If Q1 2023 was the moment to prepare, then Q2 2023 is the moment to execute.
We spent the first three months of the year taking notes of the upcoming trends and changes in the Southeast Asian (SEA) tech startup ecosystem as we are gearing up for our big event of the year: Echelon Asia Summit 2023. As we have a better understanding of what our community members need, and how we can best fulfil them, we come up with a better course of action in April.
This month, we noticed plenty of opportunities to learn.
We strongly believe that experience is the best teacher there is. But the best part is that you do not have to wait until you go through something yourself to learn; you can even learn from others’ experiences. This is why we developed a new series called Failing to Succeed.
Failing to Succeed is meant for founders to share their failure stories with the startup community. Through these stories, we will get to see how these founders picked themselves up from the many failures in their entrepreneurial journey.
We debuted this series with an interview with Hungry Hub CEO Surasit Sachdev who speaks about why the first version of his restaurant reservation system failed.
“I could have validated the problem by creating a phone number and Facebook page and promoting the service. I could have added a tech element later to grow the business. With little to no investment, I could have found very early on that the problem I was trying to solve didn’t actually exist or wasn’t big enough to build a business around it,” he tells us.
Also Read: In March, we celebrated women in tech and returned to Myanmar
If you have failure stories that you would like to share for your fellow entrepreneurs to learn from, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at writers@e27.co.
Other valuable lessons come from those who had done it well.
As we go through back-to-back global crises, startups are facing greater pressure to become financially sustainable. Gone are the days when burning money is the way to go. This time, we are thinking in the long run. We are moving steadily to win the war, not just the battle.
AnyMind Group, who had recently listed their company in the Tokyo Stock Exchange following several delays, have stories to share.
In FY2022, AnyMind Group recorded an operating profit of JPY30 million (US$223,000). According to AnyMind Group Chief Commercial Officer and co-founder Otohiko Kozutsumi, there are factors that contribute to this progress.
“As you can see, all of these business models are B2B in nature … It means we don’t need to invest a lot for the user acquisitions like B2C business. So, the important point is that we have a strict budget control system. We should achieve the target, but at the same time, costs should also be maintained in quite a good way,” he says.
Human resource plays a key role in the company’s performance. To help meet internal KPIs, AnyMind Group invests in training their employees, so that they can increase productivity effectively. According to Kozutsumi, cost efficiency and productivity are the reasons why the company is able to achieve profitability without any layoffs.
Also Read: We tried to save the world in February. These are the 3 things we learned about it
April has come to an end. We see this as the month when we open our mind to learn from others’ mistakes and glories. This is the month when we secure a foundation to grow stronger.
We hit the ground, and we hit it running.
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Echelon Asia Summit 2023 is bringing together APAC’s leading startups, corporates, policymakers, industry leaders, and investors to Singapore this June 14-15. Learn more and get tickets here.
Image Credit: sporlab on Unsplash
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