Registration for TOP100 is now open and we are looking forward to seeing your startup on the list!
TOP100 Program gives you the one golden chance to connect with hundreds of investors, showcase your startup at Echelon, pitch on the TOP100 stage, and access special programs. Find out what’s new in TOP100 and join here: https://bit.ly/TOP100_2023
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Live tech events play a vital role in the startup ecosystem. They offer a platform for startups to showcase their products, services, and ideas to potential investors and 0ther stakeholders. For startups, attending live tech events can help them gain visibility, network with peers and industry leaders, and receive valuable feedback on their products or services. Additionally, they can attend informative talks and panel discussions, learn about the latest industry trends, and connect with potential partners or collaborators.
On the other hand, investors can discover promising startups and identify potential investment opportunities. These events allow investors to meet with startup founders, discuss their ideas, and evaluate their potential for success. Investors can also network with other investors and industry leaders, gain insights into the latest technological trends, and keep up with the latest developments in the industry.
Unfortunately, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted the ability of startups and investors to connect through live tech events. Many events were cancelled, postponed, or shifted to virtual formats, which limited the opportunity for in-person networking and collaboration. The lack of face-to-face interaction has made it difficult for startups to gain visibility and for investors to discover new investment opportunities.
As the global economy continues to reopen, we are proud to announce that Echelon Asia Summit is back!
Echelon Asia Summit 2023
This year, the Echelon Asia Summit annually organised by e27 is coming back in full swing. The conference brings together startups, investors, corporates, and other industry leaders from across the Asia-Pacific region to connect, learn, and discover new opportunities in the tech industry.
The Echelon Asia Summit features a range of keynote speeches, panel discussions, and workshops covering topics such as entrepreneurship, innovation, fundraising, marketing, and growth. Attendees can also participate in networking events and the much-awaited pitch competition, the TOP100, to showcase their ideas and meet potential partners and investors.
The conference has been held annually since 2009 and has grown to become one of the largest and most influential tech events in Asia, attracting thousands of attendees from around the world.
Partners in making Echelon 2023 possible
To make this great endeavour possible, e27 has partnered with several equally reputable institutions that are ready to serve the APAC tech startup ecosystem. Here are the first two sponsors who are partnering with e27 for the Echelon Asia Summit 2023:
fewStones Pte Ltd is a web service and digital marketing company based in Singapore developed around four main activities: Web Services, Digital Marketing, Video Services, and Mobile Applications.
fewStones was founded in 2011 in Singapore by Sophie Normand and Jean-Christophe Bougle as a Video Production Agency. In 2014, fewStonges became the first agency in Singapore to be YouTube Certified for Audience Growth. Since its inception, fewStones has worked with numerous Singaporean and International customers on a wide range of videos. In 2015, fewStones added remarketing videos to its scope of services in order to help agencies and businesses improve their ROI on their website traffic.
Parlon is a beauty technology platform where you can discover, book, and buy best-in-price beauty and wellness deals in the Philippines. Parlon is partnered with over 350 salon and wellness brands and 1,500 branches in more than 60 cities/provinces in the Philippines. With the widest salon network in the Philippines and expanding soon in Singapore, they are on their road to becoming Southeast Asia’s largest beauty services discovery and fintech platform.
They provide their merchant partners with a world-class multi-channel ecosystem, enabling them to accept bookings and payments, not just in the Parlon app and website, but also via the biggest platforms like Grab, Google, and GCash. With Parlon’s proprietary technology, they have helped their merchant partners to go digital by enabling them to sell their deals online and manage their daily operations.
Join Echelon Asia Summit 2023
Echelon Asia Summit 2023 is happening on 14-15 June, at the Singapore Expo. Featuring a slew of speakers, exhibitors, business matching sessions, pitching stages, and more, the event enables participants to connect, network, and engage with the larger tech startup ecosystem.
To learn more about Echelon Asia Summit 2023 and sign up for the event, visit the official page here.
We are kickstarting a new series for Southeast Asia’s startup founders to discuss their failures or unsuccessful projects and share their learnings and experiences with the community.
Warren Leow is a known face and one of the poster boys of Malaysia’s startup ecosystem. He is currently the group CEO of Inmagine Group. A London School of Economics graduate, he was the master brain behind the state-run Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre (MaGIC).
Like many other founders, Leow also has his share of failures.
In August 2017, he started Amazing Fables, which published personalised content to inspire young kids via rich storytelling, vibrant visuals, positive values and exciting facts. However, the startup had to be shuttered for many reasons.
In this interview, he takes us through his entrepreneurial journey at Amazing Fables and the learnings he made:
Can you talk about the motivation behind Amazing Fables? Did you see a massive market for it when it started?
Amazing Fables was a custom children’s book company I started four years ago. Users could customise names and avatars and get a custom-printed book shipped worldwide. I had ten titles which I wrote myself, and I commissioned artwork and print-on-demand printers from four different countries covering different markets.
It was based on a similar company in the UK that scaled to millions of dollars in sales. The business model made sense on the surface: drop-shipping, zero inventory, scalable content, novelty factor, and word of mouth.
However, the unknown parameters were the actual logistics cost and the lack of repeatability of a ‘nice-to-have’ but ‘not-critical’ product.
Did you manage to sign up some early customers? What was their response to such a great idea?
Yes, they loved the books for the kids, as the customised books are great for storytelling and social bonding.
My best seller was a book for Muslim kids, and I had customers from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and the UK! The most important thing was that they appreciated how our book taught positive values to kids and helped strengthen bonds between parents and kids via storytelling.
When did you get the first signs that Amazing Fables wouldn’t go a long way?
The first signs were the high acquisition cost from social media and Google Ads vs low lifetime value and lower-than-expected gross profit margins.
The company was breakeven on sales but needed a positive cashflow ROI on the first purchase to keep the engine chugging along for a bootstrapped company.
How many units did you manage to sell? And when did it occur to you that it was time to pull the curtain down on Amazing Fables?
When ROI was not 100 per cent at the first purchase, this didn’t allow cash to be reinvested on a compounding basis to grow it.
You were holding the role of the CEO of Inmagine while building Amazing Fables. Did it also divert your attention from Amazing Fables?
No, it was possible to run it automatically once things were on track. However, after I assumed a more prominent role in my day job, it was also a matter of choice on prioritisation, and I chose to focus on my role within Inmagine, where we operate 123RF, Pixlr, and Designs.ai.
How did your customers/potential react to your decision to bring the curtain down on AF?
Many would still reach out to me on WhatsApp and other media to order the books for their kids. Some still leave messages of thanks due to the wonderful artwork and the joy it brought to their kids.
What are your key learnings from this episode?
Four lessons from Amazing Fables and how I compared them to selling digital goods and software within Inmagine:
Sell things with utility rather than nice-to-haves
Sell things with repeat purchases and uses
Sell things with high gross profit margins
Sell things with low fulfilment cost
Given a chance, will you revive the business? Do you see a future for Amazing Fables?
Yes, I will revive it but only as a lifestyle business. However, it wasn’t the kind of large-scale autorunning business with strong passive cashflows I envisioned.
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Echelon Asia Summit 2023 brings together APAC’s leading startups, corporates, policymakers, industry leaders, and investors to Singapore this June 14-15. Learn more and get tickets here. Echelon also features the TOP100 stage, where startups can pitch to 5000+ delegates, among other benefits like a chance to connect with investors, visibility through e27 platform, and other prizes. Join TOP100 here.
103rd place out of 146 countries (or second-to-last among our ASEAN neighbours) — that is how far behind Malaysia currently is on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index.
While our gender parity has progressed over the years in areas like life expectancy or higher education, Malaysia still lags behind on many fronts in women’s empowerment: namely economic participation and female representation in positions of leadership.
Whether consciously or subconsciously (or both), we still live in a world where women bear the brunt of gendered stereotypes. These come in many dated forms: that a woman’s primary role is to take care of the home, that pregnancy is a liability to a company, and that a mother is incapable of balancing both a successful career and a happy family.
Inevitably, these misconceptions have bled into a world of work where 72 per cent of Malaysians have witnessed or experienced gender inequality. Outright discrimination may be rare, but more often than not, women tend to have to work harder to earn their rightful seat at the table.
The many-layered biases faced by the Malaysian woman
From the “we don’t mean it that way” excuses to the “learn to take a joke!” remarks, women are often made to feel like their emotions have to be justified or be otherwise dismissed. This is especially true for societies like ours; I find that the long-running struggles of Malaysian women go beyond just gender or marital status.
The struggles they face are layered.
Living in a country as wonderfully culturally diverse as ours, Malaysian women are sometimes also confronted by an additional layer of bias: race and ethnicity. Additionally, due to being brought up in a more collectivist country, there is this strange expectation that they should be “more docile” or “more giving” — putting wider interests over their own, and even at the expense of their own.
It is especially important for workplaces to realise that these seemingly small incidents of gender-coded bias will add up and that its consequences never stop at the individual woman. This contributes to widening the gender pay gap, limiting the representation of women in work and leadership, and worse: missing out on the far-reaching positive impact women can have on business and the workforce.
In a survey conducted by McKinsey in The United States of America, titled Women In The Workplace Year 2022 Report, women leaders do more to support employee well-being and foster inclusion. This is critical to any organisation because it improves employee satisfaction and ultimately, increases retention.
Greater gender diversity is not merely fulfilling a quota. It means more perspectives and more creativity, which fuels growth and translates to a more sustainable trajectory for businesses in any industry. Bringing a more empathetic and empowered workforce to the table, female leaders are also uniquely positioned to help connect businesses beyond a purely transactional level.
Empowering women at work starts as early as the recruitment
Malaysia has already taken steps to support a more equitable and inclusive world of work for women, such as drafting the Gender Equality Bill and the very recent amendments to the Employment Act, which protects pregnant women from being unfairly dismissed from their jobs simply for being pregnant and also have their maternity leave days extended.
While this is a commendable step in the right direction, I still feel there is room yet for improvement — because these measures are reactive to issues that already exist in the workplace rather than proactively nipping them in the bud. Having been deeply involved in recruiting solutions throughout my time in HR, I believe that the greatest push for gender equality at work starts from the very beginning of the funnel: even before the hiring stage.
It is imperative that organisations strive to make purely merit-based hiring decisions. To do this, every stage of the process — from selection criteria all the way down to the job descriptions — must be gender-neutral and skill-focused.
Even a small sentence encouraging women and underserved communities to apply (which is very popular on platforms like LinkedIn at the moment!) can make a difference in diversifying the company’s pool of applicants.
The team of recruitment specialists and interviewers must also represent the diversity they hope to see in the workplace. When fairness and inclusion are then constantly at the heart of their decisions, this can make a positive difference even when filling top executive positions! In fact, this was the very basis behind CXL’s Executive Search platform, which is driving gender inclusivity and diversity in HR recruitment solutions.
Beyond representation in the recruitment stage, it is also vital that women are actively connected to female mentors and leaders from the onboarding process onward. Opportunities for women in senior-level positions to take ownership of empowering other women in the workplace is a strong catalyst not just for their personal growth but also for broader cyclical change.
Moreover, the upskilling programmes and resources made available for employees should also take into account the challenges faced by women at work, enabling them to better navigate the very nuanced world of business and leadership.
Multinational corporations may find it easier to allocate resources to drive these changes (albeit with less flexibility), whereas SMEs and startups are more likely to implement more far-reaching but smaller-scale measures. Although the scale of implementation may be different depending on the size and nature of the business, what ultimately matters is that affirmative action is taken now.
It is no longer an if but a must in the transformation of employment for the better: closing the gap between companies and best-fit talents — plus the gap of gender inequality towards a more inclusive world of work.
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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
In this episode, we are excited to welcome Jeffrey Bleich, Chief Legal Officer at Cruise, a self-driving tech company. Bleich is a prominent attorney, and a former partner at both Munger, Tolles & Olson and Dentons. In his remarkable career, he has also served as special counsel to former President Barack Obama and as a US ambassador to Australia. In addition to this, he was a former board chair at PG&E.
In our conversation, Bleich shares the story of his time serving as US Ambassador to Australia, the importance of trust-building in international relations, why over-indexing on English is a common mistake when expanding to other countries, why thinking long-term is key to a successful global expansion strategy, and considerations to take before hiring local counsel.
The capitals of major Southeast Asian markets: Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh, Bangkok, and Singapore
My fascination with what leads to the success of startups across various regions dates back to my Master’s studies in Denmark. During that time, I was lucky enough to receive a scholarship for a field trip to Hong Kong, where I studied startup success factors in Asia.
The scholarship took me to Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where I interviewed many local founders on what it takes to be successful in Asia.
After a few weeks of collecting data, I relocated to Bali, Indonesia, where I stayed until my Master’s thesis was complete. Bali felt like a great place to research, write, and simply enjoy life.
At the time, I thought my stay in Southeast Asia (SEA) would be brief, and I would return to Denmark once done. Yet, seven years later, I am writing this essay out of Singapore.
Over the years, I have learned much and changed my perspective on various topics. Still, one thing remains the same — my view is that specific business models, and products are particularly well-suited for Southeast Asia.
The region’s distinctiveness gives rise to specific challenges and opportunities, which must be considered when launching a new venture or entering the market.
For example, OpenAI and its groundbreaking work in the field of artificial intelligence could never have originated in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, the region lacks the engineering talent to develop such complex AI research.
On the other hand, a successful Southeast Asian startup like GoJek might not find the same level of success in, say, Denmark. The European markets are vastly different. The average user would likely feel overwhelmed by the million options of services offered by GoJek. Western audiences prefer minimalistic and clean user interfaces that solve one problem at a time.
In Asia, people are comfortable with an overload of information, features, banners, instant communication, and notifications. Perhaps most importantly, the high standard of living in most western countries would not be able to sustain GoJek’s unit economics.
To top it all, founders and investors in Southeast Asia prefer proven business models. The market is hard enough the way it is. Finding technical talent is a challenge. The internet connection is not always stable outside of big cities. Many regulations are vague and frequently changed.
Even the cost of starting a company continues to be high in countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The purchasing power of the average user is considerably lower than in Europe and North America. Each country speaks a different language, making localisation a challenge.
While there are many significant similarities between Southeast Asian cultures, there are also quite a few differences, increasing the complexity of localising products and business models. I can keep on going about the challenging nature of the region, but you got the point, building a startup here is really hard.
“This is a particularly challenging market for founders to get started,” Abheek Anand, Managing Director of Sequoia Southeast Asia
With all of this in mind, I thought it would be valuable to dive into what strategies increase the probability of success in SEA.
Critical factors for building a successful business in Southeast Asia
Throughout the past seven years, I have seen several strategies again and again when talking to founders across the startup ecosystem of SEA. So I thought, why not summarise my findings and share them with the broader community?
The levers I have noticed to work are:
Leverage a tested business model
Adopt low-pricing
Align incentives
Expand regionally
Localise
Let’s explore each lever in detail.
Leverage a proven business model
It’s not a secret that investors and founders in SEA have an appetite for proven business models.
What do I mean by that?
In plain language, copying business models and products that have been widely successful in developed markets.
Perhaps the best example of this approach is Rocket Internet. The company entered Southeast Asia in 2012, aiming to launch one new venture per quarter. Although keeping track of all the companies Rocket launched in the region is challenging, some well-known ones include Zen Rooms, Zalora, Lazada, Food Panda, Lamudi, and Lyke.
Although many of those ventures failed, some were quite successful, i.e., Lazada and Zalora. The one common thing amongst all those startups was that Rocket attempted to replicate a proven business model and tailor it for the Southeast Asian market.
A proven business model helps you raise capital faster. In turn, your one goal as a founder is to focus purely on execution; the playbook has been written,n and the money is in the bank. Not to mention, it’s a lot easier to find great ops and business development talent in Southeast Asia as opposed to product and engineering.
Adopt low-pricing strategies
When I first arrived in Southeast Asia, I immediately noticed the price sensitivity. Even in B2B capacity, and regardless of how well-funded or successful your counterparty is, negotiating heavily is a common practice.
Let’s take a few examples, highlighting LinkedIn and Slack.
Not too long ago, I met a few people from LinkedIn who mentioned that Indonesia and India are the only markets where the company offers discounts globally. Many large technology companies are adopting this trend of highly localised pricing.
Another example that comes to mind is Slack. While negotiating with their APAC team, I learned that the headquarters location of a company could result in a 60 per cent reduction in pricing (i.e., India VS Singapore).
That’s not surprising, given the lower standard of life across SEA. Let’s take the average monthly salary in the region excluding Singapore (being an outlier), which comes to about US$1360. With a large and youthful population of over 685 million, many business owners prefer to hire more staff rather than pay for expensive software or hardware that has a promise of “productivity” or “saving time.”
When it comes to B2C, that dynamic is amplified quite a bit. For example, e-commerce platforms have been having a frenzy of shopping events to lure in consumers.
Guide to e-commerce promotions in Asia.
This is also evident in the hotel and travel industry. My first job in Indonesia was as the Head of Marketing for a travel startup. Back then, we faced intense competition from heavily discounted online travel agents, ultimately leading to the company’s closure.
I vividly recall an experiment where we listed several free rooms on our website. We promoted the campaign as a treasure hunt and let people explore our listings to find the free rooms, which caused the entire site to crash due to the massive influx of traffic.
Aligning incentives
In a market where salaries are relatively low, anything that can boost your income is appreciated and grows virally. To illustrate, I will provide two examples, one in ride-hailing and the other in mobile games.
Gojek
GoJek started as a ride-hailing app but has since expanded to offer various services beyond transportation. The company addresses a significant issue as most markets in Southeast Asia lack a reliable public transportation system.
Additionally, Gojek provides a means for drivers to earn a livelihood without specialised education. Currently, GoJek “employs” over two million drivers who rely on the platform for their income and appreciate the flexible employment opportunities it provides.
In developed markets, ride-hailing drivers often use apps like Uber and Lyft to earn extra money. In contrast, many Gojek drivers rely entirely on the company to make a living in Indonesia.
The local government also benefits from increased employment rates and support in solving significant problems in the transportation system.
The easiest way to understand how the game works is to imagine CryptoKittes and Pokemon having a baby. The gameplay involves collecting and battling digital creatures called Axies, which are tokenised as NFTs. Players earn valuable NFTs by playing well and can sell their characters for profits that can be used to purchase game tokens or converted into cash.
Axie is especially popular in emerging markets, such as the Philippines, Cuba, and Venezuela. It provides livelihood opportunities for people who play it full-time and earn around US$800 per month. To onboard financially vulnerable players, the game developers have created “scholarship” programs that loan out Axies in exchange for sharing tokens earned from wins. There are about 40 Axie scholarships that I know of, which have created a brilliant way to onboard people who cannot afford the onboarding fees.
Axie took off in the Philippines, where many people are playing to supplement or entirely replace their income source. People who play full-time can earn about 200 SLP tokens daily at a rate of US$0.2 which comes to US$800 per month. That’s not impressive income for developed markets, but in developing markets is a no-brainer, and many people rushed to play during the pandemic.
Where people search for Axie Infinity the most around the world, according to Google
In both examples, we see startups that have found ways to share revenues with people using the platform. In markets where the living standard is low and many people do not have access to a great education system, such platforms thrive.
Expanding regionally from the offset
Expanding early is a common strategy in Southeast Asia. Despite the large size and population, your target market might be small. As a result, many entrepreneurs expand their market by venturing into other Southeast Asian countries early on. While some companies have found success by focusing on one country, such as Tokopedia, many prefer to venture out early.
Here I will offer the example of Docquity, where I am currently working. The founders have been quite successful in expanding very early in their journey.
You can think of Docquity as a professional network for doctors with a strong focus on education. Currently, the platform has over 350,000 doctor users in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan. Unlike many startups in developed markets who wait until they reach Series C or D to expand internationally, Docquity entered multiple markets across Southeast Asia early on.
The founders were successful thanks to two strategies. First, they cracked the playbook of quickly finding the right people on the ground who can kickstart a community of doctors in each market. Second, we aligned our growth with our clients. We often worked together to conquer new markets whenever they needed our help. This kept costs low and revenues high.
I now oversee engagement across all countries and have noticed the success of each call is driven by high localisation. It’s uncommon to find campaigns that work well regionally. In most cases, we work closely with local teams to run highly localised initiatives. This leads me to my final point — localisation.
Business localisation
Localisation is another crucial strategy for success across Southeast Asia, yet it is often overlooked. While I might have briefly covered the topic under the previous sections on “low pricing” and “regional expansion,” I believe it deserves separate consideration.
Even well-established startups in Southeast Asia struggle with localisation. A deep understanding of the local culture is essential, but easier said than done. In my experience, this includes adapting the brand to fit the new market through local campaigns incorporating local slang and cultural nuances.
“Almost everyone in the leadership team has at least lived here for some number of years… So you need to be multi-local, not regional,” Lim Kell Jay, Head of Grab Singapore.
In addition, it is important to modify products to comply with regulations and cater to unique use cases. Simply translating the website and product is not enough. A notable example of a company that has successfully localised in Asia is Spotify. The company used a variety of strategies and tactics, which I covered in an article sometime back.
Similarly, at Docquity, we have adopted a multi-site structure for our website. We use specific plugins and widgets for each market to ensure that our message and product resonate with the local audience. While the effort is more significant, it allows us to achieve a level of localisation that many other companies cannot.
Another example is Sea Group’s solution to the problem of unbanked individuals in the region. They introduced the “AirPlay” product in Indonesia to address the largely rural population, a reverse ATM that offers digital cash distribution in remote areas.
These counters also provide internet services in areas with limited infrastructure. This product is highly localized and specific to just some markets and thus offers a great example of the thinking one needs to succeed.
The five essential levers for conquering the market in Southeast Asia
By now, we have covered five different levers that might help you grow your business across the region: leverage a proven business model, align incentives, expand regionally early on, adopt low pricing, and localise.
It’s important to note that these levers are interdependent but work best in conjunction. As described above, the region is difficult enough. Founders need to reverse engineer what’s working and build products that cater to that. The following model shows how the levers should be approached and integrated for maximum success.
You could focus on one strategy in isolation, but the probability of success increases as you start layering different levers, one on top of another. This is hard because you do not know how all parts of your system should fit together.
What would be effective early on? When to introduce another lever? And the level of magnitude you need to consider. Yet, it does give you a mental framework that guides you toward what is essential and how much effort you want to allocate.
So these are the five levers I came up with. The idea of the Southeast Asia Mechanics Framework was three years in the making. I first wrote an article on “winning fast-growth markets” a few years back.
At the time, my view was that some business models and products experience tail other headwinds, but I could not pinpoint the levers at play. After advising nearly a hundred founders on their go-to-market for Southeast Asia, I started seeing patterns. With this framework, you can avoid the same mistakes I made when relocating to Southeast Asia.
Lastly, I want to address the elephant in the room. This article is informed by the time I spent working in and exploring Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem over the past several years. I have not conducted any academic studies, and thus you need to take it with a grain of salt.
Every rule is bound to have edge cases. We can all think of examples of companies that are successful without following any of the methods described in this article. I guess that’s the challenge of running a business. There is no one recipe that works 100 per cent of the time.
Life is unpredictable, and even the most well-intentioned frameworks can backfire or prove ineffective. But that does not mean we should not study what works and what might be contributing to the success. Each founder decides how to run their business, and I hope this framework proves helpful.
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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
