1415T2g1 South Korea/Reflection
South Korea
Day 2 |
Contents
Day 1: Reflections
Quick Introduction of JJS Media
Learning Points from JJS Media
- Product is important, but don’t forget the team – with a team that is able to synergized each other’s ability to produce the best result, it will increase the overall value of the product and makes everything more easier
- Common in Asia to get your idea stolen – if you have an idea, you should always have the motivation to kick-start your project as soon as possible
- Knowing the demographic is key to marketing your product – with a specific target audience in mind, a deep understanding on the demographic trends in a market can help speed up your marketing
- Leaders in a start-up have to be confident – by being confident, it creates an ripple effect around the team which can be essential to the success of a start-up
Quick Introduction of FiveThirty
Learning Points from FiveThirty
- Greater interest in your project if the problem affects you directly – from our Q&A session with Mr. Lee, he mentioned that the problem identified by the team will generate greater interest and bond the team if each member is directly affected by the problem as they see a great need to solve the problem
- Importance of a clear vision and goal – to bring your company forward, the team must have a clearly-defined goal which is formulated and agreed by each team member
- Desperation propels you forward – in a start-up, there are many times where you will encounter problems which you put you on the brink of failure. However, we should are take an optimistic look to the problems and see them as a motivation to being your company forward
The director of international business of JJS Media, CJ was approachable and funny. She explained briefly about how a typical live performance is being implemented and highlighted several speculations and guesses when promoters invite a particular artist to the country and how MyMusicTaste filled that void. MyMusicTaste helped artists to explore into new markets that they have never known about as well as guarantees the demand for a certain artist’s live performance. She shared with us many interesting stories about how she was persuaded to be part of the company and the setbacks that she has faced and how her CEO has helped her tide over that failure. The way that MyMusicTaste grew organically through referrals from different users has shown that the power of word of mouth is really a strong marketing strategy for the JJS Media. I feel that the developers and founders have to manage a community around their startup and leverage on the initial user base to bring in more like minded individuals into the platform. I actually struggled to create a sizeable community when developing a web application for a module in SMU. I would really want to know more from the startups on the marketing strategies and effectiveness of their most effective marketing platform and how did the utilize it to bring in the best results. She emphasized the importance of having a great team with synergy and that even if the idea was not good, it will still turn our great eventually. I do agree that having a great team is good and it was one of the factors that sometimes dissuades me from creating a startup on my own. FiveThirty was a gracious host and welcomed us with gifts. Zim Car was an interesting concept, being the middle man to source for resources to help their users move to a new home. They focused heavily on user experience as their unique selling point to differentiate themselves with the competition and that they have a first mover advantage when it comes to this idea. However, they might want to handle issues such as people not showing up to the job or vehicles that are not working properly to move the items and what is the contingency when such issues arise.
More than just your passion, you need to create a culture at which people would be willing to work hard with you and feel that the company is also their company. JJS Media said that the culture in the company is that they feel like a family, while FiveThirty said that it is important to make people happy so that they would be willing to work.
The slight different between the two companies is that JJS Media seems to have a clearer focus, targeting the global population who likes K-Pop while on the other hand, FiveThirty has 3 apps which are differ from one another. I believe that it is important to have a focus/ clear goal in a company, especially when a company first starts because they have limited resources, but as they grow, they will be able to diversify.
In short, both companies tell us that if you don’t have the passion for it, you won’t be able to continue your business because in a start-up, often you have to put more energy and time to grow your business. Finding a team which are driven and love the company and building a culture which makes them feel happy are also important aspects. If the goal of the company aligns with the personal goal of the people, they would be willing to work an extra mile for the company. The team, the culture, and the passion are definitely critical in starting a business.
JJS Media
JJS Media is an interesting events company that first finds the performances that people and communities are interested in, before liaising with the various parties to bring the performers in. This provides performers with a more accurate guarantee and ensure that the concerts staged will have an audience for it.
The lady that greeted us went by the name of CJ. She is the director for marketing, and one of the key employees of the company. Prior to that, she was part of the entertainment scene, handling concerts and performance organising. The current project is an app called MyMusicTaste. One of the main drivers for the creation of this app is that many concerts are cancelled, with organisers having to then figure out what went wrong behind these concerts, often leaving these organisers having to figure out if the problem lies with inaccurate demand predictions, or inappropriate pricing issues.
One of the key learning points is that it is important to understand their advantage and leverage on it to help businesses create a beach head in their market. Being a Korean company, they naturally have easier access to K-Pop groups. Therefore, they made the decision to first pick up Korean groups, and try to market them to determine places to hold concerts. This provided them with a competitive advantage that other concert organising companies might not have — access to the Korean markets. They have also decided to focus on K-Pop and the related genres. This helps to the app community to grow organically due to the nature of fans liking and requesting for similar groups, growing the app’s user base.
Another key point is the important of leadership. The leader of the company serves as the key motivator, the one that drives the company. The leader has to lead, and to show himself as a role model for other employees to look up to. The example given was when CJ was overseas and encountered her first failure, she was close to giving up on everything. However, it was due to her CEO’s present at the scene that touched her heart, and made her realise that he is a good person to work for.
Five Thirty
Five Thirty is a mobile app development company. Its current project is focused on helping people move, providing a one stop service for packing and delivering.
The key thing to note is that for the company, there are 2 CEOs operating the company, one driving the technical side while the other one, the business side. They mentioned that the way for them to resolve conflict, figuring out who makes the call is through constant communication, and to have a third person as a mediator to objectively look at the 2 conflicting viewpoints that the 2 different CEOs might have.
However, I am still not unconvinced by the business model for scaling. The ZimMan and ZimCar are both crowd-sourced resources. This means that there is no assurance that the app will be able to have sufficient resources to meet user demands. Furthermore, there could be legal and other considerations when attempting to push these to other countries (e.g. in Singapore, trucks and lorries are required to be registered to companies, which could serve as a problem since most company vehicles drivers would not want to moonlight with company vehicles).
The United States has long led the way as the leader in high tech innovations. This is largely attributed to the fertile ground it has provided for tech startups - access to capital and a culture that celebrates risk taking. However, there is one city that is developing itself into another important tech hub, the next Silicon Valley: Seoul.
The number of startups operating in South Korea quadrupled from approximately 3500 in the early 2000s to 15,401 in 2008. With increasing governmental support and an influx in foreign and local investors, the number of start-ups readily doubled to 28,763 in 2013.
As we embark on our first company visit, I really hope that these 5 days will help me understand and gain an appreciation of the factors that shaped Korea’s tech start-up scene, which used to be non-existent in the early 1980s. The first company, JJS Media, sets as a good example of the opportunities and challenges faced by a start-up. “My Music Taste” is developed by the JJS team with the intention of disrupting the concert ticketing industry. I personally feel that developing such technologies work as a double-edge sword. On one hand, the company is able to target a big and wide market, which gives them the potential to scale exponentially. On the other hand, such technologies run the risk of inviting attacks from companies which are going to be affected by the disruption. This could be in the form of conglomerates buying out the product, or worse still, replicate the technology and start squeezing the start-ups dry.
Despite that, I am inclined towards believing that JJS Media will succeed and grow to become a very successful company in the next 5 to 10 years for the following reasons. Firstly, the company has garnered support from stronghold investors including Samsung. The presence of such investors will not only spark greater confidence in potential investors, but also acts as a protection towards the tragedy of start-ups being crushed by the giants. Secondly, the team is made up of diverse individuals, each expert in their own field. Their members comprises of geniuses graduating from elite schools such as KAIST and Carnegie Mellon. Yet interestingly, their interview selection is based largely on being able to portray critical thinking skills over academic grades. The team dynamics is hence a good blend of both the geniuses as well as the critical thinkers. Lastly, the company has made very clear progression steps for their future. To ride on the advantage of being an early adopter of this technology, I feel that it is very wise for the company to roll out their plans to expand to the US and China market at the end of this year. This is a very well-timed move, especially after JJS had recently received their Series A funding.
The second company, Zim Car, provided another perspective of the nature of start-ups. The implementation of this application is not exactly one that is disruptive to the entire ecosystem, neither is it a game changer. Instead, it is going back to the fundamentals of using technology to boost an existing business model by having new features that will help increase customer satisfaction and usability. The concept behind making package delivering easy and hassle free is not new. However, I believe that Zim Car successfully identified that Koreans are in a constant quest for efficiency in every sphere of their life, and they boasts the highest smartphone ownership rate in the world. Thus, leveraging on the mobile platform, alongside understanding the users’ concerns, needs and wants will be a key to their success.
JJS Media
JJS Media is the first company we visited. I was really impressed by the speaker who introduced herself as CJ. She is a very charismatic, confident and capable lady. She mentioned that you got to be confident in both your decision and your product, you have to trust your own product before trying to convince others. JJS latest product is MyMusicTaste and their three main stakeholders are the artists, fans and promoters. The MyMusicTaste act as a platform for fans to indicate their interest in attending their idol's concert. Which allow the artists and promoters to locate the artist fan base reducing the risk and disappointment of the promoters, artists and fans.
Unlike their competitors, JJS Media focus on K-POP in particular, as they believe that if you focus on specific genre JJS will be able to provide a better service quality to their users as there’s less variation. CJ also shared the reason of why some of the competitors has failed. Reason being that their competitors doesn’t focus on a specific genre hence it’s more difficult to manage.
She also shared the importance of having a great team, during her sharing session she emphasize a lot on the importance of having a great team.
Her group of co-founders shares the same interest, music, and with that common interest they are able to understand the problems faced by their stakeholders and come out with the best solution that solve the problem faced by them.
All in all, my take away from JJS is that you got to be confident, responsible and courageous to be a great leader. Everyone in the team needs to trust and believe in the product in order for others to believe in your product. Besides having a great product what’s more important is having a great team who shares a common goals and interests in order to succeed in long term. Understand your target audience best is to have a specific primary persona that you want to build your products for in order to provide a better solution without large variation.
FiveThirty
Mr Sanghwa Chung, CEO of Zimcar and his friend Mr. Lee shared with us his experience and views in building a startup. They shared with us the importance of having an alignment between the employees and employers. And the importance of recruiting people that value adds to your company. They also shared the importance of following your genuine idea, which means build what you are interested in building and not build something with a profit driven mentality.
All in all, my take away from this talk is that to be able to be fully committed to a product you need to have passion for it. Never build a product having profit as your main priority because “sometimes money kills your passion”
JJS Media
We were greeted by a lively lady by the initials of CJ who shared with us about JJS Media and the service they currently provide.
JJS Media created a service called MyMusicTaste which uses technology to bridge the gap between different stakeholders in the music industry. Curious of the reason behind cancelled concerts, the founders gathered that such incidents happen when the planning team and the artists are unsure of the preferences of music lovers. Hence, by using an application to find out about the music tastes of fans, they have managed to satisfy the demand and supply for concerts. The application has thus effectively reduced the number of cancelled concerts.
MyMusicTaste was started in 2013 and the service currently has about 400,000 users with majority coming from South America and Europe. The service has helped artists find places where their fans want them to have concerts and JJS Media has held 50 concerts in 25 countries up to date. Through word of mouth from fans, the service was able to gather users quickly under 2 years without the need to market the service themselves. The company is currently focusing their efforts on MyMusicTaste and has no plans to further develop another service.
We had a fun session with CJ and these are my takeaways from JJS Media.
- “You’re the only person that thinks that this is going to work”. So you need to be able to convince people that your product/service will benefit them. Hence, the ability to convince is an important skill to have for an entrepreneur.
- A leader’s role is very important. Responsibility, courage, leadership are traits that a leader should possess.
- A strong team is necessary to complement the product/service that you sell. Find people that share the same interest and have passion for the work that they do.
- Good word of mouth is the best way to gain user base.
FiveThirty
With the motto “We Make Life Better”, FiveThirty has come up with an origami application, a part-time job seeking application, and an application to help with the chore of moving house.
Mr. Sanghwa Chung from FiveThirty shared with us about their services called ZimBox . ZimMan . ZimCar – These services provided by the company focuses on helping single families reduce the trouble of moving house. ZimBox provides all essentials needed for packing and ZimMan brings helpers while ZimCar transports the packed items. The company does not plan to patent the idea as they believe that competition will help to bring about greater awareness of such service. Contrary to JJS Media, FiveThirty plans on having many applications to benefit groups of people with various needs. I’ve learned from FiveThirty that competition is not necessarily bad for companies.
We had another speaker Mr. Lee who has various experience with start-ups and he previously held a stable job in aerospace engineering. He currently is developing an application to aid parents with special needs children. This idea stemmed from the birth of his son who is disabled and he is working on the application to guide parents who are facing the same situation as him.
With past experience of failed start-up attempts, he shared with us that passion is what really keeps him going. However, sometimes money kills the passion. In seeking co-workers, he too believes that it is important to find someone with interest in the work that he does and having goals is a must. The trade-off of working in a start-up is that there will be less time to meet friends and there is a wider gap in interests.
The two companies that we visited today were very welcoming and I look forward to visiting Pristone, Seoul National University, KBAA, and FuturePlay tomorrow!
On day one of our company visit, we visited to 2 companies – JJS Media and FiveThirty. From the sharing of JJS Media, they have encountered mix of success and failures. That is most common barriers that most of the technologies will face and get through of it. From the sharing of their flagship app “My Music Taste”, the important thing I learnt was they all have put so much passion with what they are doing and focusing on that only. The person said in order to succeed for a startup, all the team members should stand out to take responsibility and leadership. They are working with trust and believe with one another and not restricting with rules and micro management.
The second and last visit of the day is to FiveThirty. They are working on a platform that offers easy and cost effective solution for house moving service. And it is specifically towards to singles and single families. From the founder and CEO of the company shared us about his service and company to us. I learnt from that company visit is it is good to identify a concrete problem and focus to solve on that in starting a startup. He shared to us that it is more manageable to handle and know market response by making a small start. Once it has a good potential, try to accelerate further and push towards the main goal. I have seen that they have so much passion working on the project and much efforts.
JJS Media
As JJS office is not open when we arrive thus a lady brought us to tour around the building. The building consist of few levels. Mainly the 9th floor which is open to anyone to use. The lady mentioned that students can use that area as well. And I felt that the area looks like SMU Labs back in Singapore. And at the 7th floor, it’s the Content Korea Lab Gyeonggi. They have a recording studio as well as a big 3D printer! There are currently 28 start-ups and they can stay there for 2 years max. The minimum period is 6 months, but there will be an interview again on the 5th month. Unfortunately, this program is mainly for Korean.
The representative from JJS Media is a lady called CJ. JJS Media have a product called MyMusicTaste. Artists and promoters can use this application to measure the demand while the fans can request for the concerts that they want. Currently they are targeting K-Pop. That’s because they are from the same country and that K-Pop stars prefer to work with Korean company as compared to foreign companies. However, CJ also mentioned that they are preparing to flip, which means that their HQ will be at US, and Korea will only be the branch.
From CJ, I learnt a lot. According to CJ, the biggest hinder is to convince others to believe that the product is good and the team will be able to support it. Thus, the team is very important. They select their team member by sitting down with them and look at their personality. They will only hire if there have something that is in-line with the company. Hence, grades doesn’t matter to JJS Media. Also, CJ felt that you should not be frustrated when she calls you at 5am on a Saturday for work related issue. If you will be frustrated, don’t go into the start-up industry.
She also compare Korea start-up ecosystem against Singapore and US. The Korea government provide help to the start-ups. Example JJS Media is located in a government owned building. Their rental fee for 6 month is USD1000 only. However, this benefits are more towards the Korean citizen. On the other hand, Singapore too have government funding. But they benefits the foreigners as well. And most importantly, people in Singapore knows English! That is something that Korea do not really have. As for US, especially Silicon Valley, it is the best place to get funding if you have a great idea. There are a lot of VC there and “they are just waiting to throw their money in”.
FiveThirty
The latest product/service that FiveThirty do is the ZimCar, ZimMan and the ZimBox. This is targeted for the single family who need help in moving house and they are flexible in time (meaning 24 hours). The ZimCar provide the vehicle to carry the items and will cost 49800 krw (S$61.69). The ZimMan is the mover and will cost 33000 krw (S$40.88) and ZimBox is provide the box to store the items as well as the necessity that is needed, such as bubble wraps. It cost 25000 krw (S$30.97) each. There is a bundle price of 249800 krw (S$309.42) which consist of 1 ZimCar, 2 ZimMan and 1 ZimBox. FiveThirty are not worried that others will follow them and be their competitors. Instead, they mentioned something that inspire me: “People can follow them. But they (FiveThirty) started first. So they have an advantage. When others are following them, they still need to get the contacts and material, but they (FiveThirty) had all the materials already, thus able to do more and go further than others”. From the speech, I learnt that to have a higher success rate in start-up, we need to focus on our passion. Passion is the thing that keep us moving and to push our team. They felt that if you are below 25, it’s okay for you to try doing a start-up first. However, if you are more than 25, you should do some work first before proceeding to start a new business. They also agreed that it is not easy to attract employee. Unlike big companies, start-up generally can’t provide a high salary to their employees. Thus, in start-ups, the company will tend to give their employee some stocks instead.
The culture of the companies we visited today are very much different from Singaporean companies. Usually in Singapore, it’s so competitive and cooperation was at a minimum level. Even within the company itself, people just dealt with things separately and combine whatever they had later. However, what I saw today while we were visiting JJS Media was something really hard to emulate in Singapore. Co-working spaces are available for freelancers in the Hub and for designers at Content Korea Lab. These free working spaces allows people to develop their ideas and creations. They are free to use the resources provided in the space, including all the people around them who are working for the same goal.
This collaborative spirit is something Singapore needs to develop more. I look towards this in the future as a collaborative environment would be much more conducive as compared to a competitive one. However, all it is right now is a lofty dream that would take a whole new generation’s time to change.
Today marks the first day of company visits. The first company we visited was JJS which business is to connect music lovers through the use of technology and the host was called CJ Kim. She explained that the application mymusictaste allows fans to request for which idol that they wish to see and decide how much they are willing to spend. In this way, JJS is able to guarantee the demand for concert and artists and promoters can be sure that the concert will be profitable. As such, promoters and artist will be able to make a living and most importantly have satisfied fans. As of now, mymusictaste has already successful organised 50 concerts over 25 countries.
However, this success had humble beginnings as they had to work with less popular groups such as Lunafly and it took some time for people to recognize that this model is successful before committing. This proves one practical fact is that you need to first attain success before you can convince people that your idea works. I have also learnt that even as the product is important, it is essential to have a passionate team to run the business. Lastly, i have learnt how important is it to have an idea that cannot be replicate as huge companies would just steal your idea and since the legal system takes forever, most start-ups cannot match the competition and go out of business.
Next up, we visited 530 and thankfully, they are both located at the same area. 530 is currently waiting for the beta release for their application that is called ZimCar. The motivation for this application was that the CEO realized that the process of moving house is very troublesome and people normally have a hard time trying to find the right movers to do the job. Therefore, he decided that he would provide the whole moving package as a very affordable rate to entice the users and by simplifying the moving process. Despite not being a very innovative solution, i believed he identified an important problem and tackled the problem with an effective solution with the use of technology.