TAN Yun Xi
Contents
Reflection
Company Reflection
BNB Hero
BNBHero
This is one of the company that we intended to visit while we are in Korea. Fortunately the Korean startup co-founder/ marketing director, Mr Park Yong Soo, is based in Singapore for their South East Asia market expansion . We managed to schedule an interview in Singapore with him at the Starbucks cafe and learnt many important lessons through our conversation.
Here are some of the questions that we have asked him:
- Why did you start a business?
- Is there any point in time that your team almost failed?
- Is there a company culture in BNBhero?
- In an expansion plan, how will BNBhero compete against up and coming businesses?
- What are some of the challenges setting up a start up in this industry?
- What are some of the future expansion plans for BNBHero?
- Any tips for entrepreneurs wannabes?
- If there is 1 thing that you are most proud of in BnBHero/ as an entrepreneur, what will it be?
- Future expansion plans.
And through the interview, we have gained a few main pointers.
- It is never too late to start your own business
- At the end of the day, it might be a lot more worthwhile creating your own company than to work for a MNC all your life
- Understand your strength and weaknesses very thoroughly before market entry.
- Good team composition is the most important factor for success in technology startups.
Apart from this, we believe that BnBHero will be a successful company if they were to succeed in their collaboration with their China and France partners.
MEMEBox
It was really good to be able to visit Memebox's office after weeks of researching about them. We met Wonshin, the global expansion manager of Memebox, and she shared with us thoroughly on Memebox's ecommerce platform which we initially had some problem exploring due to the language barrier. We were also able to see the actual Memebox that made them so successful. It was also fulfilling when we were able to share our recommendations to Wonshin, as we felt that expanding their marketing effort on social media platforms such as Facebook would be beneficial for them. Unfortunately we were not able to visit their warehouse today, but hopefully, other batches of TSM-ers will visit Memebox again and hopefully we will be able to read about their experience at Memebox and understand their logistics process better.
Through the session, we have gained a few main pointers.
- Understand customers and focus on the product that will attract customers effortlessly.
- Plan the marketing budget strategically. Focus on a few social influencers that can aid the company yet require minimal cost.
- Sometimes it's about taking unexpected risk. Memebox expanded to USA knowing that there were other strong competitors such as Birchbox. However, due to their marketing strategy whereby they focused on utilising youtubers in USA to promote their products, it has been picking up well and they realised that USA perceived Korean cosmetic products of a higher standard and this led them to know that there is a potential market in USA.
- Although there is a need to have a passion before starting up a business, tapping on the current market and establishing a good business model is important as well.
Blog/Journal
Day 1
Twinword, Smart Content Centre, Lasso
After touching down in Korea, we headed off to Twinword for our first company visit! It was really welcoming for SCC and Twinword to paste directional signs for us when we first step out of the lift. From the CEO of Twinword, Mr Kono Kim's presentation, it was interesting to know how Twinword came about and made me understand the importance of natural language processing and how word association varies. For example, how different countries will have different preferences leading to various combinations.
The trip to SCC and their presentation also further elaborated on how Korean government foresee what are the future technological trends; is very supportive of incubating such start ups and how Korea is continuously progressing as one of the world's most technologically advanced country.
A bonus presentation from Lasso opened up some interesting facts about Korea, like how prices for their mobile phones can fluctuates every day. If that happens in Singapore, I would definitely be checking up on the rate every day before purchasing my phone to ensure I get the best price. Thus, Lasso's application aims to aid the consumers by eliminating this tedious process. Lasso also talked about cross over shopping which is becoming more prevalent.
After an enriching morning from three different presentations and the tour around the office, which all of us were particularly intrigued with the two 3D printers, we headed off to a more relaxing afternoon, with a tour around KBS, understanding more about their operations and shopping at Myeongdong!
Day 2
Ideabove
Listr.fm is a social music network platform whereby users are able to share/recommend music to one another. As a music lover, I feel Ideabove has a very innovative idea and they are tackling a problem that is very commonly found among music listeners. Ian was very passionately in talking about his start up. I learned that marketing should not be a vital part at the initial stage of a start up, and I believe that's true to a great extent though sometimes it may have to depend on the context of the company. In this case, it focuses more on how to make the product good and the better the product, the easier it will be to retain customers without marketing. However, in Listr.fm's case, marketing is essential as there are already established and similar music applications out there, and awareness would have to be raised to Listr.fm target audiences to convince them to use Listr.fm instead. Ideabove seems to be focusing a lot on the functions of the application. As a start up, fast growth is important and can lead to success of a company. This can be seen more during day 3 of our company visits.
Day 3
VCNC, Memebox, Flitto
Day 3 marks the end of our 3 days’ visits to Korean startups. Personally, I feel that today was the most fulfilling industrial visit day. Not only did we visit the most number of companies, all three companies are successful in a short period of time and have their own success stories and tips to tell.
VCNC created Between application whereby couples have a shared platform to share their memories together. The application has been receiving tremendous growth and it is interesting to know that the growth was the result of word of mouth rather than the company’s marketing strategy. This shows that the creation of a product is important. When a product is well-received by the users, they will generally spread positive news about the product and marketing activities from the start-up companies would be minimal. This will also benefit start-ups as they would have minimal or no budget for marketing.
Also, when startups are expanding to different markets, there is a need to hire the right locals to aid the company and make it more specialized to the particular market. Startups should also not just focus on expanding their market when they have the budget to do so, but instead, their primarily focus should be to sustain and improve their firm foundation.
After VCNC, we went to visit Memebox. Having been researching on Memebox, it was interesting to be able to visit the company and understand more about it. From Memebox, they further re-emphasized what VCNC said previously. That is, how successful a company is dependable on how customers find the products. Marketing tactics should be minimal for start ups with little advertising budget to begin with. Memebox was able to market their products at lower cost as they engaged bloggers and youtubers to help spread the word of Memebox. Different marketing strategies should be catered to the different products, based on the culture of the country. In Memebox case, to target the South Korea market, they hired bloggers while youtubers were their choice in USA.
The last company we visited was flitto. Flitto provides users with accurate, cost effective, fast translations through their mobile phone. flitto is a crowdsourcing translation platform that allows you to access any content in your native language. flitto's CEO Simon mentioned how branding is important, one example he gave was, "flitto is a company that translate tweet for celebration. Advice from the CEO which was really relevant include sharing start up ideas with as many people as possible to gauge how well receive this product can be. Also, in a start up, the little management skills are important and there is a need to manage all employees well as each and every employee is important to the start-up.
Day 8
Smart Education, Cybernoids
It was really a rare opportunity to be able to visit both South Korea and Japan start ups. In Japan, there is significantly less support from the government to incubate start-ups. However, through the visits of Japan start ups, I can see that they are very passionate about their products and believe there is a market for it. Therefore, they are so persistent in building their own company rather than just staying loyal to one company which most traditional Japanese would have done.
Smart education has already obtained 10 million dollars of funding. They aim to create mobile games for kids, catering to the different age groups. What I learned was that user interface is very important for different target audiences. It is even more difficult especially if it is catered for children as children tend to have shorter attention span. As it is a mobile application and can capture the international market, Smart Education also emphasized the need to generalize the application so that they can cater to the audiences from different countries.
The next company that we visited was Cybernoids. What I learned from the CEO was that in the idea generation process, it is not just envisioning how things would look like in 5 years' time but even more ahead, like 100 years' time. As the CEO has a programming background, he focused on his strength and was particular about developing a good product.
