Matthew Tippetts started his professional career as a tech banker about 20 years ago, before moving out to manage portfolios at US-based hedge fund Citadel. This enabled him to come to Asia where he soon discovered the massive gap in terms of the user experience.

“There wasn’t a lot happening in online space. There were a lot of things that could be done to help merchants and get them to really leverage data properly to grow that business. So that’s basically how the idea started,” Tippets recalls.

The first thing that Tippets and his co-founders did was to do a market study. “We wanted to understand how people do payments. So we interviewed 1,800 businesses, about a thousand people, to really understand what people are ready to do and how they do it,” Tippets says.

Tippets wanted to see what the people were using at that time and what the trust factors were out there.

This initiative eventually led to the founding of Cambodia-based fintech startup Clik.

“We wanted to see their interest in some of the services that I was envisioning at the time, and the result of the study was positive. And so we decided to start building up the team, Skye (Skye Cornell, Chief Marketing Officer) and I. We then met the third co-founder, Darren Jensen, along with other co-founders who are all either serial entrepreneurs or tech professionals, fintech professionals,” Tippets continues.

Why Cambodia

In its platform, Clik shares its vision to “create a digital community across Southeast Asia by providing a 100 per cent safe and seamless payment method, suitable for everyone” by building an advanced mobile payment system for enterprises, merchants, and consumers.

In doing so, the question arises on why Cambodia was chosen to achieve this.

“I was at the time in Cambodia, so that was a natural reason. But also it’s mostly because Cambodia, in our view, is the best place for piloting a new technology infrastructure. Here, we have close to more than 80 per cent of internet coverage for the population, where you can get 10 gigabytes for US$7-8. Ninety-five per cent of people here have smartphones, so they have the tools to do mobile payments,” Tippets elaborates.

Also Read: Ecosystem Roundup: Intuit acquires TradeGecko; Synagie proposes US$45M sale of e-commerce arm; Ayoconnect, Wahyoo, Clik, Vesta secure investment

“When we did our feasibility studies and asked questions to people paying in Cambodia, close to 60 per cent of them were already using apps to make payments. One of the payment companies was in 30 per cent of people’s smartphones, which showcased how big the level of penetration is,” Tippets says.

In contrast to what most people believe, Cambodia has a pretty dynamic fintech sector. There are already quite a few players such as Pi Pay, a youth-targeted cashless mobile payment platform.

Phone-to-phone tapping payment

To understand the kind of ecosystem Clik is building, imagine the not-so-distant future where no hardware is required to do a cashless payment.

“We’re looking to enable banks to link bank accounts to the app, so that when you tap with your phone to make a payment, it comes straight out of your bank account, making it practical because it’s completely seamless,” Tippets announces.

Tippets adds that what can be seen now of the company is a little bit like the tip of the iceberg.

“The visible part of the platform is that we help merchants do different things related to data insight. From creating loyalty plans to microtargeting, messaging and so on, all available in the app for the consumer. But beyond that, we have web applications developed for internal purposes, such as building our own customer relationship management and sales force automation system to automate and assist the activation team in reaching out to merchants and converting them,” says Tippets.

“We’ve also built an electronic KYC product that could allow these merchants’ customers to link their bank accounts and onboard customers in 90 seconds when it comes to consumers,” Tippets adds, saying that the e-KYC is where they really hit it off when they first showed it to the target merchants.

“We decided to prioritise the e-KYC and it’s a critical part to the customer journey, whether it’s a merchant or the customers. A merchant can just download the app and look through the application to fulfil all the necessary Know-Your-Client, which is similar to what a bank would require, but in an automated way,” he continues.

Also Read: Cambodian fintech startup Clik raises US$3.7M in seed funding, announces key hirings

In Cambodia, however, to do the standard KYC, it is required to have a face-to-face check-in.

“To address this, we have an activation team queued up with this sales force automation tool, which can really make it easy for the activation team to target merchants and act on converting these merchants onto our platform. So they would go to a merchant, help them download the app, help them collect all the information they need, and within five minutes, a merchant can be fully KYC,” Tippets breaks it down.

The capability to onboard merchants in five minutes is powerful because it opens up a completely new market, which is where the micro SMEs can really thrive with the elimination of needing a Visa account or hardware tool, as everything is done via smartphone only.

The investment and partnerships preceding the launch

“We were unorthodox in terms of our late commercial launch, as we’re looking to really establish our footing in this space. But we have signed agreements with the equivalent of over 2,500 merchants, and we also have agreements with financial institutions for testing and partnering with our services,” Tippets said.

Even before it was officially launched, Clik manages to secure several investments and international partnerships. The company is also raising for its Series A.

Clik’s leading investor is Openway Group, one of the leading investors in mobile payment and cloud payment systems.

“When we explained it to the founder, Andrew Vereninov, he immediately understood what we were doing and volunteered to help us. And within a call, we got nearly US$700,000 in funding, and we’d been working with them for nearly four years now.”

The company then got another investment from Phillip Capital’s POEMS.

It is also securing a guaranteed license by the National Bank of Cambodia. “We expect to get a license by October earliest. So there’s no longer any regulatory risk before our official launch,” Tippets adds.

Also Read: MYPINPAD and Clik aim to unify the digital point-of-sale industry

In addition to the investments, Clik also utilises MYPINPAD’s enhanced Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant payment security, as well as facilities that allow integration with existing payment infrastructures.

Being data-driven as the main focus

The recent and on-going funding will be used for a product roadmap.

“Let’s assume that we’re on track with the launch at the end of 2020, by the first half of 2021, we expect to have quite a few more payment capabilities. So we’re hoping to start with Visa, but we’ll add on MasterCard, and most likely UPI and Alipay. We’ve also already been in discussions with a few other financial institutions to be able to link up with their accounts,” Tippets details.

“We also plan on having additional functionalities launched shortly after the commercial launch, with international remittance being one of them. And in the second half of 2021, we will have further data-driven tools around data analytics and artificial intelligence and machine learning to help our customers predict their revenues and also optimise loyalty plans and the micro-campaigns,” Tippets further adds.

“On top of that, we also expect to expand by the end of the year as we’re already well in the process of applying for a patent license in a neighbouring country, which most likely will be Myanmar,” he ends.

The data-payment gap

Right now, according to Tippets, 85-90 per cent of transactions are still in cash in Cambodia, and that is with around 25 mobile payment players existing in the market.

Tippets says that the potential for market growth is huge as there is enough space for quite a few players. He specifically points out the brick-and-mortar businesses, in which there’s a massive fragmentation of payments and of data.

“In Southeast Asia, for retail payment, 97 per cent are in brick-and-mortar businesses, but nobody’s really catering to these brick and mortar merchants to help them gain some of the data-driven tools that the online space has to really better understand that customer base to better cater to them, get them to be more loyal, and repeat purchase and basically drive more value,” Tippets says.

Tippets believes that moving forward, payments aggregators are going to be key in bringing that interoperability between all these different players to be able to grow the business.

Also Read: Without privacy, Asia’s cashless society will only benefit governments

“That’s why … we’re all about building an ecosystem where we can bring a lot of value to our partners, to the merchants and to the consumers, so that they have a good enough reason to use the service six times a day all the time. Because it’s seamless, practical, ultra-safe, and because it’s everywhere,” Tippets closes.

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Image Credit: Clik

The post Why Clik believes that Cambodia is the best place to pilot a new fintech infrastructure appeared first on e27.

Anchanto raises US$12M from MDI Ventures, European shipping firm Asendia, claims profitability; Ascendia is the 4th customer to turn into Singapore-based Anchanto’s shareholder; As of 2019, the B2B SaaS firm claims to have served 12K+ business and sellers consisting of over 300 global enterprises. e27

Singapore’s tech firms put up lists of retrenched workers to help them find new jobs; A local initiative called FreshlyBaked.io, which is collating these lists, said that there are more than 550 professionals, managers, executives and technicians in the nation on these lists; Skyscanner is one of the latest firms to start its own directory which it is promoting on multiple channels. Malay Mail

How Vietnam’s e-commerce firm Tiki manages to keep employee churn rate healthy; Chief People Officer Sakshi Jawa discusses the various HR challenges faced by Tiki, which employs nearly 3,000 people across Vietnam. e27

How bad is the retrenchment situation in Singapore, and how much worse it will get?; Unemployment and retrenchments on the island continued to rise in Q2, especially in the aviation, hospitality, F&B sectors; Retrenchments rose by 108% to 6,700 between April and June, compared with 3,220 in the first 3 months of the year. Malay Mail

Asia bets on blockchain to battle online theft during pandemic; The global blockchain market is expected to hit US$15.88B in 2023 despite retreating 7.27% to US$2.27B in 2020; Blockchain has emerged as a solution for fighting digital counterfeits, pushing businesses to adopt the technology. Nikkei Asia Review

New Singapore live-stream technology aims to recreate theatre experience at home; On their screens, audiences can hang out in the theatre foyer reading virtual information about the play, chat with the front-of-house manager and even sneak a peek at the actors getting ready in their dressing rooms. SGSME

MAS earmarks additional US$182M to boost fintech innovation; The Singapore’s central bank will commit the amount over the next 3 yrs under the enhanced Financial Sector Technology and Innovation Scheme (FSTI 2.0); The budget is 11% higher than the US$164M spread over 5 years that was injected under the first FTSI scheme, which was launched in 2015. DealStreetAsia

Startups urged to unlock value of Malaysia Digital Hubs with launch of special deal; The hubs are an extension of the MSC Malaysia Cybercentre that was created for startups and digitally-powered businesses; It’s designed as hotbeds for innovation, digital co-working spaces and incubators using digital tech in their respective fields of specialisation. Digital News Asia

APAC SMEs responding well to pandemic, but face challenges in digital transformation, says poll; Among the APAC SMEs that responded to the section on COVID-19 impact, 77% said they had adjusted remote work arrangements for employees; The areas that S’pore SMEs cited the most often as significantly impacted by the pandemic were the abilities to meet customer demand, win new business, operate at full capacity. SGSME

Why the Avengers would make a bad startup team; A set of highly talented people coming together to attain a mission could often end up failing if they don’t get a time-travel redo; Talent does facilitate performance, but only up to a point, after which it becomes detrimental as intra-team coordination suffers. e27

Temasek, Mirae Asset return to invest in Impossible Foods’s US$200M Series G round; Impossible Foods has so far raised close to US$1.5B in total funding since launch in 2011; COVID-19 appears to have had a positive impact, at least in part, on the burgeoning alt-protein industry. AgFunderNews

Launching a whole-plant ‘pork’ made from jackfruit in Singapore is next for Karana, say co-founders; In the future, it also plans to launch products using other regional ingredients that will enable us to expand beyond pork; Karana recently closed US$1.7M seed funding for its jackfruit alternative meat. AgriFoodInnovation

How working from anywhere (WFA) is defining the next normal; WFH is not going to be the silver bullet that rebuilds the world’s economies; Instead, a hybrid workforce that incorporates the ability to WFA is what will define this Next Normal. e27

MDEC urges SMEs to register with Digital Xccelerator (DX) platform; The DX platform is designed to help SMEs gain access to available programmes, incentives and tech solutions that best match their specific digitalisation needs; It’s a free-of-charge initiative launched during the MDEC inaugural SME Digital Summit. Malay Mail

Korea’s US$2B Unicorn Toss Join forces with CIMB Bank Vietnam for in-app banking solution; Since launching in Feb 2015, Toss garnered over 48M app downloads and processed over US$10B in P2P payment in Korea, and started to expand its biz to Vietnam since 2019; In an emerging market like Vietnam, the unicorn had a different strategy to win over the young generation. Fintech News

China to expand testing of digital currency; The digital currency pilot programme will cover much of the country’s most prosperous regions; China’s central bank has said that the digital currency shares features with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Facebook’s Libra, but it will be designed to handle transactions more quickly, making it feasible for wider adoption in China.WSJ

Robots in, buffets out: Asia hotels try socially distant hospitality; Establishments that pride themselves on “personal service” with a “human touch” are now forced to keep employees away from customers as much as possible, while also rethinking a host of other amenities guests used to take for granted. Nikkei Asia Review

Developing an IoT system for Thailand; Experts propose an IoT ecosystem that requires a combination of key players such as tech service providers and the government to jointly facilitate factories connecting their machines, making them “speak” to one another and having them work automatically with a minimal amount of human involvement. Open Gov

Championing the spirit of entrepreneurial resilience; Businesses in the F&B industry have taken to offering food delivery services, while those in education have switched to online classes; In this difficult period, it has become more important to rally businesses to champion the values of resilience, tenacity and importantly, innovation in their daily operations. SGSME

Telecom speakers advise digital readiness; Thailand is first in ASEAN to embark on 5G frequency allocation as it aims to become a digital hub; The nation needs to embrace new digital tech such as robotics, AI, drones, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, AR/VR, and 3D printing, which are all seen as a tech disruptors. Bangkok Post

Amid contactless boom, S. Korea steps into cashless society; Concerned about COVID-19, people are increasingly using mobile services to order food and other necessities online instead of dining out or buying their clothes at physical stores; People in their 40s and 50s have become a crucial customer base. The Inquirer

eBay rolls out an e-commerce export programme for Filipino SMEs; ‘Global 24/7’ is specifically designed to help local SMEs leverage eBay’s platform for global export; Aside from Philippines, the programme is extended to Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam. NewsBytes

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Image Credit: 123rf.com

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Not a lot of people may realise this but when it comes to navigating various job opportunities, the one fundamental factor that’s often overlooked is company culture. We can discuss work-to-home proximity and debate about the ethics of comparing pay grades as much as we want, but at the end of the day, culture fit is what tips the scale when it comes to a person’s employment journey.

And haven’t we all been there? While paychecks and other concrete factors define the backbone of our decision-making, how long we last in a company and how happy we are during our time there are determined by how well we mesh with the values of the organisation.

According to a 2019 report, culture fit is the most important aspect when it comes to staff retention. Because we spend so much of our time at the workplace, it is necessary that employees feel connected in the environment they work in. This is integral not only with regard to how long employees last but also with regard to their sense of presence as well as their overall performance.

Company culture is known to have a direct impact when it comes to boosting a company’s profile and ultimately creating a brand out of its identity. Fostering this sense of identity through company culture can yield tangible results in terms of investor expectations and compensation costs.

As such, Manila-headquartered Workbean launched their culture-search platform that helps companies showcase who they are and what they value in employees to attract talents that mesh well with the company’s values and culture.

Empowering the workplace

In a nutshell, Workbean focuses on helping talents find meaningful careers in companies where they belong by helping employers showcase their most authentic stories about their people, workplace, and culture.

Launching in January 2020 with 8 pilot companies, they have now grown to working with 15 partner companies. Workbean has had over 25,000 unique views of the “culture page” of their portfolio companies, while their job-click rate (job-clicks per culture page views) rose from averaging 5-7% between February to March, and 16% in July. Starting from 1,000 monthly active users in February, they have now grown to 13,000 in July.

“We are seeing that companies are adding employer branding initiatives to their people strategies and not a lot of tools exist to assist HR leaders in this space,” said Neil Rojas, Workbean Co-founder, CFO, and Chief Strategist.

Also read: PouchNATION is changing the game in crowd management tech

Rojas added, “When I lived in Malaysia and Singapore, I noticed that the career perspectives of job-seekers are wider and more informed. This is not the case for Filipinos; the dream of the majority of fresh graduates is to work for the well-known conglomerates and FMCGs—product brands that are well-known.”

In the Philippine context, he argued that not a lot of people apply to tech and software companies despite the high growth potential. Filipinos are still more likely to go for areas often considered “safe” and “traditional”, whereas elsewhere in the world, there is a draw to technology companies and high-growth startups that are changing the world.

Workbean seeks to help widen the Filipino perspective and the best way Rojas believes one can achieve that is to provide a platform that offers authentic company information.

The importance of work culture in the digital age

With COVID-19 disrupting virtually every aspect of human interaction, and by extension, workplace dynamics where employees engage their coworkers through computer screens, it is especially important for companies to craft and nurture their values as an organisation.

Moreover, companies must build their teams according to those values and constantly engage their employees in ways that yield the best results both for the organisation and the individual satisfaction of team members.

Rojas believes that in this isolation economy, innovation will skew towards culture-building and engagement because these are the things that we need to preserve and improve on right now.

“In our interviews with users, we got the sentiment that employees need to feel that their management and their leadership care about them and see their human sides. This is a side of work culture that you don’t see in company websites and job ads—these are the things that we want to shine a spotlight on,” explained Rojas.

“Workbean is positioned to be the platform that showcases the human element of work.”

The future of Workbean

With the momentum that the company currently enjoys and one that they experience despite the setbacks created by the global health crisis, Workbean seeks to onboard at least 100 companies in the next 12 months and have partner companies in major cities in the Philippines.

“We want to be able to spread our mission to other parts of the country because we know that if we can widen the perspectives of a conservative nation such as the Philippines, we can also do so in other countries in Southeast Asia,” said Rojas, underscoring Workbean’s larger plan of scaling regionally in the future.

Also read: VCs get behind Disaster Tech in search for innovative life-saving technologies

He added, “scaling the product and having more companies in the platform [is the goal]. We want to elevate the way people search for jobs and we want to spread this culture of transparency not just in the Philippines but in Southeast Asia.”

The company is also gearing to release a self-service platform where HR teams can self-manage their culture pages. Coupled with plans to offer modified services that come in free and premium versions, Workbean hopes that companies will be able to start building their brands with Workbean for free and eventually upgrade to a premium version once operations finally stabilise.

Addressing challenges

The modified services model currently in development is a part of the company’s plan to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 to businesses everywhere. Because companies are understandably in crisis mode where some have been forced to freeze their hiring processes, Workbean hopes to be able to offer their services without burdening the precarious financial situation of different businesses today.

Moreover, with Workbean having signed up for an e27 Pro membership, the company no longer has to rely on offline incubators and accelerators to access investors and explore funding opportunities.

“e27 Pro makes it easy to identify which investors to reach out to because data is presented in a way where we can easily filter things such as funding stage, markets, and funding amount,” said Rojas, highlighting the important role of transparency and staying informed in the context of fundraising. “The ease of reaching out just to start a conversation is very valuable for us,” he added.

Workbean’s solid run despite having been thrust into a pandemic-riddled status quo says a lot about the company’s formidable team and business model. With their plans already underway and their access to e27 Pro tools and insights, we can only expect great things from Workbean and their vision to inspire a healthier and happier life at work using authentic information for people to reach their full potential.

The post Workbean: Empowering the workplace in the time of COVID appeared first on e27.

With the ever-changing business climate across the globe, companies now find it increasingly important to innovate and grow in order to remain relevant and gain a competitive advantage over their peers. XNode, a leading private accelerator from China, starts from entrepreneurs, connects the resources of large enterprises and synergises the power of investment institutions, academia, government agencies, and accelerators or incubators to build a diverse entrepreneurial innovation ecosystem progressively.

The China-Singapore Innovation Launchpad is one of the many acceleration programs organised by XNode to help participants gain in-depth market knowledge through workshops and meet leading partners and customers to find the product-market fit. More importantly, participants can tap into the XNode’s community and alumni network to receive ongoing support on knowledge, partnerships and financing.

In September last year, XNode leveraged e27’s ecosystem platform and network of startups to promote the Launchpad. The programme called for Singapore startups keen to enter China to submit their applications.

e27 recently had the chance to sit down with Luuk Eliens, XNode’s Chief Commercial Officer, and Clara Chen, XNode’s Innovation Lead, to get their thoughts on the importance of bridging global innovation, the potential for startups in Singapore and the ecosystem in China to mutually advance together as a whole, and how e27’s community and expertise have helped XNode to achieve their desired outcomes.

Also read: ‘Asia Pacific is rich in innovation’: Airbus Ventures Partner Lewis Pinault

How e27’s community supported XNode in its China-Singapore Innovation Launchpad and helped achieve its objective

On working with e27, Chen shared that “e27’s coverage about our Launchpad helped us reach far more people than we might realise; it is a nice complement to our own community-building efforts and collectively, the continued visibility keeps our brand in the innovation ecosystem’s eye and reinforces the message that we are here to support the Singapore ecosystem for the long haul.”  Apart from capitalising on XNode’s existing community members, the Launchpad also tapped onto e27’s ecosystem of startups, investors and partners to attract relevant stakeholders to participate in the inaugural accelerator program in 2019.

Chen further added that the campaign with e27 “gave the XNode brand a personality and helped to tell our story to the right audience. After close to a year, our content is still being discovered by audiences new to the e27 community and continues to earn organic traffic.”

The importance of bridging global innovation and how accelerators like XNode are navigating the new business landscape in fulfilling their mission

Even amidst these times of crisis, XNode’s mission to build the world’s leading engine for innovation and to bridge China to the rest of the world remains the same.

Eliens pointed out, however, that there are definitely several firms including early-stage technology companies that are now more cautious in executing their global expansion plans. “In particular, a few companies with whom we already reached an agreement to help expand their business into China decided to hold back and wait for the right timing to do so,” he revealed.

Nonetheless, Eliens firmly believes that the marriage of business and innovation is a global necessity and startups and innovation ecosystems will naturally gravitate towards the geographies where opportunities are the most significant.

On future opportunities in the space of innovation in China and the rest of the world

There are growing trends both in China and in other parts of the world where we start to see governments stepping up to revive economic growth through innovation. 

Eliens posits, “from that angle, we see a plethora of opportunities in areas such as Smart City, Smart Manufacturing, and Sustainable Development Trends including climate change adaptation and mitigation measures.”

“But this will depend on the ability of companies to take advantage of the new industrial revolution and to overcome growing economic nationalism, as sustainable development depends on a global policy climate that remains conducive to cross-border investment.”

Key advice for founders who are planning to internationalise their business into markets like China

“I certainly believe there is great potential for startups in Singapore and the ecosystem in China to mutually advance in the long-term”, Eliens begins. 

China remains as one of the largest growth engines globally during the pandemic and the country is extremely hungry to spur innovation by fostering collaborations externally. In this regard, since startups from Singapore are global natives and easily adapt and localise from the get-go, they are perfectly positioned to play an important role.

In order to become successful in a vast ultra-competitive market like China, Eliens advises startups and companies not to underestimate the amount of localisation that is required across all angles including product, business model and communication style. He also advises startups to have a long-term vision and mission and be willing to invest in their business expansion for an extended period before they can even draw any meaningful conclusions from their expansion strategies. 

For Eliens, some of the critical characteristics of these companies include “having a very differentiated value proposition, some experience in the China market and the humility and willingness to listen and change”. With that, founders would have a better chance of flourishing in this competitive market.

Carrying such a positive outlook on their bold initiative in the region, XNode has tapped the right partners to complement their objectives. “The campaign with e27,” Chen shares, “was the catalyst to our community-building efforts in Singapore. It connected XNode with hundreds of startups and scale-ups, and was the bridge to future partners and talents within the ecosystem.”

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XNode recently worked with e27 for a campaign to tap into e27’s network of startups and reach out to a wider targeted audience. We can share your story at e27, too. Engage the Southeast Asian tech ecosystem by bringing your story to the world. Visit us at e27.co/advertise to get started.

Apart from the above, e27 also has the expertise on co-organising accelerator programs. Some of our recent notable projects include the Facebook Community Accelerator Program, Vision Program with Science & Technology Policy Research and Information Center (STPI) and Smart Zholy Program with the Kazakhstan Government. Find out more by contacting our open innovation team at dustin@e27.co or bocheng@e27.co and let us help you to achieve your desired goals.

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Traditional agriculture practices consist of complex and inefficient value chains. Typically, a farmer’s produce goes through several intermediaries before it reaches the end consumer.

As each intermediary in this chain is entitled to its share of margin, so the farmer’s proportion of the dollar earned from the consumer is very small. This is where agri e-commerce can be very helpful.

Digitisation of the agriculture supply chain is more important

The digitised platform can drive efficiency within the current value chain, with the potential to benefit both farmers and consumers. While at one hand, e-commerce can enable farmers with increased access to new markets such as retailers, restaurants, and consumers; on the other hand, it benefits consumers by providing them with fresh and nutritious produce.

In developed countries, many studies have shown that a direct market place between farmers and consumers, help the farmers to retain between 40 to 75 per cent of a food dollar, as opposed to a mere 15.6 per cent in a corporate chain.

In developing countries, where agriculture contribution to GDP is in double digits, e-commerce will be of significant benefit to the lives of farmers.

Pivoting to agri e-business happened at a large scale in the current COVID-19 pandemic. In Malaysia, during MCO (Movement Control Order), established e-commerce player Lazada connected farmers from Cameroon Highland to consumers directly.

Also Read: Why agritech startups will call for the next e-commerce revolution

The company reached out to farmers immediately, who otherwise were going to throw away their produce due to logistic issues and helped them go online.

Agri e-commerce is finally here. However, it is still in infancy, especially in Southeast Asia. SMEs who want to tap into this space should keep some key business considerations in mind while engaging the farmers to adopt the online platform.

The level of engagement can vary from basic to advance stage, depending on the business model and services provided. However, businesses that are still in the nascent stage, or just beginning their operations in agri e-commerce space should keep the below-mentioned golden rules in the farmer engagement model in-view.

5 golden rules for an effective farmer engagement model

Acquiring the farmers:

The first step is to build a robust base of farmers who can serve customers. A commitment from the farmers to engage with technology, which is new and uncertain to them, will require businesses to invest time in building a relationship with their target pool of farmers.

One way is to employ field agents who can organise small communities in the rural areas to explain the business model and its benefits to the farmers. Another way is to partner with farmers’ societies, co-operatives, and government.

eKutir (India), a social enterprise group that offers sustainable technology solutions in agriculture, has established decentralised local kiosks for collaborating with farmers. Each of these kiosks is run by a trained local entrepreneur, who would then work closely with farmers on a project, thus leveraging ICT tools for agricultural services.

Also Read: Ecosystem Roundup: Intuit acquires TradeGecko; Synagie proposes US$45M sale of e-commerce arm; Ayoconnect, Wahyoo, Clik, Vesta secure investment

Startups can follow this model of collaboration with local entrepreneurs; or partner with social enterprises that can help them to utilise an already built network of farmers, and save cost.

Peer group dialogue and referral programme, where acquired farmers tell their digital journeys to others, is also an effective way to utilise word of mouth to drive farmer’s use of the platform.

Building trust between farmers and consumers:

During the startup stage of e-commerce service, where both demand and supply elements are uncertain, a legally secure off-take arrangement can play a pivotal role in building trust between both parties. To safeguard the interests of both sides, agribusiness should try to secure a minimum guaranteed off-take agreement between the farmers and the buyers (if the buyer is retail, restaurant, etc).

One on hand, this reduces the risk of servicing the requests raised by the consumers. And on the other hand, it ensures farmers about the guaranteed income from the e-commerce platform. An example of the implementation of this approach comes from the Kenyan Agri e-commerce business, Tulaa, where the farmers sign a short-term contract with Tulaa agents, enabling a legal guarantee with a minimum off-take.

Providing continuous education and training:

Ad hoc training by local field agents, where they teach the farmers about key tasks such as grading, packaging, entering the details of the products, and eventually using the e-platform, needs to be coupled with continuous learning and engagement channels.

Communication channels such as hotline number; WhatsApp, Facebook messenger groups, and the chatbot are needed to keep the conversation going between farmers and the agribusinesses’ employees. Another way to facilitate continuous learning is to educate and train local farm leaders on new insights so that they can drive local communities to discuss and exchange ideas.

Today, farmers want conversational technology, which answers their questions continuously. An agri e-commerce startup that meets this expectation will speed up the adoption of its platform. One such successful conversational technology company is 8villages (Indonesia).

Also Read: A comprehensive guide to Indonesia’s agritech ecosystem

They started their journey by launching educational and communication applications for agriculture matters. But now they also provide a platform to rural people, where the farmers can ask questions and seek information about agriculture matter from agriculture practitioners and experts.

Enabling pre-finance options:

The success of this business model depends on making farmers less dependent on the middlemen. Securing finance for farmers to enable them to start their e-commerce journey, would lower their dependency on the middlemen who otherwise charge high-interest rates.

Agri e-commerce businesses can partner with potential lenders to provide easy finance to farmers. Jai Kisan (India) is an agri-fintech company that provides low cost and timely financing options to farmers. Partnering with such fintech companies would allow agri e-commerce companies to support farmers without committing any significant resources.

Another agri e-commerce business, such as Indonesian startup Tani Group, provides both a platform and the necessary funds to the farmers. They make use of a crowdfunding platform, where individuals or enterprises can choose to invest in a project of their preference.

Agri startups can also use such models to provide funding options within their e-commerce platforms.

Integrating e-commerce platform with value-added services:

Truly growing the farmers’ community and speeding up the adoption of e-commerce platform, would require an integrated solution that not only connects the farmers to their customers but also helps them to manage the quality of their produce.

An e-commerce platform can offer various kinds of features to enable farmers to manage their crops. It can be frequent crop reminder notification, which informs the farmers about the right dosage and time of inputs, depending on their crop requirement. Or it can be about providing consultation on where to source various machinery and agriculture equipment at a lower price.

To give an example, DeHatt (India), an end to end tech-enabled platform, offers a distinctive feature in its app.  The app provides various services to the farmer community and has recently included a feature that offers customised advisory services through automation and voice calls in the local language. This feature is innovative in the sense that it makes the solutions available to farmers in an easily digestible manner.

Also Read: In brief: eBay launches e-commerce accelerator in Singapore; Circles.Life introduces eSIMs

With the supply chain disruption this year, it is a good time to pivot for agri e-commerce startups. But there will be stiff competition from already established e-commerce players and large companies planning to enter this sector.

However, startups can benefit from establishing a strong farmer engagement model, that develops a close network between the farmers and the consumers.

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In 2019, around 52.6 per cent of event professionals reported having invested more in event tech than the previous year; this year, those numbers might skyrocket. To say that COVID-19 has thrown the events industry into disarray would be an understatement.

This enforced physical isolation has led to an en masse shift towards digital solutions: from virtual birthday parties to virtual music festivals, to large-scale trade conferences such as Facebook’s Oculus Connect 7, that took its annual San Jose conference online — events are going virtual.

But is this digital migration just a fad, brought about by necessity, gone by the time the pandemic ends?

On one hand, it is true that this new age of virtual events won’t be the death knell for traditional, analogue events: Long-term quarantines have only made clearer that we are social creatures who go stir-crazy if left alone for too long; and, the serendipity of meeting and networking face-to-face is something that virtual alternatives cannot yet capture.

On the other hand, while we need to meet other people — as the pandemic keeps event venues shuttered and people more than an arms-length apart, it has become imperative for us to rethink what meeting requires.

Hybrid will be the new normal

Physical events may be impossible for now, but they will still be a part of the post-pandemic world — though they won’t be the same. For one, concerns about health and safety will persist — according to a survey conducted by SACEOS in May 2020, only five per cent of respondents said that they would be comfortable attending events in October without safety measures in place — thinning out crowds as fewer people flock to physical event spaces and mandating stricter hygiene standards.

Also Read: For COMEUP 2020, the post-pandemic future will be led by startups

As event venues operate under capacity, events will require a digital component to keep participant numbers high.

And, the current pandemic has forced even the most resistant of the old guard to adopt and adapt to digital solutions. Almost 60 per cent of the respondents to a survey conducted during our digital event on how to run digital conferences reported that they believe digital conferences will be a part of physical conferences in the future, despite only less than 10 per cent of them having organised digital conferences before.

From live streaming events to remote viewers outside conference venues, to chat rooms that facilitate interaction between online viewers and participants on-site, digital elements currently being tried-and-tested will see greater implementation in physical events as they prove their worth — bringing into being hybrid events that marry the best of both worlds.

Hybrid events will be the next normal. The digital side of events of our near future will leverage features we already know well, stretching the limits of familiar technologies to provide new ways for participants to experience the event and engage with its offerings.

So, what will the future hold?

Device-agnostic, portable events

According to Cisco’s 2020 Global Networking Trends Report, the video will come to represent approximately 82 per cent of all business internet traffic by 2022. In addition, over 70 per cent of the global population will have mobile connectivity by 2023, with smartphones representing the second-fastest growing mobile device in the period between 2018 to 2023.

More people are watching videos online, and an increasing number of them are doing so on mobile devices — and embracing this digital transition will reshape how and where we participate in events. With modern streaming technology, it is now entirely possible to have an entire event in the palm of your hand, to take with you on-the-go.

Also Read: We revamped e27 Events and here are the new things you can do

Of course, to make these borderless events possible, you need technical literacy to ensure the cross-compatibility of their event on different operating systems and devices:

Does your video streaming platform of choice work the same on both Android and Apple phones? How does your live stream landing page look on different screen resolutions? These are issues you must tackle to ensure an optimal experience for all your participants.

New opportunities for generating revenue

In our survey, when asked how much they would be willing to pay for a digital conference in place of the physical edition, which used to be US$1,000 per ticket, 89.2 per cent of the participants were willing to pay for the online conference.

However, 82 per cent expected the price of a digital conference to being around 10-40 per cent of the price of the physical equivalent — owing, perhaps, to the lower set-up costs, the lack of face-to-face networking opportunities, and in some cases, even shorter duration.

If you want people to be willing to come to and pay for your digital event (or the digital offshoot of your physical event), you need to add value to their experience — and going digital creates new opportunities for you to do so.

Think about “freemium” events, for example: With the main session helmed by well-known keynote speakers, available for all participants to view and learn from — and paid breakout rooms, for participants who want more in-depth knowledge or networking opportunities with the speakers. “Freemium” models aren’t new — they’ve been used extensively in SaaS software — but it is significantly harder to implement in physical events, short of stationing a ticketing booth outside of every breakout room.

Also Read: Time to pivot, not panic: The startup advantage to dealing with a pandemic

Looking beyond the event industry

Digital and hybrid events have been around before COVID-19. What the pandemic has done is force the event industry to adopt them at an unprecedented scale and speed, pushing many experienced event managers into unfamiliar territory and creating a new breed dedicated to navigating the new virtual terrain — the digital event managers.

As we build the skills needed to make the most use of digital spaces, we’ll see more digital event managers take a page out of the playbook of digital veterans in other industries — such as e-commerce, or gaming.

When developing features for online exhibitions on GEVME Live, we had to think about how we would digitalize exhibitions. Would it have made the most use of our digital tools to have simply mapped out the physical event verbatim into the online world — or could we go further?

The benefit of a digital exhibition is that it is not constrained by space or time: Participants and exhibitors can come from anywhere, at any time. To make the most of this, we took inspiration from e-commerce, creating an online marketplace where exhibitors can have year-long exhibitions, and engage participants with live streams, networking sessions, and other features like showcases and seminars.

Digital event managers also have a lot to learn from the gaming industry. Gamers know how to work online engagement via video streaming: Two out of the top five most-subscribed Youtube channels feature gaming-related content; on the live-streaming platform Twitch, the average user spends 95 minutes per day watching live gaming.

How do effective game streamers maintain this high rate of engagement, curate their communities, and generate social media buzz on their streams? Events tech is constantly evolving in response to global needs, industry trends, and the wider world of technological developments.

Also Read: #SaveEvents: 4 event-focussed startups to support to keep the sector afloat

Still, the most impactful changes are likely to come from close by — things that are tried-and-tested and have proven themselves to work, even if they haven’t been applied to the event industry yet.

If you are interested in finding out more about what the future of events will hold, and how to navigate the emerging field of digital and hybrid events, why not join us at our Digital Events Academy?

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Working from home (WFH) used to be a bit of a polarising subject. You either believe it works, or you do not. The past few months, however, have shown that we can be just as productive working from home, as we usually are from our office desk.

My colleagues and I are quite fortunate in this regard. From day one, remote working has been built into the company’s DNA, and we are encouraged by leadership to work wherever we are most effective, whether from home or in the office. So when the coronavirus started making its presence felt globally, it wasn’t a stretch to shift to a remote work arrangement for most of our workforce.

This current impetus to remote work was very much crisis-induced, and for many, a move to try and keep companies afloat and workers employed for the short to medium term. Businesses are reacting to the situation as it develops, and a great many do not have business continuity plans set up either.

As much as some workers have embraced the idea of remote work, there are also those with roles, responsibilities, and circumstances who struggle mightily with staying productive from home for long stretches of time.

Prior to COVID-19, just 3.6 per cent of the total employee workforce worked from home more than half the time. Previous research shows that 67 per cent of employees have jobs that require in-office collaboration, so the office is still critical to getting work done, especially when collaboration is needed.

However, Global Workplace Analytics estimates that 25-30 per cent of the total workforce will be working at home multiple days a week by the end of 2021.

Also Read: e27’s remote staffers sharing their work-from-home experience

We are more than halfway into 2020, and businesses are starting to open, with workers tricking back to the office. Things clearly will not be the same, what with the social distancing requirements in place in many countries. For me, this led to a realisation that work is something you do, and not a place.

Being productive, anywhere

Working from home is not going to be the silver bullet that rebuilds the world’s economies. Instead, a hybrid workforce that incorporates the ability to Work From Anywhere (WFA) is what will define this Next Normal. Whether in the Asia Pacific region or globally, I firmly believe that the act of being productive can come from anywhere, whether the office, at home or somewhere in between.

Business leaders will now need to consider how to organise office spaces to strike a balance between employee interaction and distancing requirements. This may mean the demise of the office pantry or the rightsizing of large meeting rooms in favour of smaller spaces for collaboration outfitted with video conferencing tools that feature a consistent experience with the same collaboration tools at the office as they do at home.

Working from anywhere also means empowering employees with the right tools to make flexible work possible, whether from home or from the office. As they split their time between the office and their home office, remote workers expect and need an enterprise-grade experience, all the way from equipment like their headsets and webcams to ensure that their collaboration experience is optimal, and more importantly, able to meet corporate security requirements.

At the same time, adequate tech support needs to be easily available to ensure that they stay connected, engaged, and productive without costly downtime.

Investing for the medium- and the long-term

Investments made in this time of crisis are likely to have a more lasting impact on future performance; this thinking is not lost on employers in APAC who are not averse to investing in technology during this time. For example, 57 per cent of APAC employers are looking to increase their technology investments, according to a GlobalData survey commissioned by Telstra.

This investment will lean towards cloud-based collaborative tools to help boost productivity and efficiency throughout these organisations going forward.

Also Read: Is your new work-from-home culture stressing your employees?

With a workforce in transition, I also firmly believe that this is a prime opportunity for business leaders, managers, and workers alike to better understand and navigate the intricacies of how employee experiences, corporate policies, and organisational culture come together. The experience of collaborating with team members is even more critical now so as to ensure that they feel part of the larger team, even when part of the team isn’t in the office.

On the macro level, smart building technologies may start seeing greater adoption as the demand for healthier workplaces grows. Perhaps it is time to consider investing in infrared cameras to help measure employee body temperatures to see if they have fevers, smart air purifiers that ensure ample amounts of fresh air, or even touchless systems to replace elevator buttons.

Looking beyond the next normal

For all its faults, I still see the office serving a purpose for collaboration deeply rooted in how humans interact on a social level. Throughout my career, I have found that certain shared experiences can only be found in the office, whether packing in all-nighters to wrap a critical project or proposal,  or commiserating around the office water cooler (or drinks after work) with colleagues after a long week, or suffering through the awkward silence of suddenly finding yourself alone in the lift with the company CEO. I’m sure many others will agree.

If anything, COVID-19 turned out to be the impetus that companies needed to prove that remote work can be viable for an increasingly agile and efficient workforce, complementing the roles and functions that work best from the office. We cannot say for sure when the pandemic will end, and what the next, next normal will be.

What is clear is that as organisations work towards empowering a transitional and scattered workforce, there is always a place and a need for a consistent, secure, easy-to-install and easy-to-manage communications and collaboration experience. We may not all be working together in the same office space going forward, but this sense of connection has never been more vital to our long-term survival.

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Remember the Avengers? A set of Earth’s mightiest heroes coming together to save the world. Ring a bell? Just like a startup, that is most usually a few talented, driven people coming together to do something about a problem they have perceived.

Although the Avengers franchise has a happy ending, the way they get there is questionable at best. Startup teams could learn a thing or two of what not to do from the Avengers. A set of highly talented people coming together to attain a mission could often end up failing if they don’t get a time-travel redo!

Superstar syndrome

While you are building your startup, you are on the search for the best talent out there. This includes rockstar programmers, innovators, disruptors, and marketing champions. Everybody loves superstars. But when you end up putting a bunch of them together, while just filling skill gaps, oftentimes, you will not get a good startup team. Why?

Avengers movies are an ode to the issues of having a collection of superstars as your team. Throughout the franchise, you can pick up a thread of all-knowing egos and a complete disregard for teamwork.

Are you thinking this happens only in the superhero world? If only that was true. According to a study, a group of all-stars tend to move away from coordination and cooperation, and towards competition and conflict. Talent does facilitate performance, but only up to a point, after which it becomes detrimental as intra-team coordination suffers.

A chemical mixture that makes chaos

Captain America to Stark: “Fury didn’t tell me he was calling you in.” Stark answers, “Yeah, there’s a lot of things Fury doesn’t tell you.”

Also Read: The ‘Avengers’ of Singapore’s game development scene just secured funding

Right before Iron Man jumps off a plane, Captain America says: “Stark! We need a plan of attack!” To that, Stark says: “I have a plan. Attack!”

Captain America to Stark: “We have orders. We should follow them.” That gets him a “Following’s not really my style.”

Are you sensing a theme?

A running theme throughout the franchise is the lack of collaboration between different superheroes. Constant squabbling over who does what better and the “put on your suit, let’s go a few rounds” to see who’s better.

Many times, we see Captain America and Iron Man both independently working on the same thing, not trusting each other’s processes. Both getting to the same place, but through different methods. Only if all that superhero power was used in a way that does not cancel each other out!

If you take a moment to reflect, it is more common than it should be in startup teams. As a startup, you are mostly working on unfamiliar terrain, solving problems as they come, and as is expected of talented people, each of them thinks they have the best way to solve the problem.

But as a team, when you are strapped for resources, you need every soul in the team pushing in a single direction which seldom happens without good leadership.

“That’s my secret, Captain. I’m always angry.”

Captain America to the Hulk: “Word is, you can find the cube”.

Hulk: “Is that the only word on me?”

Captain America: “Only word I care about.”

Good, because the other words were his volatile and destructive nature, anger issues, and delusions of grandiose. Startup founders tend to follow a similar approach while choosing their team. Most founders aim to collect “smart” people in the team while giving no or too little weight to their people skills.

Also Read: What I learned from the Avengers of Southeast Asia’s venture capital scene

While the singular objective given to Hulk was to “smash”, you may need each of your team members to do much more than that. Undermining the importance of soft skills in the team could lead to catastrophic results as is obvious from the Avengers as they run around trying to contain Hulk’s “personality” for the rest of the movie. Do you need all that drama while swimming upstream trying to build your business?

“Bridgeport?” said I. “Camelot.” Said he.

This infamous Mark Twain quote used as a metaphor for communication (or the lack thereof) between civilisations with very different backgrounds is squarely applicable in many parts of the Avengers franchise.

Two words: Ultron fiasco. Stark and Banner came together to build an advanced AI solution to defend the Earth. Great initiative. But they did not speak about the project to any of the other Avengers to avoid criticism and objections. No adequate review or safeguards were in place and viola, catastrophe.

This is common not only in the superhero world but in the startup world too. Lack of communication between team members leads to misunderstandings and breakdown of team dynamics. Thus, creating silos within teams leading to trust issues. It is also one of those things that becomes a catalyst to many other problems that leads to failure like lack of passion, losing focus, etc.

So you have a bunch of Avengers in your startup. It is a task to handle, but they do get things done. How can you make them work together and save the day?

Creative leadership

Most startup founders do not actively think about their role as a leader of the team. Being a leader is not the same as being the boss. You may not need hierarchy in your team, but you do need leadership. Leading the superstars is going to be harder than leading a regular well-balanced team.

Understand that your superstars might not instinctively know how to value each other’s emotions, remember birthdays, and to catch the signs when someone in the team needs help.

Also Read: This team of Avengers offers you cashback for online purchases

As a leader, you cannot afford to be passive. Actively identify areas for them to work together. Understand the strengths and weaknesses, and the management style required for each teammate. For an Ironman persona, it may be good to give them the flexibility to explore innovative ideas and concepts, but be prepared to reinforce the objective, so that they don’t get lost in fantasyland.

If you have a Hulk, keep them away from the stress and give them space to problem solve. When you have other priorities, Captain America can be the loyal leader who never loses sight of the big picture.

Instil a common purpose

Despite all their differences, Avengers banded together, in the end, to save the day for a bigger and sentimental purpose. You may think it does not come along in real life just as it does in reel life, but that is not true. Find the “why” behind your business and actively champion your team behind the cause.

Do not mistake purpose-driven for non-profit. Purpose holds your team together, helps guide your decisions objectively, and ensures the authenticity of your actions.

In addition to being a glue, the purpose will also guide you on day to day decision making as to what is beneficial for the business against vanity based distractions. As unstable as a startup journey can get, you need your team to be united behind a common vision, ready to support each other and not only be content- but revel in being a part of the team that saves the day.

Cultivate trust through team building

Most startups think ‘team-building’ activities are for corporates that have way too much time at hand and money to spend. Team building does not necessarily mean an expensive retreat to Mauritius. It can be solving an escape room together, paintball, or board games.

Dedicating a few hours every month towards these inexpensive activities will take down the walls within the team. This will pay you dividends later as stories and inside jokes of “remember that time when…” which are uniquely yours and will bring your team together at every retelling.

Also Read: One man’s trash is another’s gold: How Tridi Oasis plans to transform plastic waste management

Another way to bring human emotions into play is to take away the screens. In a tech startup, communication is mostly through instant messaging sites such as Slack or Discord. Although extremely convenient for day to day operations, it keeps you removed from the emotional closeness cultivated from face to face communication. Encourage in-person communication that builds camaraderie in the team.

Repurpose conflict

Captain America and Ironman are not expected to agree all the time. It would make for a less thrilling movie. Conflict breeds creativity. The point is not to have a bunch of extremely talented individuals agreeing with each other all the time. That will lead to a very in-the-box team who never challenge each other. The first feedback you get should not be from your customer or your investor. Your team is the first line of offence.

You can do this by embracing conflict as a part of startup culture. Understand that no one in the team (including you) has a monopoly on being right. Encourage everyone to actively question assumptions, ask questions, and call out objectivity. Be cautious of the criticism getting personal.

We need teams that are talented, well-adjusted, and disagree enough to better the value of the product. Ultimately, the goal is that when you go out there into the shark eats shark world, your product could not have been any better than it is.

Consider a wholesome profile while hiring

While functional profiling should still be an important metric in hiring, the personality of the potential hire, and how the person fits into your overall team framework is equally important. It is hard to resist when you come across someone with a skill that is exactly what you are looking for.

But do not make split decisions. Take ‘meet the team’ part of the hiring process seriously. It would even help to get a potential hire to come on one of your team building activities to see how they react and work together when there is no formal interview setting.

As a founder, it is for you to understand the big picture, whether hiring this person will add something or take something away from the team dynamics. Maybe it is better to go for a well-adjusted candidate who is 75 per cent there in terms of skill than a 100 per cent skill match who just may not fit. But sometimes, when you are strapped for resources, there may not be a choice.

Also Read: 10 tips that will help launch your startup fast

In those cases, weigh the pros and cons and make an informed decision. It is then up to you as a leader to put in the extra effort needed to manage and keep the team together.

Everybody loves superstars. But having a cohesive group of highly motivated, and diversely skilled people is what your startup needs to succeed. As a founder, you need to take your role as “first among equals” seriously and rally your team to save the day!

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Today, TikTok requires no introduction. Together with parent company, ByteDance, the pair are among the hottest keywords on the web and in the papers. Following an executive order issued last week by President Trump banning transactions with ByteDance and its subsidiaries, namely TikTok, the video-sharing social media app has found itself in hot water once again.

Alleged by the US government to be capturing vast swaths of information from its users and potentially allowing Chinese government access to their personal information, TikTok has denied these claims. The main culprit behind this international fiasco the app has found itself in? Data privacy. And here the key takeaways for entrepreneurs.

Rise of data-driven decisions

Renowned data scientist W. Edwards Deming perfectly sums up the importance of data today by stating that, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” Making data-driven decisions is the process of utilising data to inform your decision-making process and validate a course of action before committing to it.

Famed frameworks such as The Lean Startup methodology by Eric Ries are examples of data being infused in business decisions. A study by the Harvard Business School (HBS) has shown that making data-driven decisions bring about a host of benefits.

Ranging from cost savings due to increase in efficiency by using data to pinpoint loopholes to making more confident decisions based on concrete data, it is no surprise why a survey conducted by PwC showed that data-driven organisations are three times more likely to report significant improvements in decision-making compared to those who rely less on data.

Also Read: Why Tik Tok is not a real competitor to Instagram

TikTok, like the majority of other social media platforms, utilise user data to tailor content for its consumers. Crucial to TikTok’s re-engagement strategy to retain users was the enjoyment users had derived from its content. Therefore, data played an important role in deciding the right content to showcase.

Personal data collection involving an individual’s interests and interactions drove algorithms that curated personalised and engaging content for users and in turn, significantly increased the appeal of TikTok.

Research conducted in 2019 by McKinsey has shown that personalised content will be the prime driver of marketing success in the next five years. The acceleration in the adoption of digitalisation, driven by the pandemic, has certainly brought forward the timeline. The desire for curated content has never been greater.

Thus, entrepreneurs, particularly those in the B2C sector, need to effectively harness data to understand customers and improve the user experience.

Ultimately, given the consumer-centric business model many of these startups adopt, founders should aim to connect with their customers on a deeper level and customise their offerings to their unique pain-points. The enabler for that to happen? Data.

How much data is required?

Having discussed the important role data plays in businesses today, an ongoing dilemma facing firms is the quantity of it required. With the rise of data privacy, first brought to light by the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2018, authorities are clamping down on errant firms that collect excessive user data. Therefore, it is no coincidence that TikTok was banned by the American government due to excessive data collection.

The app starts collecting data the minute you download it. According to the company’s privacy policies and terms of service, TikTok tracks website users are browsing and how they type, down to keystroke rhythms and patterns.

Also Read: I tried TikTok out and now I get why it is the future of digital marketing

Furthermore, for most users that unknowingly grant the app the full permissions required, TikTok has full access to photos, videos, and contact information of friends stored in the device’s address book. Even after users close the app, TikTok tracks their whereabouts using IP addresses and GPS coordinates, providing the app with precise location while users work, exercise, or travel.

The amount of personal data harvested by TikTok is bewildering and begs the question of why so much is required. For example, it is difficult to rationalise the collection for certain data, such as keystroke rhythms and patterns.

With the likelihood that consumers will feel betrayed because of the excessive “snooping” on them, trust is the name of the game when it comes to data collection. Therefore, entrepreneurs should be mindful of both the amount and type of data their startups seek to collect and only store meaningful data which improve product offerings and the experience for users.

Importance of data security

Although TikTok has denied claims that government agencies have access to personal data of its users, the crux of the issue here is the amount of data the firm stores in its data centres located in the US and Singapore. With over 800 million active monthly users and over two billion downloads worldwide, TikTok’s database stores personal information of over 10 per cent of the global population.

As seen from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, huge amounts of in-depth personal information make social media firms the prime target for data breaching. Locally, studies have shown that there was a two-fold increase in hacking attempts in 2019 with more than 137 million malicious attempts to access personal details of users on media sites.

Given the high value of data stored in its database, it would not be surprising to read about a data breach, possibly on a larger scale than Facebook, occurring at TikTok in the future. Even though research by IBM has shown that the average cost of a data breach globally was US$3.9 million in 2018, perhaps the biggest long-term consequence of a data breach is the loss of customer trust.

A good reputation is often a company’s most prized asset and a data breach has the potential to tarnish even the cleanest of reputations. Therefore, founders need to build a culture of data security within their companies and invest in the needed resources to safeguard user data and build the element of trust with their customers that would ultimately, drive bottom-line growth for their firm.

Also Read: Today’s top tech news: TikTok’s creator tests out Spotify-like apps, Bio startup Aprogen has become Korea’s newest unicorn

Pursuing sustainable growth

The late Jack Welch, the former Chairman, and CEO of General Electric, shared that good management encompasses balancing both short and long-term goals and this is where founders, particularly for late-stage startups, need to focus on.

TikTok was arguably a victim of its own success. From its launch in 2017 to surpass two billion app downloads in 2020, the viral growth of the platform brought along its fair share of controversies too. Indonesian authorities banned TikTok in July 2018 for containing content promoting pornography and blasphemy. While the ban was lifted a week later after the app pledged to monitor such content, it marked the beginning of allegations against TikTok for promoting discriminatory content.

Other shocking allegations include platform moderators being asked to suppress users with “abnormal body shape”, “ugly facial looks”, “too many wrinkles” or in “slums, rural fields” and “dilapidated housing”. While TikTok has denied these policies are no longer in place, it was appalling they had existed beforehand.

TikTok resorted to focusing on short-term growth by prioritising aesthetically-pleasing users and promoting materialism, catering to the unhealthy needs of millions of teenagers on the platform. Given the young demographic of users on the app, TikTok chose the easy way out and rode on unethical trends to grow its popularity and chose not to actively police their content.

Even though it paid off handsomely in the short-term, the growth was simply not sustainable in the long-term. There were warning signs as various national authorities, ranging from Netherlands to India, started to open investigations into TikTok and their policies. This spate of inquiries culminated in the executive order to ban TikTok in the US, its second-largest market after India.

Therefore, entrepreneurs must have the discipline to look past instant gratification and focus on achieving sustainable growth. Being a founder entails additional responsibilities and the relationship with your business goes deeper than a conventional employee.

When things go south, the buck stops with the founder. Given the inherently greedy nature of humans, especially in entrepreneurs fixated on and desiring for success, it is therefore vital for founders to take a step back occasionally and evaluate whether their businesses are indeed achieving ethical and sustainable growth.

Also Read: Today’s top tech news, July 5: UK investigates TikTok over children’s data privacy handling

Learn from their mistakes

Due credit should be given to TikTok and its founder Zhang Yiming, for building an empire that connected global youths and gave rise to a new era of content creators and influencers. TikTok succeeded in the short-form video sharing industry where others, including Vine with over 40 million active users at its peak, failed.

Even though there were countless right decisions made along the way which entrepreneurs can draw insights from, what ultimately led to TikTok’s downfall were its mistakes.

Though mistakes were few and far between compared to the right decisions, the impact and severity of the former significantly outweighed the latter.

Therefore, founders should draw insights from this debacle on the importance of data collection, management, and achieving sustainable growth to prevent their firms from making the same mistakes which TikTok had made.

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Anchanto, a Singapore-based B2B software provider that enables enterprises to manage end-to-end e-commerce operations, has secured S$16.6 million (US$12.1 million) in its Series C investment round.

Investors in the round are Asendia AG (a European cross-border e-commerce shipping and mail services company) and existing investor MDI Ventures (the corporate VC arm of Telkom Indonesia).

Also Read: A peek into SelluSeller: an automated multichannel selling management system by Anchanto

Anchanto said in a media release that it will use the funds to strengthen its R&D portfolio to launch two new products, build data platform and expand to three new markets. It will also invest in hiring.

Additionally, Anchanto also announced that it has achieved profitability.

“Achieving profitability in these times is an excellent performance, and I feel this is a more significant achievement than raising US$12 million in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis. We are a capital-efficient company. Hundred per cent our revenue comes from a SaaS subscription with a high gross margin; we do not buy inventory or run services shops or warehouses,” said Vaibhav Dabhade, CEO and Founder of Anchanto.

“It took strong resilience, deep understanding of product design, engineering, marketing, sales, account management, and solid teamwork across seven countries to reach here,” he added.

Incorporated in 2011, Anchanto is a SaaS firm that helps brands, e-distributors, e-commerce enablers, retailers, third-party logistics providers, SMEs, warehouses and postal associations streamline and manage end-to-end e-commerce operations.

Its offerings include SelluSeller (online multi-channel e-commerce management software as well as a mobile app) and Wareo (full-suite warehouse management system that helps businesses manage B2B and B2C operations through a single system).

As of last year, Anchanto served more than 12,000 business and sellers consisting of over 300 global enterprises.

The company further said its customers manage over 67 million-plus stock keeping units (SKUs) and 115 million-plus listings, and have processed a combined Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of nearly US$2.71 billion via their platforms. Sellers process over four million orders per week on its systems.

The company also recently expanded into South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. It will now be looking to explore other markets within the greater Asia Pacific region and Europe in the future.

Ascendia  — a joint venture between the French National Post La Poste and state-run Swiss Post — is the fourth customer to turn into Anchanto’s shareholder after MDI, Transcosmos Japan and Luxasia.

Also Read: Pos Malaysia inks deal with Anchanto for its warehouse management technology

“Asendia Singapore cross-border e-commerce operations have been running on Anchanto Wareo and SelluSeller platform for over two years now. Asendia wholly owns wnDirect, which happens to be our customer for over six years. We see investment from Asendia as our gateway to European markets. Over 70 per cent of investment in Anchanto has been from our customers, which is a great testimony of how powerful and stable our platforms are and the trust global companies have in us,” Dabhade added.

As part of the investment, Marc Pontet, CEO of Asendia, and Donald Wihardja, CEO of MDI Ventures, will be joining Anchanto’s board.

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Image Credit: Anchanto

The post Anchanto raises US$12M from MDI Ventures, European shipping firm Asendia; achieves profitability appeared first on e27.