Singapore Entrepreneurs

The first Facebook Developer Garage meeting has finally happened in Asia, and Singapore is proud to be the first country in Asia to host this event. We know that Facebook will be making some big announcements soon. The E27 team has put together an interesting conference for those who are interested in developing applications for Facebook. Of course, the event was followed by a hackathon at the Garag3. In this post, we review the presentation by two young speakers, (i) Trey Phillips, the winner of Facebook F8 Hackathon in Silicon Valley, Palo Alto and coincidentally, he is here in NUS for a student exchange (so Singapore is attracting cool programmers too these days) and (ii) Leonard Lin, founder of Tyler Projects and he has the honour to develop Singapore’s first Facebook MMORPG application: BattleStations. The focus is on the lessons learnt in developing a Facebook application.

The Story of Facebook in Singapore by Justin Lee, co-founder of E27

Before going into the presentations of Trey and Leonard, Justin Lee (co-founder of E27) told us the story when Facebook really started in Singapore. He even gave us the date when the first user in Singapore started using Facebook, which turns out to be 11 May 2006. He provided the statistics for the initial growth of facebook in NUS, NTU and SMU. For some time, the growth was slow until it hit the tipping point in April 2007. Somehow, I got the feeling that it’s the series of events from E27 IV till Nexus, where we are using Facebook to coordinate many events. As a result, it grew exponentially, and one surprising thing is that the Singapore network is growing faster than the networks from the universities, polytechnics and other education institutions (junior colleges, secondary schools and ITEs). Obviously, as a joke, Singaporean students are studying so hard that they have no time for Facebook. Justin also gave an estimate that the number of users will reach 300K before the end of the year, and then to 600K in the 2008 Chinese New Year.

Lessons from Trey Phillips, Winner of Facebook F8 Hackathon in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley

Like Justin, Trey started with the story in how he got involved in developing Facebook applications. He told us the story of the F8 invite, where he received an invitation to witness the launch of the Facebook platform by Mark Zuckerberg. He thoughht that it is a good idea for individuals to get involved in developing applications for a platform like Facebook. He believes that the first applications will gain the first mover advantage and extract the most value from the audience before the next wave of applications come in. Being first movers, the developers will have huge access to a large group of users within a short period of time. It will ensure the owners of the platform to work with the feedback of the developers. He told us that the hackathon was about a few hours. During the event, he sought others to source for ideas but no one wants to team up with him. So, he worked on his application alone, which basically allowed a facebook user to expand information about him or herself, for e.g. favourite food and place. Yes, he also showed us his fifteen minutes of fame with a photo of himself with Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. The real funny part of the story is the maintenance of the application, since he had the pain to maintain it with the use of a dialup (given he was on holiday with his family for two weeks). Eventually, his application was sold to SideStep, a travel company. He made an important note that as a developer, the integrity of the platform to ensure privacy is an important feature. Through his success with the first facebook application, he got an internship in Silicon Valley.

He shared a few lessons learnt from the experience. The first and foremost is to listen to your fellow users and developers and not to forget that you must love Facebook too. To create the killer application, his advice is to get in early before the next wave gets in (or the fad disappears). The developer must concentrate on his idea, and the longer the person waits, the more likey it will be done. Ironically, this is the same thing that I have been telling some aspiring first-time web 2.0 entrepreneurs. One thing I liked about his presentation is the emphasis of not spending too much time developing before launching. Instead, the developer should let the user feedback guide the process, and prepare to respond quickly while the application is in her beta phase. Lastly, making the application sticky is an important part of developing a killer application.

As the talk moves on, Trey offered tips in how to approach issues in Facebook. One of them is the lesson “don’t take things too seriously, particularly about monetization” since the platform is only 5 months old. It is important to do develop utilities and games because they are featured fill, rather than extensions of an existing application (for e.g. Super Poke and Super Wall, where Facebook can integrate it into their system). Yes, he revealed that Facebook is on the look for innovative applications, and if you have one, do send them a proposal. In tackling against the market, he broke down the market segmentation to total, active, niche or demographic specific users. He urged those who are planning to develop facebook apps in the following exit strategies: (i) sell the app, (ii) take it out of Facebook and try to maintain it independently. He also suggested that multi-lingual apps may be the next hot thing for developers, and an interesting trivia for Facebook: most of the users are at least 25 and there are more female users than male users.

Lastly, he centered on the execution issue. The developer hosts the app and also have the responsibility to keep up with the growth and also be prepared to deal with the Tuesday night pushes (downtime). Lastly, he talked about the possible metrics for measuring how successful an app could be. Lastly, he gave an example of a hypothetical app which is uniquely Singapore: an app which translates any message on the wall to a Singlish phrase (for e.g. I see -> I see lah) and the application targets Singaporean users or people who wants to get to know about Singapore.

Leonard Lin, Tyler Projects

Leonard has the honour of creating Singapore’s first Facebook MMORPG app: BattleStations. How did he get involved in Facebook since he had always been developing web games? It was the nudging of Bjorn Lee, the other founder of E27. He got onto the phone with his partners when he heard about the Facebook platform being open for developers. They created the app within 2 months.

He released some interesting statistics which might be of interest to people who want to harnass Facebook. When BattleStations is first released, the number of active users for his app to 4000 within 1 week, growing at 1240%, though it’s growth slowed to about 20+% in later weeks. He even showed his Alexa chart, where the traffic grew by more than 2000% (and I am not kidding). For Battlestations, he was surprised that there are 64 page views per user and 13.3% of players play for more than an hour everyday (the average is about 15 minutes per day).

Yes, Leonard also talked about the new Clan War features for BattleStations in his presentation and guess what, he is giving those of us who attended the talk bonus game points.

Conclusion:

All in all, there are other speakers who hit the presentation stand. The breakout discussions are interesting and most of us in the web 2.0 community have a good time catching up. Leonard, Michael Cheng, Ian and myself went for a beer after the event. This is the first time that I see a proper developers conference done here, and would urge our friends to organize different developers conference such that we can grow more innovators along the way.

Related News:
While Singapore celebrates to be the first in Asia to organize this Facebook Developer Garage and Hackathon, Facebook has just made a big announcement later in the day: Microsoft will take a $240 million equity stake in Facebook’s next round of financing at a $15 billion valuation, and the companies will expand their existing advertising partnership (from TechCrunch).

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