There’s no understating COVID-19’s impact on businesses across Asia. As economies across Asia start to emerge from lockdown, business leaders are reassessing their plans and projections to accommodate the ‘new normal,’ and creating opportunities for startups.
Many startups already possess one of the qualities that could prove most beneficial in the post-pandemic world – business agility. But being agile and moving fast is just the beginning. Startups also have to look for opportunities to pull unnecessary costs out of their business, forge new links to partners and customers, and ensure their employees are continually developing new skills. With this focus, startups can lay the groundwork to survive and thrive in the new normal.
The urgent need for digital transformation
During these challenging times, we are seeing companies of every size, including startups, express their desire to transform more quickly into the cloud as a way of breaking free of the legacy on-premises infrastructure that holds them back from trying new ideas.
According to Daphne Chung, a research director at IDC, the pandemic has underscored the importance of digital transformation across all industries. Cloud continues to be the underpinning platform for all digital transformation initiatives and has therefore seen an acceleration in demand in the wake of the pandemic.
In Singapore, the public cloud services market is expected to grow by 13 per cent from 2019 to 2020. All that cloud promises when it comes to elastic consumption, agile development, and global reach are in demand, and the value is being realised across Southeast Asia.
The education and health sectors have embraced digital solutions in an unprecedented way.
An example of healthtech responding to changing business conditions, is Japanese telemedicine startup, MICIN, a company that offers a free app for virtual doctor appointments, and other features like medical questionnaires and billing. MICIN experienced a substantial surge in demand for their telemedicine app, Curon, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Running on the cloud, they were able to sustain a near ten-time increase in new patient registrations from January to April. Curon runs on services including Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), AWS Lambda, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), which many startup customers rely on to scale quickly and accommodate unpredictable growth or demand.
As consumers continue to embrace digital services, their behaviour change creates opportunities for agile startups that quickly innovate with cloud technology to deliver great experiences online.
At AWS, we are helping startups rise to meet this opportunity. One example is the Indian health and fitness startup, Cure.fit. When COVID-19 hit, the company had to shut its physical gyms, but quickly saw they could stay connected with customers by running virtual workout classes, and creating personalised online programs.
The success of this new offering led to a sudden spike in traffic to Cure.fit’s website, which they were able to manage by leveraging Amazon CloudFront, a fast content distribution service that securely delivers data, videos, and applications to customers globally.
Saving money
Running a startup can be a stressful experience at the best of times, and one of the most critical factors underpinning their success is how well they manage their cash. And that means making sure they are only spending money on things they absolutely need.
AWS offers several ways for startups to save money on their cloud expenses. We work with startup customers to make sure they are using the most cost-effective pricing models and are not using more AWS services than they actually need.
The AWS Trusted Advisor online tool helps startup customers reduce costs, increase performance, and improve security by checking their use of AWS services, and making suggestions to help optimise performance.
In Singapore, we worked with fintech, MoneySmart to help reduce their cloud spend by more than 28 per cent per month through cost optimisation exercises. As an example, Spot Instance usage enabled the personal finance portal to achieve a near 50 per cent savings compared to On-Demand usage.
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Attracting customers
One of the hardest tasks of bringing a new idea to market is simply making people aware of it, and by identifying platforms to facilitate these introductions. At AWS, we work hard to forge connections between startups and potential customers and partners.
We regularly connect executives from large organisations with startups to hear about new solutions that might be of interest. These connections often involve ‘reverse pitches,’ where large organisations discuss their challenges and startups propose solutions.
And finally, while we know that startups rarely have spare time on their hands, it is important to never stop learning. Keeping up to date with the latest products and developing the skills to use them is more critical now than ever.
There is a variety of free online education and live-streamed or on-demand training events for startups across Asia at every growth stage, including AWSome Days and the AWS Builders Online Series for early-stage founders new to the cloud. AWS Innovate conferences are for startups looking to accelerate their cloud skills.
The natural agility of startups gives them the capacity to adapt quickly to market changes and presents a chance to win new customers. By using this time to take stock of their business and the opportunities available to them, startups can move forward with confidence into 2021 and beyond.
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