intelligent species that survived, but instead the one that was best able to adapt and adjust to changing environments.
Founders tend to take failure as a massive blow to their reputation, but the irony is that they could do significantly more damage by lying and failing to deliver.
Instead, they should embrace failure and learn to adapt to it instead of avoiding it through deceit. People understand that failure is a part of life. It’s what you do next that matters more.
Being upfront about the potential for failure and showing how you will handle it can help your reputation.
When my co-founder Surekha and I started Redhill, we were clear on our ambitions, but we also said: “We’ll do our best, but we’ll tell you if we fail.”
We were very transparent about the possible risks and what our strategy was to mitigate them. People appreciated our honesty, and this helped us build a reputation for responsibility and trustworthiness.
Staking your reputation as a founder
As a startup founder, your reputation is everything. You are your product. People work for and invest in your company because they believe in you and trust you to lead the way forward. That doesn’t mean they expect you to be perfect, but it does mean they expect you not to betray their trust.
Reputations precede the person. You might get away with one lie, but lies only engender more lies. If you make things up to avoid failure and it backfires, that stains not just your company’s reputation but your own as well.
Plus, now that everyone has a digital footprint, a bad reputation is not only difficult to reverse – it can follow you for years and affects the trust that people have in you.
On the flip side, trust and authenticity are byproducts of a genuine effort to create a good reputation. If, as a founder, you are consistently honest and authentic, people will also associate that with your business.
Inspiring trust is invaluable because people believe in your ability to deliver your best even if you fail, which makes them more likely to work with, support and even advocate for you.
At Redhill, we’ve returned the money to people when we couldn’t deliver on what was promised. We also explained what we learned from the mistake and how we would do better next time.
In many cases, admitting failure and explaining our learnings has fortified our reputation because our clients see that we’re not just in it for the money– we genuinely care about doing a good job. Some have even rehired us and recommended us to others because of it, and that’s actual gold.
Trust has been the foundation for business success since the beginning of time. Unfortunately, the high-pressure, high-stakes environment of the startup and VC ecosystem has made the current ‘win at all costs mindset somewhat endemic within the industry.
Being the little guy is hard and talking up a big game often seems like the only way for founders to get their foot in the door, but that’s a very short-sighted play; what happens when the house of cards falls?
The more this happens, the more cautious VCs will be about investing and the more difficult it will be for startups to get funding. Fewer founders will be willing to take the plunge, and there will be less innovation overall.
Ultimately, this mindset takes ‘putting your best foot forward’ too far and only hurts all of us in the long run. That’s why it has to start and stop with us.
As founders, we started this journey knowing the risks because we felt it was worth it. Sometimes things don’t work out, and that’s okay. Failing is just part of the process, not the end of the story. It’s never worth pawning your reputation to avoid failure because having a good name is everything.
As long as you have your name and reputation intact, you can always pick yourself up and try again – and that’s a rare privilege.
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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic
Bangkok-headquartered digital asset and cryptocurrency exchange Bitkub has sold 51 per cent of its total shares to SCB Securities (SCBC) for 17.85 billion baht (~US$536 million).
SCBS is a subsidiary of one of Thailand’s largest and oldest banks, Siam Commercial Bank or SCB.
Upon the deal closing (expected to complete in Q1 2022), SCBS will become the major shareholder of Bitkub. This brings Bitkub’s valuation to more than US$1 billion, making it Thailand’s third unicorn, alongside Flash Group and Ascend Money.
SCB intends to work closely with Bitkub as a business partner, develop digital asset businesses through new business models to create long-term added value and lay the foundation for the bank’s further entry into the financial world of the future.
“We strongly believe that together we can drive the Thai economy into the future to be a regional financial and technological centre. And it is an important opportunity to create a new national champion for Thailand,” said Bitkub CEO and founder Jirayut Srupsrisopa.
Founded in 2018, Bitkub offers services including cryptocurrency and digital assets exchange, blockchain solutions and ICO advisory services, education workshops, and venture capital investments. The startup aims to push forward the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem toward mass adoption in Thailand.
The acquisition is in line with SCBx Group’s (the holding company of SCB) strategy to upgrade to a financial technology group, meet new consumer needs, and enter the new competitive and emerging arena of digital assets in the next three to five years.
SCB also owns a fintech venture subsidiary SCB 10X, which has invested in enterprise blockchain solution provider Ripple, custody tech firm Fireblocks, investment bank Sygnum, and centralised crypto lender BlockFi. The firm also participated in the US$93-million funding round of The Sandbox.
Thai crypto market has witnessed the involvement of notable banks this year. In August, Bank of Ayudhya, through its VC arm Krungsri Finnovate, participated in the US$41 million Series B of Zipmex, a Singapore-based crypto exchange that has been licensed in Thailand.
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In recent times, telcos have never been the epitome of ‘cool’ regarding brand positioning. Because there are usually only a couple of dominant telco players in each market, they typically don’t have much incentive to innovate or provide a stellar customer experience.
This means it’s rare for customers to get genuinely excited about a telco brand. At least, this much is true, according to Delbert Ty, head of marketing at Singapore-based digital telco Circles.Life.
Circles.Life is on a mission “to bring power back to the consumers,” explains Ty. Launched in 2016, the company offers no-contract mobile carrier plans with fully digital support.
While this is the norm in many developing nations, the approach is considered novel in developed markets such as Singapore, as incumbent telcos lock customers into 12- to 24-month contracts and provide SIM cards and customer service at offline branches.
With Circles.Life, customers can instead buy a SIM card online and pay as they go. They can take comfort in knowing that the amount they spend on mobile fees sync with the data and minutes they use.
In 2019, Circles.Life claimed to have reached a five per cent market share in Singapore. The company then expanded to Taiwan and Australia that same year.
On top of simple and unique offerings, Circles.Life’s marketing efforts have injected a breath of fresh air into the regional telco space. The company has consistently created viral campaigns that get the public talking.
For example, the brand made waves during its 2016 launch by involving influencers who vandalised what seemed to be a new telco’s outdoor ads offering 3GB data for S$40 (which was the norm back then).
The campaign sparked conversations that the offering was indeed nothing special and garnered media coverage about Circles.Life’s new data plan (20GB for S$20) after the brand unveiled itself as the one behind this stunt.
Speaking with ContentGrip (an online media powered by ContentGrow for professionals in media, marketing, and tech), Ty shares some of his recipes to help fellow marketers create viral campaigns.
Viral campaigns get folks talking about Circles.Life
Influencer youtiao666 vandalised a fake telco ad in 2016.
When done correctly, viral marketing can significantly increase brand awareness. People will Google the brand responsible for engaging campaigns and visit the website. This, in turn, can help the company retarget them later on using paid ads.
Generally speaking, retargeting campaigns cost less than those that aim to bring in new visitors. As a result, this helps to bring the customer acquisition cost (CAC) down.
Higher awareness should also help increase a brand’s overall search volume on Google. Ideally, this will help increase SEM impressions and bring CAC costs down even further. According to Ty, these tactics can apply to any industry, whether it’s B2C and B2B.
“Be clear with your strategy, message, creative material, and plan,” says Ty. “They all have to have in clear linear sync — meaning ‘this therefore that.’ When it comes to execution, you should be able to explain this to any layperson.”
In the case of Circles.Life’s vandalism campaign, the idea was about waking people up to the reality that what incumbent telcos offer is — quite simply — not good. Instead of just showing a ‘brand A vs brand B’ message, the team brought to life the sentiment of customer dissatisfaction through faux vandalism.
Circles.Life announced its most extensive no-contract data plan in this campaign, which was 20GB for S$20. This was an outsized improvement from the 3GB for S$40 commonly offered by other local telcos at the time.
Viral campaigns should evoke strong, visceral emotions
Circles.Life giving 2020 the middle finger in Australia
The core component of viral marketing is not so different from traditional marketing. Practitioners need to have a strategy, a target audience they want to reach, a clear message they want to convey, a creative idea, and a plan that stitches it all together coherently.
“The only thing that sets what we’ve done apart is the creative idea. We think of the Nth level extreme of what can elicit a visceral and emotional response,” says Ty.
“This usually considers culture and local norms, as what gets a strong response in one market could very well fall flat in another. But there’s also a flip side. Something that gets the appropriate emotional response in one market might end up being way over the top in another.”
In the case of Circles.Life’s vandalism campaign, Ty believes the strategy might not work in a country where vandalism is more common (in Singapore, there is very little vandalism).
So marketers need to understand each target market’s culture fully. According to him, culture is the vehicle in which a company’s ideas can be distributed.
Circles.Life’s also made headlines in Singapore when its ‘vending machines’ let locals pay S$3 in exchange for S$50. The free money stunt drew such a massive queue that police eventually stepped in to disperse the crowd. This was done to promote the company’s new S$3 unlimited data plan.
To find viral campaign ideas, the team does rapid-fire brainstorming sessions to populate a list of ideas. The team discusses trending topics, perennially hot issues and explores which ones sync well with the brand’s strategy and messaging.
Ty notes that marketers should always try questioning the premise. He asks, “Why are certain things done the way they are? Why is this the right channel? Why should we be liked as a brand? Through this line of questioning, you’ll unearth the weirdest, wackiest ideas that will help you drive distinction.”
To objectively assess whether an idea has a decisive score in “discussion worthiness,” Ty’s team will check Google Trends and Twitter to see what’s trending. Another avenue is to look at media mentions via various tracking tools such as Google Alerts and BrandWatch.
“Lastly, we’ve also explored doing ‘fake door’ tests on ideas by creating meme versions of the concepts and posting them on social media organically. Based on the upvotes and likes, we’re able to assess its discussion worthiness,” adds the marketer.
How Circles.Life handle mystery brand reveals
Several of Circles.Life’s publicity stunts have been kept unbranded initially, with the brand then revealing itself later on to spark interest. This is designed to explore whether the team can achieve more significant virality if the campaign is perceived as ‘organic’ by the public — rather than an advertisement.
The first ad features a lover’s break-up message
In Australia, the team decided to do a fake print ad of a scorned lover breaking up with her partner on a major publication. This stunt generated several media pickups, including one from the world-renowned tabloid Daily Mail.
As a former Procter & Gamble marketer, Ty shares that he uses Pantene’s playbook for mystery brand reveal activities. He emphasises the importance of providing a clear narrative that follows each initial mystery.
For the Australian fake ad stunt, the team followed it up with another print ad. It revealed how this disenchanted lover was breaking up with her telco and that Circles.Life is here for her now.
The follow-up ad unveiled Circles.Life’s publicity stunt
Ty explains, “This continuity in the narrative makes it easy for the audience to recall the previous coverage, and we eventually can drive the user’s journey back to our brand.”
That said, some stunts don’t need to be mysterious at all. For example, earlier this year, the telco created a S$20,000 lottery for families who, for some reason, are not eligible for housing benefits or loans from the government. The stunt was introduced as part of its new family plan launch.
Ty adds, “Even though we knew it would ruffle feathers, it only made sense if we put our name on it. In this case, we believed that because we were making a stand, literally putting our money where our mouth is, and most importantly, not selling anything, we’d be able to achieve the cut-through we wanted.”
He reminds fellow marketers to make sure that there is a reason why they’re not revealing a brand during bold marketing stunts. Further, each stunt should be carefully orchestrated not to contradict the creative idea. Lastly, practitioners should be mindful that this is a tactic. Tactics don’t work indefinitely, and they certainly don’t work if the strategy is wrong.
He explains, “Our approach here is that with risky bets like stunts and viral activities, there is an inherently low chance of success. So, no matter how creative you and your team are, you’ll never have a greater than 50 per cent hit rate.”
Because of this dynamic, Circles.Life’s marketing team hedges the risk by spending less than 20 per cent of their time and money on publicity stunts. This allows them to be braver and not worry about the cost of failure. They spend most of the budget on more traditional and reliable channels that are easily trackable, like performance marketing.
Ty says, “Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure is okay, so long as you have a contingency if it does happen.”
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BeeX, an autonomous robotics startup in Singapore, has secured an undisclosed “seven-figure” USD in a seed investment round.
Cap Vista, the strategic investment arm of Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency, led this round. It also saw participation from Quest Ventures-Maritime Fund, IMC Ventures, SEEDS Capital, and the National University of Singapore.
With the money, BeeX will expand its team to accelerate the development of autonomous capabilities across more diverse and critical environments, it said in a note on its website.
It will also commission a more powerful hovering autonomous underwater vehicle (HAUV) used for harsher conditions in offshore wind. It represents a unique opportunity for rapid growth in underwater infrastructure as the world adopts renewable energy at an unprecedented rate to achieve net-zero.
Founded by Grace Chia and Goh Eng Wei, BeeX is a deeptech engineering spin-off from the National University of Singapore, with a decade of R&D. It designs and builds vehicles to redefine how underwater work can be done. BeeX has a multi-disciplinary team with experiences in marine robotics, autonomous self-driving, electronic design, and naval architecture.
While autonomous robotics has impacted how work is done on land, air, and even outer space, the underwater world has stayed the same. Humans are still working in dangerous environments — be it physically diving or being mobilised on multi-billion-dollar large vessels — to deploy human-controlled remotely operated vehicles.
BeeX believes that Hovering Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (HAUVs) independent of these big boats can provide a sustainable way of large-scale underwater inspections. This will become a fundamental building block in ensuring the safety of coastal cities and accelerating the shift towards renewables, such as floating solar and offshore wind, by significantly reducing their operations and maintenance costs.
BeeX claims its HAUV — A.IKANBILIS –performs repetitive tasks efficiently with advanced autonomy, enabling better data and insights into critical large scale infrastructure like offshore wind, floating solar and aquaculture farms. It excels operationally in high currents and low visibility, with its custom propulsion, electronics, and sensor fusion techniques.
“BeeX’s marine autonomy technology will revolutionise underwater inspections and disrupt the maritime sector, and contribute to applications in sustainability and defence,” said Chng Zhen Hao, CEO of Cap Vista.
James Ong of IMC Ventures, commented: “The best validation of BeeX’s solution is demonstrated through the demand for their product in the maritime industry. BeeX has shown the commercial ability to sell its solutions on commercial terms, and it validates that the technology works and the pricing is viable. IMC hopes to help BeeX scale by utilising IMC’s broad network across Asia Pacific”.
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