Rachel QUAH Shu Ting
Contents
Reflection
Blog/Journal
Day 1
After seven hours on our flight from Singapore, we arrived at Inchon International Airport on Wednesday morning. We grabbed a quick breakfast to-go and headed straight to Anyang for our first company visit to Twinword in SCC (Smart Content Centre).
Twinword
Twinword is a service that compiles a huge database of information on how various words are associated with each other and to concepts. This information collected are then analysed and sold to companies to improve their targeted marketing to their customers. Mr Kono Kim, the founder of Twinword also shared his motivational reasons for why he started Twinword in the first place. He noticed that associations can be found everywhere and human knowledge despite its vastness is often not utilized by technology because too much information ends up confusing and distracts technology. He also shared about the pain points that Twinword has faced in the last two years since they started which included the difficulty in generating revenue and marketing their service.
SCC
After the presentation by Mr Kim, instead of having a presentation by SCC, we had more of a discussion with the representatives of SCC to learn more about what and how they do.
Through our discussions, we learnt that SCC is actually a government backed incubator for start-ups which has only been around for slightly over 2 years. As our discussion led on, we were able to gain greater insights to the support the Korean government has been providing for start-ups in the recent years. It was shared that Korea is extremely capable in the ICT sector (as seen with LG and Samsung) with over 200,000 persons in the sector. Also, smart content is the main area of focus in the sector with government has plans to make it global, thus, they have been heavily investing, providing and supporting the smaller start-ups to help in accomplishing this goal. SCC is fully funded by the government to promote and increase start-up opportunities in Korea. Start-ups who are interested can apply and they go through a selection process to join SCC. When under SCC, they are fully supported for two years through the accelerator program. Space, servers, test machines are all provided for free during the two years under the program.
Day 2
Ideaabove
On our second day, despite it being Labour Day, a public holiday, we were fortunate to have a company visit to Ideaabove. Prior to our meeting with Ideaabove, our class had previously met with Ian Lee, the CEO of Ideaabove and his team back in Singapore a day before we left for Korea. During that meeting, Ian shared that his team and he have created a social media musical application known as listr.fm which allows users to share their music and playlists with their friends or other music lovers within the application. He also shared about his struggles in the past to have an easy way to share music and playlists with his significant other or friends, which led to the motivation of creating listr.fm.
I was really excited to meet up with Ideaabove again as Ian’s sharing of the application and motivation when we last met was extremely inspiring to me. During the presentation, Ian shared more about the research their team did when they started on their application. They found that people are more likely to listen and enjoy music when shared or recommended by their friends. Thus, they decided to focus on this aspect when building their application.
As my friends and I often share YouTube music videos and covers among each other by copying and pasting the YouTube links to each other on Facebook, listr.fm actually found that this problem my friends and I faced was a very common problem among others as well. Hence, they aim to help reduce this issue by allowing their users to create multiple collaborative playlists where users can collaboratively add music into the playlists. Playlists can be set to public where anybody can add music into the playlists, or to restricted, where only the allowed individuals can add music to the playlist.
After talking about the application, Ian also shared more about his team, and it could very easily be seen that he had a strong team with a huge passion for music and what they do and hope to achieve. From his sharing and my own experiences, I realize that it is indeed extremely important for a team to have a common passion and interest for something in order to take the first step to success. With Ian and his team, their strong passion for music is what brings them closer to developer a better and greater application for their users.
Day 3
For Day 3, we had our final 3 companies to visit in Korea before we headed off to Japan in the following week. All three companies were located in Gangnam-gu.
VCNC
The first company we visited was VCNC which was one of the companies my team was hosting. We were welcomed by Edward Lee, a value-creator of VCNC. Edward conducted a short and simple presentation explaining what between was about, the motivation behind the application and the future of between in a more global scale. The remaining time was an informal Q&A discussion between our team and him.
VCNC vision for the between application is to create a service that would help to improve offline relationships. Between helps and does this because the application is used by couples, and has functions that allow for planning, memory keeping, and chatting. When couples are together, they do not need to use their phones; hence, between hopes that this helps to improve their relationships.
Edward also shared about how it was important to market their application differently to suit the culture of the country that they are in. In Korea, the idea of "losing out" is rather big and therefore, VCNC leveraged on this to target their marketing to their users. They also coined the between application as a "virtual ring" between couples and using between would signify as a form of commitment to many. Their target audience was generally women as women would get their significant other to use the application as well. I found that this was an extremely clever way of marketing to get users hook onto the application. Another thing that Edward shared was about break ups. In relationships, it isn't uncommon for break ups to happen. Edward shared that when using between, if a couple chooses to break up, they can just disconnect their application with their partner instead of deleting the application. However, all their data will still be kept in the application for up to one month should they decide to reconcile. It is only after one month that the data will be flushed and deleted from the database.
From our discussion with Edward, one of the things that he mentioned and stood out to me the most was the importance of prioritizing the application functions, especially so in a start-up company. Many times when we work on a project or application, we tend to want to do many things and functions all at once. However, Edward shared that it is more important to choose a core function to focus on and be great at it and prioritise the rest of the functions than to work on multiple functions at the same time and be good at none. In the case for VCNC, while other functions such as video calls are being requested to be developed, however, instead of starting on it immediately, VCNC has chosen to draft them into a road map for future development and continue to focus on their core functionality first.
Memebox
Memebox is a unique beauty box company that was started up by three guys. However, the ratio of their office now is 80% women and 20% men. Memebox differentiates itself from other beauty boxes found online because of their unique product offering. Firstly, Memebox focuses solely on packing and distributing Korean products. All the products on its website and in its boxes are products that are made and manufactured in Korea. Secondly, Memebox does not operate on a subscription basis like other beauty boxes do. Instead, customers are free to choose when they wish to purchase their boxes.
A recommendation I thought of for Memebox is to target more popular YouTubers to review their boxes if they wish to have a higher and more global reach of the market. YouTube is a very popular but very crowded platform where there are many YouTubers making the same types of videos. However, some YouTubers have a larger reach to the viewers either because of they had been with YouTube from the very beginning, or they are producing videos of higher quality than other YouTubers. These YouTubers have larger and more global viewers who span across the world. Therefore, as Memebox expands globally further and wishes to reach out to more customers around the world, they should consider sending their boxes to more popular YouTubers such as Michelle Phan, itsJudytime, bubzbeauty or beautifymehh.
Another recommendation Memebox could consider is to increase their leverage on social media. Currently and right from the beginning, Memebox has made the right move by using social bloggers and YouTubers to help promote their boxes. Continuing forward into the global expansion, Memebox should also leverage and be more active on other social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This would also allow Memebox to grow and form a relationship with its customers and have them returning consistently to purchase their boxes.
Flitto
The last company we visited was flitto. Before we headed to their presentation, a representative of Maru180, the incubator where flitto was housed at conducted a tour of their incubator space for our team, showing us how the start ups work closely with their VCs in the same building and the same floor. They have meeting rooms in between the start ups and VCs and this arrangement encourages for a closer working relationships between the start-ups and their VCs.
After the tour, we were brought down to the presentation room for the presentation. Mr Simon, the CEO of flitto started of the presentation by introducing himself. He then passed the time over to Min Hee, the global PR manager for Flitto, who shared with us more about flitto, the motivation behind the concept of flitto and the difficulties that were faced. She then shared about the advice Simon would give to budding entrepreneurs like us. A few learning points that strike me from Simon’s advice included the importance of starting a start-up because of the passion and not for the sake of starting up one.
After the presentation, we had a Q and A session and Simon shared with us the darker side of being a start-up entrepreneur. While we often see the role of a start-up entrepreneur as one that is very exciting and fun, Simon shares that at many times, he faces many difficult decisions to make and loneliness. It was interesting to hear of the not so positive and more difficult aspects of being an entrepreneur and his sharing has helped to provide a more balanced view for me when considering the entrepreneurship path.
Key Learning Points
Importance of choosing the right people to form your team.
It is important to choose the right people to form a team. There should be a diverse group of people in the team, with a diverse set of skills. However, while skills may be important, being able to work together is very important as well.
Courage, Faith and Trust to take the Risk
From all the company visits we have made, I realize that all the CEOs have extremely great courage, faith and trust to step away from a stable income and start up their own businesses. They may be shun by their family and friends for doing so but they still continue to do so. I think this three characteristics of the CEOs are extremely admirable and something I hope I will be able to have when I venture on my own.
Do it for the Passion not for anything else
As Simon from Flitto shared with us, do not start a business just because you want to have the reputation, position or status. You have to have passion in order to start up a business because it is often not easy and you would face a lot of difficulties along the way. If you do not have the passion, you would feel very tired and would not be able to succeed. I think this is very important, people with the passion like Ian from Ideaabove are able to work on the same product for years.
Importance of Planning and Prioritization
As a start up, planning and execution is the most important. Because you are small with limited resources, proper planning and prioritization of what features to develop and focus on first and what to do later are crucial to the success of the product. As we learnt from VCNC, while they have great plans to do many things in the future, they have chosen to stay focus on a few core functions to ensure they are completely thoroughly. All the start ups we visited had road maps for the next few years and how they plan to continue or expand. I've learnt that this is extremely important if you want to be able to succeed.
Photo links
Photos of my journey and company visits can be viewed here!
