Hi fellow readers, once again! My name is Gabriel, and I enjoy building software that helps make lives easier. About a year ago, I shared my startup journey as a student as I navigated my way to building a modern web-based deals and promotions discovery platform in Singapore.

I thought it would be fresh to take some time to reflect on my journey last year and think about the developments in the technology and startup space in my limited experience!

Continuing my journey of being scrappy and looking forward

My experience in 2022 was that it was very challenging to grow as a startup. 

Cash became more expensive, and both businesses and consumers were more price sensitive and were less inclined to spend. Our small platform couldn’t afford to dedicate loads of money to acquiring new customers.

With the overall tech scene and companies taking quite a plunge in the year, I felt we needed to be even more scrappy. It’s not bad to save costs by using cheaper software, building more consistent growth, and manually doing things by ourselves for now.

My last year was mostly around prioritising and optimising.  There were many things that we wanted to try at the start of the year and many ideas we wanted to put into action. These took up valuable resources, and it was important to acknowledge we couldn’t do everything.

We picked several favourable battles and iterated quickly. I guess it trained our team to be able to do more with less and helped us move faster with less too.

Also Read: Antler to invest in 30+ firms, launch founder residency programme in Indonesia

I personally also felt it was easy to constantly look inward, scrutinising everything about our journey and progress. But I think it was particularly valuable to look outwards during this season – to evaluate which companies were doing well and not so well and learn from both their successes and mistakes.

I’m also learning to take inspiration from others as well. This helps to drive innovative thinking as technology evolves rapidly.

Focusing on delivering value and building credibility to prepare for scale

That being said, I decided not to be too fixated on what’s around, to work within my means, and, of course, to remember to enjoy the ride! Looking back, I honestly felt that 2022 wasn’t a year of generating more cash flows, running better financial projections, or showing a J-curve – a typical depiction of exponential growth.

My experience in the previous year was focused on delivering even more value to the stakeholders that we worked with, both users and businesses, with even lesser resources.

As a small startup, we iterated through different projects to test our value on different fronts, whether it is helpful compilations that could benefit our end users or helping businesses to consolidate their promotions across different properties or events.

When done well, they helped us to build our relationships, trust, and credibility in our offerings and solutions.

As a developer, I focused on creating software that could help scale these projects within a small amount of time. We managed to onboard partners with the lowest friction and the highest efficiency. My goal is to be able to flick a few switches on my codebase and pop up a ready-made platform for the new customers we are onboarding. It’s a work in progress, but I’m working towards it!

It was important to keep things lean so that our operational costs would not be a heavy burden as we focused on delivering value to our potential customers. This feels highly underrated in my experience – it takes away the pressure of generating big sums of cash in the short term (through sales or fundraising) and gives lots of space to innovate and continue iterating around what we currently have.

Finally, I don’t think there is ever an end goal in startup preparation and groundwork. I think it’s probabilistically placing ourselves in a better position and opportunity to scale. Well, if chance favours the prepared mind, scale favours the prepared startup.

I’m also learning to be patient about building something big and being happy to grow it at a slower rate while seeing success.

Stay curious and be adaptable to explore different models

I’m not sure if this will be relevant, but I thought this was an interesting reflection thinking about growing Dive Deals in the past year. 

When I first started Dive, it was mainly targeted at fellow users like myself, looking for a one-stop place to find all the relevant deals and promotions. We started sharing and targeting users like myself looking for such a platform, and we began growing slowly and steadily.

It became challenging to scale such consumer models in these situations with limited resources and also with a limited audience in Singapore. Also, it became particularly comfortable to simply continue our basic offerings – to maintain the status quo.

Also Read: Insights from a Singaporean founder’s journey to Silicon Valley

I feel that it is really important to be humble about new ideas and stay curious about all things.

While Dive continues to be used as a consumer app, we began iterating and exploring different business models behind the audience and capabilities we have built in the past year. We worked with various institutions, corporate partners, and technological partners.

Nevertheless, we continued to grow our consumer-facing channels, serving as a core foundation of our business that brought greater value propositions to our other channels. To date, we are thankful to have served more than 200,000 users, with more than 25,000 followers across our channels, most notably on our Telegram channel.

We find strategies that work and double down on them, which gives us a greater runway to explore our surroundings for more synergies. It’s like crossing a river and looking out for big milestones along the way, bridging the gap between profitability and scale.

One of the new models we explored is a perks program. We observed the current climate and felt that businesses are trying to maximise staff welfare and morale during this difficult season.

Employers can tap into our existing pool of data and services and can even opt to include their exclusive deals, information, and more. We’re excited to roll these features out as we go.

We’re in the midst of trying new and different things, and I think continuously adapting to the current climate is really essential, similar to AirBnB’s strategy during COVID-19.

I like the idea of startups staying long enough until it works. Staying doesn’t mean being the same product or doing the same things!

Building meaningful and synergistic relationships

One of the most exciting experiences in 2022 was meeting new people and faces. I feel particularly privileged to meet the diverse minds behind some of the exciting startups we see around us today. 

One of the mistakes I felt I made earlier was being wary and afraid of talking to bigger and more experienced players around the industry. I feel it is always important to reach out to get their feedback on what we are working on (even “competitors”), which can provide a good indication of the progress and direction forward or even when to stop.

Since then, we have approached many individuals and companies around for their thoughts and feedback, apart from our early users and testers initially. We learn from their greater experiences in various but similar areas and even brainstorm together on moving forward.

These have also opened doors for us to experiment with exciting ideas and build win-win solutions with various partners that could help both achieve more. We’re also looking forward to some of these potential integrations and the value we are co-creating with these companies.

Across the past year, Dive had the privilege to work with multiple stakeholders, including users, businesses, agencies, institutions, and more. 

We are also currently even waitlisting and onboarding a large number of employers on our new model, and we think these would provide even greater value and synergy across our offerings – ultimately to our users and brands.

But we’re still figuring things out, and we’ll take it patiently as it comes.

Personally, I enjoy building many things, but I find the most meaning in building relationships. These are ultimately valuable for my personal growth and insights, not everything has to be centred around the startup!

I quite like documenting some of these past activities, and I hope sharing this will be an interesting read for you as well!

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