Apart from social media sharing, having a comments box at the end of an article is one of the most common features to be found on various online media platforms. However, despite its popularity, the comments box is not perfect.

In fact, American tech publishing platform HackerNoon listed down three points why it has “fallen short”: There is a high barrier for readers to leave a thoughtful comment with only the most popular stories getting meaningful feedback; readers are forced to comment on the story as a whole, leading to generalised comments such as “nice story”; and finally, only readers that read the story to the finish are able to react –and many just do not go that far.

This is why HackerNoon introduced its newest feature: Inline emoji reactions.

The new feature enables readers to respond to individual sections of content with an emoji reaction. There are light grey bars next to each section; if readers hover over the bar, they will see a range of emojis to pick from, to express their thoughts and feelings about that particular section.

If a section is popular –meaning having a high number of reactions– there will be more bars and its colours will change from yellow to green to red as the activity increases. The reaction then gets aggregated and the total number will be visible at the top of the story.

“Readers now have a low-friction tool to give writers specific feedback on their words. This creates a feedback loop that writers can learn from and improve their content over time,” HackerNoon CPO Dane Lyons comments on the feature.

In this third episode of our deep dive series, Lyons and CEO David Smooke explain to e27 the process behind developing features such as this one.

Also Read: 3 mistakes early stage startups in Singapore make in product development

Topics covered in this episode:

– Product Development 101: Principles and process
– Customer matters, but they are not your product manager
– The next steps
– The mission for a better internet

Product Development 101: Principles and process

As in many tech companies, the product development process at HackerNoon begins with understanding customers’ pain points. To achieve this, every member of the team need to have a unified mindset.

“Everyone on the Hacker Noon product team is a writer in addition to their usual duties as a designer of infrastructure and product. This is a concept we borrowed from the Marine Corps where ‘every Marine is a rifleman’,” explains Lyons.

Calling this concept a “huge advantage”, Lyons further elaborates that this concept enables team members to identify problems as a user. Yet, on the other hand, they have the ability to create the solutions, being a developer of the platform itself.

In the context of the inline emoji reaction feature, the development stems from the team members frustration in getting the feedback they need to improve their writings.

“What writers and readers really need is a very low friction tool for giving better feedback. Giving an emoji next to a paragraph is meaningful. If nothing else, it gives writers much more targeted agreement or disagreement signals,” Lyons stresses.

Also Read: A multi-disciplinary approach to product development requires collaboration

Adding to this explanation, Smooke gives insight into how the team starts working on the development of a new feature.

“Everything we put time and resources into has to tie back to our three core metrics: time reading, words published, and money made. For the most part, we don’t assign projects or set deadlines. I trust our team to pick projects that they think will move our core metrics,” he says.

“Also in every weekly product meeting, we end with an advocacy session. Anyone in the company can attend and spend a few minutes advocating for a function that should be moved up the product funnel. We talk out the expected input and potential output,” he continues.

For this feature, Smooke says that the metrics that they are focussing on are the number of people who give an emoji, aggregate emojis given, and average site session time.

“Usage determines a product’s value. Every function has its own purpose. New functions should have a predetermined metric that you are trying to move. But you should also keep an eye on what other metrics change,” he elaborates.

He adds, “Logistically, we have a #product-results channel to foster discussion. We gather and monitor data, mostly from Google Analytics, Firebase, Vercel, Algolia, Sentry and internal tools. We A/B test a good bit. But also, it is timely (and a nice rush) to just ship it straight to production. At Hacker Noon, we also invested in a sound dev environment, so it’s really easy to rollback changes if break something significant.”

Customer matters, but they are not your product manager

But even this process possesses its own challenges. Lyons says that one of them is dealing with consensus; while the team members might agree about the problem that they want to solve, there are often different ways to approach.

“I think we’ve done a great job of not allowing that friction to get in the way of progress. One strategy is to not get too caught up delivering the ‘perfect solution.’ It’s much better to deliver a ‘viable solution,’ then learn and iterate. At each step, the solution typically gets a little better and the final implementation sort of works itself out,” Lyon says.

Also Read: How a Japanese initiative backed by local government is accelerating product development in Southeast Asia

He gives the example of deciding how granular to get with emoji reactions.

“There is an ongoing debate whether to allow readers to react at the paragraph-level or at the word-level. We decided to start by allowing reactions at the paragraph-level because it was a far easier implementation. But this debate inspired us to build a flexible data schema that will allow us to explore word-level reactions in the near future,” he explains.

Now, what is the role of customer feedback in this process?

Lyons admits this one can be tricky, as it can trap product developers into developing just whatever the customers want, without any further consideration.

“Running around like a madman chasing competing interests is just not an effective strategy for building a product. You’ve really got to take in customer feedback as a whole and really internalise what people are asking for before taking action,” he says.

“Users often ask for band-aid solutions to product frictions. When a user asks for a feature, don’t immediately jump to thinking about how to go about implementing it. Instead, really invest time thinking about the underlying problem. This often leads to very different and much more effective solutions,” he continues.

The next steps

When being asked about the lessons learned from the process of developing the inline emoji reactions feature, Smooke says that it is still too early to tell.

But even as they launched the early version of the features, the team already prepares the next updates in the pipeline. For example, they want to be able to go as far as enabling word-level reactions and adding comments in addition to emojis.

There will also be greater ties to inline emoji reactions to an article’s performance.

Also Read: New in e27 Jobs, 5 Product Development roles with startups in Singapore

“As we get stories with more reactions, we’ll start using reactions as a quality signal to sort stories. This could happen anywhere you see a list of stories,” Lyons begins.

“Some writers might want to configure which emojis are available for reader reactions. Maybe some writers feel cyberbullied on social media and just don’t want to deal with negative reaction options. Other writers might want to lean in and embrace critical feedback,” he continues.

“A few months ago, we prototyped a Hacker Noon leaderboard based on comments. We’d like to iterate on the design sort stories by the number of reactions received over the last seven days … When a story hits a reaction milestone, we want to celebrate that achievement with an email and/or a tweet. When readers give a story an emoji, it’s an implicit endorsement. We think those endorsements should display on the reader profile,” Lyons closes.

The mission for a better internet

Founded in 2016 by David Smooke and Linh Dao Smooke, HackerNoon is a platform that is built for technologists to read, write, and publish content. It has an “open and international community” of more 12,000 contributing writers and more than four million monthly readers.

In introducing the inline emoji reaction feature, the company has received a grant from Mozilla’s Fix the Internet incubator programme. Starting in July, the eight-week programme began in July with the new feature being launched just last Friday.

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Image Credit: Hacker Noon on Unsplash

The post How HackerNoon uses customer-centric approach to build meaningful new features on their platform appeared first on e27.

With COVID-19 affecting virtually every aspect of human life — from our lifestyles, to consumer behaviours, to labour practices — it is easy to overlook exactly how people are mentally coping given everything that is going on.

The World Health Organization (WHO) explained that because of the significant changes to our daily lives caused by stricter movement regulations being imposed by governments around the world on top of our individual fears of contracting the virus, it is perfectly normal to experience bouts of stress and anxiety during today’s precarious times.

This, however, isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. While the pandemic has amplified such experiences, many people have had to deal with different forms of stress long before COVID-19. In fact, one of the most pertinent forms of stress is the kind that is experienced at work. This is merely magnified by work-from-home arrangement that is now highly encouraged by many offices where people are unable to compartmentalise domestic leisure from the stresses of work.

Also read: Workbean: Empowering the workplace in the time of COVID-19

Another WHO study noted that a healthy working environment is one that does not only reject harmful conditions but also promotes complete physical, mental, and social well-being among employees.

It is through this lens that Dr. Ian Ng, Founder and CEO of VITA, decided to come up with a mobile personal health record which provides detailed health information and insights with easy to understand visualisation tools that will help assess mental health through people’s biological stress scores combined with psychological assessment tools.

Empowering employees’ overall well-being

Based in Malaysia, VITA by Zing Healthcare provides tech-enabled tools to monitor and measure health data at the workplace and offer insights into personal and corporate health data to keep track of health policies and assist in formulating a customised health programme.

At its core, VITA’s unique technology provides more insight into the unknown and undocumented world of stress at the workplace.

“There are numerous studies linking stress to breakdowns in physical health but it is still mostly vague associations. We want to gather as much data as possible to understand all the elements which make up work stress and how it positively and negatively affects the human body,” explained Ng, emphasising that his profession as an occupational health doctor is the driving factor to why he created this tool.

He added, “[I want to] help organisations understand more about the stresses afflicting their employees and how to start improving work conditions using data-driven insights.”

Also read: Adapt to survive: Why Singapore and the world need to reinvent the old order

When under a lot of stress, some people may find it hard to concentrate, make decisions, and feel confident about their performance at work. As the age-old saying goes, “happy people are productive people” — meaning, work-related stress isn’t only detrimental to the overall well-being of an employee, but it also affects a company’s performance.

It is thus of paramount importance that companies put a premium on this aspect of work culture: by addressing problems in employees’ well-being using data-driven solutions that seek to accommodate the best interest of all stakeholders, companies stand to gain not only a happier and healthier workforce, but also a productive one.

Technology to address human needs

“Healthcare definitely has yet to see rapid digitalisation advances as it is highly regulated and customised to every healthcare system. In order for effective uptake by the end consumers, all healthcare providers need to adopt and also benefit from digitalisation of healthcare data,” Ng argued, explaining the fundamental role of technology in how we can improve and develop healthcare frameworks that best address issues in the workplace.

Moreover, he explained that as we get more information about stress and physical health, we can make the associations required to create AI to predict disease patterns and provide early warning systems to help with the patient’s motivation and decision-making for their own future health.

“We as a company in the digital health space are ready to assimilate into and work together with current healthcare systems and create more value by making the data relevant to the consumer. It’s not just about benefiting the corporates by saving insurance premiums and increasing productivity, the final target audience who are the employees themselves have to benefit from living healthier and happier with better transparency of data,” Ng added.

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

One particular challenge that VITA foresees is resistance from healthcare providers who have yet to digitise their business as well as hospitals and clinics who are reluctant to let the patient health information freely transfer from one institution to another.

The reason for this, Ng argued, is due to fear of losing their patients/customers to the competition. At the end of the day, the objective is to allow patients to take back control of their own health data as they are the ones who will ultimately determine the outcome of their own health.

A crucial thing to surmise given these challenges is that when it comes to matters of health and safety, healthcare providers must step aside and allow people to make the best decisions for their own well-being based on transparent information and data-driven solutions — something that VITA advocates for.

Moving forward, what’s next for VITA?

Down the road, VITA hopes to work with more corporate customers to unlock the hidden metrics of stress at various workplaces. They also seek to expand their business intelligence tool based on the feedback gained from their current pool of customers, especially in terms of stress and how it affects the workplace.

In order to address challenges with healthcare providers and hospitals being stingy with health-related information, Ng said, “we do not exclusively work with any single healthcare provider and remain agnostic as a platform to allow this exchange of information to take place. Anyone who wants to join is very welcome to work with us to facilitate this freedom of data exchange.”

VITA has also recently signed up for an e27 Pro membership, allowing them to access tools, actionable insights, and fundraising opportunities that can help them push their plans further.

Ng expressed, “e27 Pro has allowed us to connect with startups, media, and investors from beyond our own home country of Malaysia and keeps us connected to the greater ecosystem out there. Our end goal is also to be part of a larger ecosystem instead of just residing in our own country.”

This exciting new development enables VITA to explore scaling opportunities that will allow them to grow not just their company but also their capacity to help out more people in the region. “We managed to make more connections than any other equivalent programme in our own country. We also utilised the Zendesk promo to help us develop our product to have a better CRM system to serve our customers,” Ng continued.

With these new developments laying the groundwork for VITA’s future successes, there is no telling how far their team can go in building a better world for employees everywhere.

The post How VITA by Zing Healthcare empowers employee well-being through technology appeared first on e27.

Beijing-headquartered online insurance company Waterdrop, with subsidiaries in Southeast Asia, has secured US$230 million in Series D financing, led by Zurich-based insurance company Swiss Re Group and Tencent.

Existing investors IDG Capital and Wisdom Choice Global Fund also joined the round.

This deal comes over a year after Waterdrop raised two rounds of investments — US$74 million Series B led by Tencent in March 2019 and US$144 million Series C led by Chinese PE firm Boyu Capital in June 2019.

Founded in 2016 by Peng Shen (a founding team member of Meituan), Waterdrop distributes insurance policies online via Waterdrop Insurance Mall, besides providing crowdfunding to fund illness treatment via its platform Waterdrop Crowdfunding.

It also operates mutuals funds.

The firm claims that the insurance mall has enrolled 100 million users and reported a total written premium of US$865 million in the first half of 2020.

Also Read: Insurtech Waterdrop Company closes nearing US$74M Series B funding

At the same time, Waterdrop Crowdfunding has raised US$4.6 billion from 320 million users.

Waterdrop Mutual has helped 12,819 families by appropriating mutual fund of US$233 million in total.

The insurtech company will use the fresh capital to tap into Artificial Intelligence and Big Data (which can help to process vast amounts of information, increase workflow efficiency, and reduce operational costs).

Yu Haiyang, Managing Director of Tencent Investment, said: “As the Chinese commercial health insurance market is expanding rapidly, Waterdrop seizes the market opportunity and succeeds in meeting user needs, use technology and innovation to provide tens of millions of families with protection, and helps to further complement the personal healthcare system.”

Singapore VC firm Jubilee Capital Management is one of the early investors of Waterdrop.

According to statistics from the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC), the insurance penetration in the first half of 2020 reached 5.95 per cent, an increase of 0.73 percentage points over the same period in 2019.

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Jubilee Capital Management is an investor of Optimatic Pte Ltd, the parent company of e27.

Image Credit: 123rf.com

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TikTok is finding itself entangled in yet another controversy as the popular short-video app is facing a law suit for alleged copy-right infringement in Vietnam, says a Reuters report, quoting unnamed sources.

According to this report, local tech giant VNG, which has business interests in online gaming, music streaming and messaging apps, has accused the Chinese app of using audio tracks owned by its subsidiary Zing without adequate licences.

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

The lawsuit wants TikTok to remove all the songs taken from Zing records and also seeks for damages of over 221 billion dong (US$9.5 million).

TikTok is quite popular across the world, including in Vietnam where it had 10 million users as of August. However, the firm has of late faced challenges in many of its key markets, including India and the US.

In India, the government imposed a ban on TikTok, along with many other Chinese apps, in July over concerns that these firms were engaging in activities that threatened “national security and defence of India, which ultimately impinges upon the sovereignty and integrity of India”. This move came in the wake of a border dispute between the two countries.

Also Read: Who will benefit from America’s attacks on Chinese tech giants?

The app is also mired in legal controversy in the US after the President imposed a ban on the app earlier this month over concerns that it could pass American users’ data to the Chinese government, something ByteDance has denied doing.

However, TikTok is challenging the US ban in the court, saying the move was motivated by politics, not national security.

The post VNG sues TikTok over alleged copyright infringement in Vietnam: Reuters appeared first on e27.

Global manufacturing is on the cusp of a major reset through the COVID-19 and beyond, which opens up new avenues for enterprises in Southeast Asia (SEA). Supply chain as a business function breathes “connectivity”, both logistical and digital into businesses.

Southeast Asia has a strong foundation in logistical connectivity and can lean on the success stories of Indian startups to build digital connectivity and scale-up. Almost 80 per cent of volume and 70 per cent of the value of global trade happens through the sea, of which 60 per cent passes through the South China Sea.

When it comes to digital connectivity, it is projected that the digital economy of SEA will triple its current size by 2025 and breach the US$300 billion mark.

Enterprises in SEA are sitting on a pile of opportunities and if they can leverage the digital transformation of their business processes as some leading Indian tech startups have done, they will be able to synergise the best of both worlds; logistical and digital connectivity.

When it comes to scaling up, Indian startups can serve some important lessons that hold relevance for enterprises that are looking to deepen their roots in SEA economies. These are as follows:

Adopt a product mindset instead of a service mindset

The Indian digital ecosystem has been through three stages of maturity: outsourcing, software services, and now software products. Currently, India has 30,000 active technology startups with more than US$4 billion in funding, and the trend towards software products has only continued to grow.

Enterprises in SEA need to embrace a product mindset right from the word “go” to create new avenues of value creation apart from cost. Price sensitive models provide a cost advantage but also make customers price-sensitive, thereby heightening the risks of erosion of market share to competitors.

Also Read: What it means to have a product-first company

Third generation Indian startups that have focused on products are extracting higher margins as compared to those with a focus on outsourcing and services.

Building the MVP from the ground up

SEA –like India– offers a lot of cultural, economic, and geographical diversity. For enterprises in SEA to transcend the challenges emanating from a diverse customer base, they need to replicate what some leading Indian tech startups have managed to pull-off.

The latter have embedded diversity into the core visualisation of their minimum viable product (MVP) while building it from the ground up. This has allowed them to be more agile and correct the course of their product development strategy to fit customer needs. Indian tech startups have been able to differentiate their products by embracing pluralism in pricing, compliance, regulations, and governance, language, and device categories across the web and mobile platforms.

Reduce supply chain length

SEA economies, like India, offer significant synergies owing to the demographics and high rates of GDP growth rates. The six SEA countries that comprise of ASEAN together have a total population of 600 million people which is larger than that of NAFTA, a combined GDP of US$2.3 trillion, and total goods exports of US$1.2 trillion.

For a region that is as diverse as India, it makes sense for enterprises to explore opportunities to stay in proximity to the points of consumption, reduce the length of the supply chain and thus, reduce distribution and downstream logistics costs.

Digitalise supplier networks

One of the major challenges of operating in a geographically diverse terrain governed by different governments is supplier collaboration. The weakest link in the supply chain and procurement network can set off a ripple effect on the manufacturing of finished goods.

For instance, if one out of 50 suppliers for an automotive OEM fails to deliver its components of the right specifications at the right time, it leads to a delay of eight days in the downstream distribution of the finished goods.

Also Read: Will South Asian tech startups thrive in the new normal? 

Indian startups are leveraging digital procurement platforms to improve the accuracy of their bidding processes and make their strategic sourcing more performance-driven. SE Asian enterprises can look to explore digital procurement to navigate across their supplier networks across several countries in the region.

Focus on core competence

Focus on core competence has enabled Indian tech startups to stay cost-competitive. They have been able to migrate towards an analytics-driven culture to map their competence, build their category expertise, and specialise while outsourcing everything else.

SEA enterprises need to do the same to scale success in the region; pivot their make or buy decisions on data, manufacture what they should, and procure everything else from suppliers that can provide it at a better cost.

One of the prime reasons for China’s cost competitiveness in addition to cheap labour is its procurement of intermediate goods from SEA. Enterprises in SEA need to leverage the cost-advantages of local manufacturing of intermediate goods and consumables such as MRO items, packaging, spare parts, accessories, and low-value components of finished goods by embracing the digital transformation of their procurement.

Leverage automation to access new markets

SEA, like India, is the home to some of the world’s most tech-savvy consumers which presents a great opportunity to enterprises in the region. With the roll-out and scaling up of the Adhar initiative, e-governance has enabled 1.2 billion Indians to have biometric identities.

This has, in turn, enabled higher financial inclusion through the creation of 500 million bank accounts for the previously unbanked and created tremendous opportunities for fintech startups, digital payments platforms for B2C transactions, community lending, crowdfunding, etc.

Also Read: A beginner’s guide to the B2B e-commerce business

Similarly, SEA enterprises need to leverage opportunities presented by the automation of business processes to access new markets, reduce transaction costs, and costs of customer service. Disruptive technologies hold great potential for SEA enterprises and can create an additional annual impact between US$10 billion to 20 billion, approximately accounting for 5-10 per cent of the projected annual GDP of SEA economies in the next five years.

Embrace B2B e-commerce

SEA and India share a common trajectory of cross-border commerce and distribution which is likely to gain higher momentum after the COVID19 pandemic. The roll-out of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in India based on the principle of “one nation one tax” boosted inter-state commerce and distribution by transforming the country into a compact and borderless economic union.

Similarly the existing strategic and economic partnerships enabled by ASEAN offer a tri-polar edifice to the global supply chain from Japan through SEA to the US. Interestingly three ASEAN member nations are home to the suppliers of OEMs in Japan: Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia.

The strengthening of cross border trade partnerships in ASEAN in combination with B2B e-commerce models can enable SEA enterprises to reimagine cost and technical efficiencies in trade and distribution, just like Indian startups have done in the aftermath of the GST.

This will allow SEA enterprises to not only leverage export opportunities in the United States and Japan but also explore endogenous growth opportunities within the region of SEA.

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Agritech and food tech startups have been increasingly receiving recognition. Just recently, in 2019, a pan-Asian-Pacific competition called Future Food Asia was awarding one finalist out of the 10 with a $US100,000 grand prize as they present a wide range of technologies to address some of the most critical challenges of the food supply chain.

With food tech companies continually innovating, there’s been plenty of new technologies and developments in the market from food techniques in distribution and automation to creating new superfoods that are not only tasty but can also be part of a healthy diet. 

Who are some of the food tech startups leading the way? Below is a curated list of a few incredible startups making their mark in the foodtech world. 

Grain – Singapore

With plenty of delivery food services such as Deliveroo, Grabfood, and Foodpanda in Singapore, how has Grain managed to differentiate itself from the competition? Instead of partnering with restaurants, Grain has adopted a different approach and prepares its own dishes instead. 

Grain focuses on providing a unique range of menu items to its customers from local favourites with a unique twist to truffle pasta and more. Since Grain rotates its menus weekly, customers won’t get bored of the choices, and it’s decently priced with meals usually priced between SG$10.95 to SG$19.95 with a varying delivery cost.

Also Read: Bringing innovation to the table: Why foodtech is the next frontier in Southeast Asia

Currently, the company is also trialing menu plans and is offering it to a small group of customers. 

Dahmakan – Malaysia and Bangkok

Another great on-demand food delivery service is Dahmakan in Malaysia and Bangkok. The company provides healthy, fresh meals to customers that are cooked by a friendly chef with fast delivery.

The process is simple: the company sources fresh local ingredients from their suppliers, then you can order your preferred dish from the website or app, a chef will help cook the meal for you, and it’ll be delivered right to your doorstep. 

Some items that Dahmakan has on their menu include a minced pork bowl, chicken rice, and spicy chicken quesadilla. They’ve even got dessert from passion fruit cheesecake to an apple crumble yoghurt, and you can choose to have the items delivered the day of, or sometime during the week. 

Gathar – Australia 

Do you love entertaining but find it a chore to set up and cook for a large group of people? If so, Gathar would be right up your alley. The company takes the stress out of entertaining by connecting individuals with chefs that’ll come by and do all the work. Since its launch, the company has achieved plenty of success and has expanded into 10 locations in Australia. 

Also Read: Setting new rules for the food delivery industry in a post-pandemic world

While the recent pandemic may have caused many companies’ demise, Gathar has managed to shift gears and innovate. During this period, they’ve catered to parties of two that may be celebrating their anniversary or small weddings and even hosted a virtual dinner party with chefs cooking the same four-course meal in various locations before delivering it to the guest’s home.

Phyto – South Korea

Finally, you’ve got innovative food tech startup Phyto that has created a plant-based salt that can reduce sodium intake by 20 per cent. By using and extracting salt from an aquatic plant that’s also known as Salicornia, the company has managed to produce a naturally low in sodium salt that’s great for those with high blood pressure, and reducing body fat.

The company has recently launched in Korea but is also planning to launch in other markets such as Japan, China, Europe, and the United States. Recently, the company has also developed PhytoMeal – a new superfood ingredient that is also made of Salicornia.

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One of the most common reasons why a company fails is not because the quality of the technology or the size of the market, but rather, it is because of a misalignment between the co-founders of the company.

Just in the past two weeks, I’ve dealt with two strong startup teams that are dealing with a “co-founder break-up” –without having to ruin the company.

Let’s face it, every person has a different reason for why they start or join the founding team of a company. Some want to “change the world.” Some want “to build things that impact millions of lives.” To be honest, many people are in it to have the chance to win the venture lotto, hitting the jackpot of having more than one per cent of shares when a company get listed or acquired, acquiring “life-changing wealth.”

Of course, 99 per cent of startups fail, so it might have been better for most to just work a corporate job. Regardless, it’s very important to know what each other’s motivations are before you commit yourself and spend 10-12 (or more) hours per day with a group of people for at least three to five years.

Also Read: Finding the right co-founder is worth the trek

When I was starting Plentina, a new fintech startup focused on alternative credit scoring and micro-lending in the Philippines, I met one of my Stanford friends who has successfully built a company and exited her startup.  She gave me very important advice on cofounder alignment.

She also exclaimed that it is important to develop this transparency early on because, like marriage, there is typically a “honeymoon period” of 12-18 months where everything seems to be fine. But when sh*t hits the fan, then this conversation will be most important to come back to understand each other.

Here are the most important questions to sit-down with your co-founder when you start or shortly thereafter. My advice is to do a “double-blind test” where each one of you writes down the answers separately and discusses.

• How does this startup align with your personal purpose?
• Why are you personally building this startup?
• What is a good outcome for the startup and when do you expect this?
• What is your end goal in 10 years and how does this startup help you achieve this?
• Any life changes over the course of the startup that we must anticipate?
• What are the non-negotiables for you (meaning the situations or values where you will stop everything)?
• What are the areas where you are best at and areas where you are weak at?
• How can I as your co-founder help you achieve your 10-year goal?

Starting a company is hard, and often come with many risks. It is undoubtedly an emotional roller coaster. I hope that you all get to ask these questions to each other early on; not just to avoid heartache later on, but also be able to focus on building the business rather than dealing with co-founder drama.

Also Read: Fantastic tech co-founders and where to find them

Have you asked these questions already? If so, would love to hear what other questions you think should be asked as the founding team gets formed.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. Become a thought leader in the community and share your opinions or ideas and earn a byline by submitting a post.

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This article is published as a part of a partnership with Future Food Asia. Agrisea is one of the 11 finalists of the US$ 100,000 Future Food Asia (FFA) 2020 Award to be hosted from September 21-25.

Agrisea was initially built to solve the UN Sustainable Development Goal 2, No Hunger. In 2018, when we started our process, as founders we both thought it was ridiculous that hunger could still be so prevalent throughout our society. As we grew and became the company we are today, we realised we held a unique opportunity to change the very fabric of our food and agricultural system.

A complete overhaul with sustainability as a core focus of agricultural development. Together we built a vision of the agricultural system that integrates planetary longevity with sustainable resource management and promotes ecosystem integrity. All of these components work together to solve world hunger and provide permanent food security for all of our futures.

We see Agrisea an ocean agriculture company, as the gateway to a truly sustainable future. To us, we can all be a part of Agrisea.

Growing rice in the ocean

Agrisea is developing oceanic salt-tolerant crops by identifying the genes in organisms such as mangroves and seagrasses that allow them to activate salt tolerance and thrive in the oceans. Rice, for example, has these same genes, and technology encourages the expression of these genes to create crops that have gained the ability to grow in oceanic salt conditions.

The genetic design is based on four key pillars that have been individually proven through in-depth academic research over the past 70 years. These four pillars manage the salt concentrations between our plants and their environment. The company is currently commercialising its technology by licensing it for specific crops to agriculture companies to grow.

As Agrisea scales, we will focus on the supply of agricultural goods, e.g. staple crops – rice and alternative protein sources – soybean and mungbean, by deploying our own farms in coastal waters as a means of sustainable food production. Now, more than ever, our second phase is ever important to replace the demand generated for alternative protein sources that taste excellent as we move away from high-density livestock production.

From rural England to the salt deltas of Vietnam

Agrisea started as an idea in a bedroom of a small village in the rural North of England. Through the friendship and vision bound by Rory and Luke, Agrisea has evolved into an international brand and company. One of our greatest achievement came as the graduation from IndieBio, the world’s most successful biotech accelerator programme.

Four months in the heart of San Francisco, meeting goliath corporations, monumental investors, and building a network spanning continents.

Also Read: Bringing innovation to the table: Why foodtech is the next frontier in Southeast Asia

Expanding from those four months and our final event of the IndieBio Demo Day, where we presented to 3,000 people split between our physical crowd and virtual viewers, Agrisea has continued to grow and build the foundations of an agricultural system that will change the fabric of the food industry.

Some highlights include our confirmed plan to create a pilot plot site and field lab on the coastline of Grand Bahama Island to support circular economies in the Caribbean and building relationships with key seed distributors across ASEAN, including starting our first contract to convert Vietnamese rice varieties for application in the Mekong Delta.

Inroads into Asia

Amid all the concerns around the COVID-19 pandemic, it is thrilling to be a part of a community working to build the world of post-COVID-19. We are excited to begin partnering with representatives from the entire Asian region and elated to be part of the Future Food Asia 2020 cohort of finalists. It is an honour to be recognised for our role in the world we are trying to build. It provides us with the opportunity to integrate deeper into the Asia wide innovation network that is critical for us to build the world we so often refer to.

A vision to grow more with less

Agrisea’s vision and supporting technology have the potential to redesign the industry. The fundamentals of agriculture have existed for 12,000 years without strong deviation from the existing model. Agrisea changes the fundamental assumptions to redesign why and how we produce our food.

We believe that food production does not have to come at the cost of our natural world and is proving that we can produce more food, with fewer resources and in locations previously considered infertile all while supporting the integration of the human and natural worlds for planetary longevity.

Also Read: 5 foodtech startups in Asia Pacific to watch in 2020

But Agrisea is such a colossal vision and disruptive technology that for us it is so important to work with environmentally and culturally conscious partners to ensure the best implementation and adoption of our technology across regions and borders.

We are also very aware of the public’s perception of new technology; we wish to clearly educate and share our vision so that everyone from the grower to the consumer can understand and align on why Agrisea exists and why we want to bring about sustainable change for the world.

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Image credit: Agrisea

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Savvy entrepreneurs start testing their ideas on potential solutions even before the concept is fully cooked. They have enough confidence in their ability to deliver. They don’t worry about someone stealing the idea to get there first. And they don’t forget to listen carefully to critical feedback. They become walking public relations machines for themselves, as well as their idea.

The alternative is to spend big money later on pivots. Lost credibility with investors, and delays at rollout trying to build visibility and credibility. I’m not proposing that anyone promise things that they don’t intend to deliver. But it’s time that founders switch to start selling their product before they build it. Rather than believing the old adage of “if we build it, they will come.”

I still hear too many excuses for not working early on the elevator pitch. Like wanting to fly under the radar, don’t have the team together yet, or can’t afford an agency. In fact, you don’t need a third-party public relations agency at this stage. There is real value in doing the key things yourself before your startup is even started:

1. Demonstrate thought leadership before selling a product

Highlight the problem and your concerns in industry blogs, speaking in public forums, and making yourself visible on social media and networking opportunities. You want people to see you as an evangelist for hydrogen fuel, for example, so your later auto engine will have credibility by default.

2. Craft and hone your elevator pitch early

Before the product is set in stone, you can test your message and continue to refine it until it connects well with investors, as well as customers. Later you may have the problem of being told by public relations firms to stay on message, even after you suspect it is not working.

Also Read: Book Excerpt: How I survived an elevator pitch session with Tim Draper

3. Visibly be a bit controversial to test the limits

This early in the game, any coverage and peer review are better than just being another unknown entrepreneur. It’s human nature that challenging the status quo gets more attention than quiet concurrence. We have a tendency to forgive controversial views. If you aren’t perceived as pushing a product.

4. Proactively seek out thought leaders and journalists

Entrepreneurs who wait to be found are destined to spend a lot of time alone. Social media sites today, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, provide ideal forums for presenting your cause and your concept. Start actively blogging on your own site, as well as on industry forums.

5. Make your business cards stand out in the crowd

Everyone exchanges business cards and most are forgotten immediately or never really seen. These days, images are especially important, as well as a tag line, and your social media links. Unique and professional business cards are still well worth the investment.

6. Follow up personally on every new connection

Key introductions in a networking meeting will be quickly lost. Unless you take the next step of calling or emailing later to request a personal meeting. Use these meetings to build the relationship, more by asking questions than by pitching your concept. Requests for investment come later.

Every entrepreneur has a story! Perhaps the inspiration for your idea; or the path taken to get to this point; or a key lesson learned from past mistakes. Stories are the grist reporters look for, and they make you unique and memorable. I use my personal hook! It can be key to your entrepreneurial success. Bigger than any given product or service that you are about to offer.

If you are a social entrepreneur, a natural hook is the environmental or humanity cause that you espouse. Perhaps you can amplify your position by sponsoring an event; travelling to a visible location; or donating your time and other resources.

Also Read: Going from 0 to 60 in a successful elevator pitch, from one founder to another

These days, winning in the crowded startup world is all about marketing. The sooner and more effectively you utilise all the available marketing channels; The more visibility and impact you will have later when your product or service arrives. As an entrepreneur, you are the most important part of your brand, not the other way around.

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The article was published on nfinitiv.

Image Credit: Patrick Robert Doyle on Unsplash

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E-commerce saw a surge in transactions in both essential and discretionary items in the past few months in Singapore, as the COVID-19 pandemic forced most people to stay at home, according to a joint study by iPrice Group and Similar Web.

Driven by high-value online orders nationwide, Singaporeans spent an average of S$113 (US$83) during the January-June 2020 period.

The average basket size increased by 51 per cent when compared to the same period last year, the study finds.

Also Read: How Shopee uses AI, data to build a marketing strategy that suits changes in user behaviour

Given the current situation in the island state, iPrice and SimilarWeb also updated the Map of E-commerce report to shed light on the biggest developments from the top e-commerce platforms in Singapore.

Data reveals that e-commerce platforms in Singapore experienced a two-digit growth (23 per cent) in total web visits (desktop and mobile web) throughout the first half of 2020.

This signifies a strong consumer confidence in e-commerce retail and further growth in the digital economy.

Based on the overall e-commerce traffic in Singapore, five of the top e-commerce players that emerged are Shopee, Lazada, Qoo10, Amazon and EZBuy.

Shopee led the pack

Shopee was the most visited platform in the city-state as of Q2 2020. The e-commerce firm saw a tremendous increase of 82 per cent from Q1 to Q2 2020, garnering nearly an additional five million in average visitors in Q2 2020 alone.

The surge was potentially driven by Shopee’s constant marketing initiatives to promote and help value-driven shoppers during the circuit breaker period. These initiatives included ‘shop from home’, ‘4.4 flash sale’, ‘super mart month’, ‘6.6-7.7 great Shopee Sale’.

Lazada played emerged second with a per cent rise in traffic when compared to Q1 2020, recording an average of 8.5 million visitors as of Q2 2020.

The Alibaba-owned firm retained a strong presence in Singapore as the platform acquired 23 per cent of the web market share, indicating its healthy growth in winning both customers and merchants.

Lazada also aims to stand out from its competitor through its strong brand connections in engaging livestreams. Moreover, it assisted more brick-and-mortar stores to be part of its online platform.

Its online supermarket delivery business, Redmart, reported a 4x jump in sales since Singapore implemented movement restrictions in early April.

Also Read: Alibaba-backed Lazada acquires online grocer RedMart

Additionally, among the most important initiatives to support future business strategies was the recent appointment of Lazada’s new CEO as the company aims to double down on tech investments in each market.

Given Lazada’s growth in numbers, its Group CMO, Mary Zhou, believes Lazada’s Super Brand Day (SBD) promotions are 2nd only to its 11.11 sales day, where 26 brands recorded sales of over $1 million across the region in 24 hours.

Dark horses

Qoo10 is another home-grown company that experienced string growth amidst the pandemic.

As the top-3 e-commerce players successfully maintained their positions in Singapore, a surprising element emerges in the form of an international e-commerce giant Amazon. With its strengthening presence in the market since Q4 2019, Amazon seems to be penetrating Singapore successfully.

Amazon was thriving during COVID-19 as it was the forth most visited e-commerce platform in H1 2020. Its traffic surged to an average of 3.6 million from 2.8 million.

Also Read: Is China the new global e-commerce leader?

Its strong performance could probably be attributed to the closure of many of  its international retail stores not available in the city-state, providing consumers with a variety of options across the globe.

Given its constant growth and maturity in the e-commerce sector, Amazon may catch up fast especially with its innovations to increase its market share in the upcoming quarters.

Securing the fifth position as the most visited e-commerce platform, EZBuy had garnered over 63 per cent increase of monthly visits from Q1 to Q2 2020.

Specialised in bringing wide varieties of consumer products from overseas, the company recorded 1.68 million in average visitors as of Q2 2020.

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Image Credit: Shopee

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