Customers and Techies Rule! Review of the E27 event

June 22, 2006 by SGE

Last night, E27 held their second event with three new startups in SMU. We review the event and look at the interesting lessons which we can pick up for the future.

Yesterday, our partners Entrepreneur27 held their second event in SMU. The turnout was fantastic from the organizers viewpoint. Originally, they were expecting 50 people but it ended with 91 people inside the student lounge room. There were people who gatecrashed the event, but if you are in one of those famous technology clusters, you will know that it’s not uncommon.

With pizzas and soft drinks, we spent our time listening to the three companies pitching their ideas to the audience. To be fair, their ideas were not out of the blue types of tech startups that you hear in the Silicon Valley. If we have been venture capitalists or business angels, we would not put my money into them. However, we were impressed by their passion and dedication to present in front of an audience who were throwing tough questions and comments at them. We thought that there is a lack of Web 2.0 yesterday. We would like to see more gutsy people building the web 2.0 infrastructure in Singapore. Two things struck me here: the first, I was impressed by the crowd who were ready to challenge assumptions of their business models and technology by the startups, and second, people engaging in talking more about technology. It takes time to build up the quality of our innovations rather than to keep harping that we don’t have innovations.

We felt that there are three main themes which revolved around the event last night:

Increasing user base or we say, talking to your customers: Jeremy Yew, founder of Yearbook.com.sg started working on the startup 7 weeks ago. He showed that you don’t need to know technology to start a company. What I thought he brought across is the need to continuously engaging the customers. He described the processes of getting feedback from customers and how he worked on satisfying the needs of the customers. Someone once said, the way to show that your business is working is that you have customers. For him, he has created the user base. Sponsoring the podcast from Mr Brown and Mr Miyagi actually helped his business to grow. He started it off as a free enterprise, and subsequently moving into ads based revenue model.
On the other hand, the same is to be said for Choon Keat who present the technology he created: RSSFwd. In his case, he built an interesting applications and slowly his users start to help him in bringing in more improvements and even cash.
Bootstrapping is the way to do a startup: We thought that Jeremy and Choon Keat demonstrated very well the use of bootstrapping in their startups. They put their own time and possibly money in building what they thought was good. Similarly, for the XShare team, they felt that there is a missing link in the telecommunications market. What we felt that XShare needs to improve, is taking their presentation through. They put a lot of effort in their presentation and yet the audience was confused by their technology and business model. If you want people to invest, you need your presentation to be improved.
Who cares what people say, I just go and build my technology: Xshare and RssFwd continued to build their technologies despite the odds. I liked the story from Choon Keat, where he told that the idea behind RSSFwd started from him buying a book from Amazon. Even as so, after the presentation of the three startups, We saw Matthew Chong passionately demonstrating the technology he built to the rest of us who were networking in the room. That’s what we need. We see a lot of engineers and scientists going into business, but very few stayed to do the technology. The reason is simple: building technology is hard and the principle of least action adopted by most students is to take short cuts. Unless we start to have a critical mass of technologists, we are not going go anywhere with too many business people. It is this trait we observed that we felt that E27 has a lot to offer in getting technologists to show their ideas whether they can be a business ready startup.

I look forward to the next E27 event. Still, I think that the best time in these events is never the event itself, but the drinks session after that. I find the discussions in the cafe after the event more exciting and interesting, because we are really thinking of trying new and crazy tech ideas.