TAN Yun Xi
Contents
Reflection
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
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 common found in many music listeners. I learned from the CEO that marketing should not be a vital part at the inital 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 focues more on how to make the product good and the beter the product, the easier it will be to retain customers without marketing.
Day 3
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.
