Taiwan Startups

A few days ago, I returned from Taiwan, where the opening session of Startup Labs took place at the weekend. Startup Labs session is a three-week work with five selected startups that have come to the program with project prototypes. Startups receive at the beginning of the program an investment of about 30 thousand dollars for 8% of the project from Startup Labs and local investors. The priority task is to obtain concrete results on the acquisition of the audience, customers and making money, which will determine the direction of the technical development of the project. Secondly, it is the technical implementation of the properties necessary for obtaining an audience, customers and money. In the process of work, the project is assisted by mentors from among local experts and investors .

The results of the work will be presented to investors on the Demo Day, which will be held on the day of completion of the program on March 2. The most important thing that teams must present at the end of the program is proof of the startup's life. Proof of life can be the methodology and estimation of the cost of obtaining new customers, a model for analyzing the activity of existing customers, the percentage of conversion of the target audience into customers of the service, the first money earned. This is the difference between the approach advocated by Startup Labs and the usual startup method. Usually start-ups spend a long time and a lot of money to make a full-featured product, and only then they check if all this is necessary for real users and clients. I am a big supporter of just this kind of approach and even made for those interested in this issue a brief summary in Russian of the well-known book Eric Ries “Lean Startup” devoted to this issue.

So, what was there, and how do I relate to the whole process?

The discovery was crowded, especially for the scale of Taiwan and the first event of this kind - about 250 people gathered representing local experts and investors. The local partner of Startup Labs is the investment company Yushan Ventures . The discovery took place in the local office of Microsoft, which is a sponsor of Startup Labs. Demo Day will be held at the local office of Google, which is also a sponsor of the program.
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Five projects were selected for participation in the program.

• Foodjing - a catalog of the menu of restaurants, painfully similar to our Russian Menu
• Gumhoo is a photo catalog of products for social shopping, something vaguely reminiscent of LookBook and our Russian TagBrand
• Flirq is a dating service where only women can initiate dating.
• InsureMe - insurance search and order service, virtual insurance broker
• The TrueSense - service to automatically check the source code of web services for various vulnerabilities and their correction

The first few days were devoted to the joint work of mentors and startups to adjust product offerings and identify key hypotheses that need to be tested on real customers and users. Foodjing has begun work towards adding pre-order meals for business lunches, take-away meals and delivery for those restaurants that have it to a simple menu catalog. On the second day of work, they received the first real customers from among the restaurants, began to add this property to their service and are preparing to attract the first users from nearby business centers. Gumhoo has begun work on collecting information about the goods of little-known brands in Taiwan from the surrounding countries of Southeast Asia in order to streamline the process of their ordering and delivery to Taiwan. InsureMe set itself the goal of earning the first money from customers who actually bought insurance through them, and began work on expanding the grocery offer for other categories of services, increasingly starting to remind me of Sravni.com. Flirq went to the fields to collect information about the "classy men", on which the first female users of the service can start pecking. True Sense decided to get the first customers, "sowing on the tail" of competing systems users from big brands who may find vulnerabilities, but have not yet learned how to fix them, which True Sense can already do.

Of course, all these are only the first hypotheses that should be tested during the session. Any of them may not be confirmed, and start-ups will need another pivot - a change in the product offer. But I was seriously pleased with the fact that during the first days startups managed to convince them that they should quit on developing software properties that may never be in demand by anyone, and go to the fields to switch first to working with real customers and users. And they went to the fields and got the first results.

The most interesting thing is to see what will be achieved at the end of the program. I'm going to go back to Taiwan for Demo Day and after that talk about how it all ended. It is worth noting that the desire to visit Demo Day was recently sent even by the Minister of Economy of Taiwan and the Chairman of the Board of Directors of TrendMicro.

And where am I? I am Arkady Moreynis, and Startup Labs is a project we did with my partner Clint Nelsen, who is the co-founder of the international Startup Weekend. Last year, he completely switched to work at Startup Labs, becoming the managing partner of the company. One of the tasks of Startup Labs is not only to help the birth of new startups in each individual country, but also to facilitate the transfer of startups and technologies between countries. Startup Labs focuses on work in emerging markets - the next session is scheduled in April in Turkey, then in Jordan, Brazil, China, India and so on. And for Glavstartov startups - this is a unique opportunity to enter new emerging markets with the help of local partners Startup Labs.