This Week at Iterative – How to Test Startup Ideas, Winter 2021 Batch and Jobs at Iterative
Issue 5
Hello!
We’re halfway through our 2nd batch of companies (see below). One of my favorite parts of working with early-stage startups is coming up with clever ways to validate ideas and get early user feedback.
Here are a few I’ve recently heard about.
Testing Ideas with Notion, Airtable and WhatsApp – Duoria (Iterative W21) is testing their idea with nothing more than this Notion, an Airtable form and WhatsApp to coordinate with users. Even though both founders are technical, doing it this way lets them iterate faster and interact with every user. If you think you need a technical co-founder to start working on ideas, think again.
Go Where Your Users Are – Often, the most valuable user feedback comes from the users who don’t use your product. How do you talk to them? Well GoZayaan (Iterative W21) went where there users are, the airport! They sent people from their team, to the airport, to find out where they had purchased their tickets and why. We love that kind of hustle.
Testing Inception – One of my favorite stories from our podcast with Tim Grassin is how they initially tested the idea for TendoPay (Iterative S20). He built a fake sneaker store on Shopify, with fake buy now, pay later payment option to see how many people would be interested in it. Turns out there was a lot and TendoPay was born.
Have an interesting story to add? I’d love to hear them. Please share in the comments.
Winter 2021 Batch 😍
We met with over 220 companies from all over Southeast Asia as part of the process for recruiting our Winter 2021 batch. We're excited to have the following 7 companies as part of the batch.
String Soul - Remote music lessons for kids
Spenmo - Helping companies manage spend
GoZayaan - Travel platform for Bangladesh
Ferne Health - At-home health screening for women
Duoria - Pinduoduo for restaurants and activities
CoderSchool - Lambda School for Southeast Asia
1Export - Helping Philippines suppliers go global
For more details on each company and why we're excited about them, read this. If you’re an investor and interested in attending Demo Day, you can sign up here.
Podcasts 🎧
We've released 3 more episodes of our Founder Stories series where dive into the stories behind some of the best founders in Southeast Asia.
Tim Grassin on Early Influences and Testing Ideas
Tim Grassin is a Co-Founder of TendoPay (Iterative S20), the largest online installment provider in the Philippine. On this episode, I talk to Tim about his earlier influences, switching from finance to entrepreneurship, how he built a multi-million dollar design agency, why he gave that up to start a startup in the Philippines and how they tested their initial idea by building a fake website that sold fake products to see if people would try their fake financing product.
Vibhas Jain on Finding Co-Founders and Ideas
Vibhas Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Outside Voice (Iterative S20), a no-code app builder for WhatsApp. On this episode, we talk about Vibhas (Vibes) childhood growing up in India, getting into and moving to Stanford but never actually attending Stanford, how he met his co-founder and came up with the idea of Outside Voice.
Jeff Liu and Justin Louie on Being 2nd Time Founders
Jeff Liu and Justin Louie are the co-founders of Jenfi (YC W20). Jenfi lends to small businesses in Southeast Asia based on revenue. Jenfi has raised US$2.1M in funding.
Who do you want to see? Know someone we should have on the show? Let me know in the comments.
Writing 📖
Successful Startups: The Right Founder, Problem and People
I spoke at a session held by the Singapore Management University Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. It’s full of 2x2 and a story about Chris Rock but my favorite excerpt from the conversation was this.
“As a founder, especially in the early days, your job is, ‘Can you convince people? Can you convince investors that they should invest? Convince co-founders and teammates to work with you? Can you convince customers to use your product and give you money?” explains Hsu Ken, whose machine learning startup Decide.com was acquired by eBay in 2013. “You’re more of a salesperson than anything else. The sooner you make peace with that, the better off you’re going to be.”
We find this is a hurdle that first time founders struggle with. Founders typically start a startup because they love to build, not because they love to sell.
Work at Iterative 👩🏻💻
We’re hiring! We want to help more founders and invest in more companies. That means we need help. If you know anyone who would be a good fit for either of these roles, please send this to them.
Content Producer
We're looking for a self-motivated Content Producer to help with The Iterative Podcast. This person takes pride in their work, has high attention to detail and a strong appetite to learn. The ideal candidate has an interest in startups and entrepreneurship. No background in audio or video production necessarily but helpful. On a regular basis, they will pitch story and format ideas, book and arrange interviews, edit transcripts, create show notes and work closely with the show's hosts (Hsu Ken Ooi, General Partner at Iterative).
Batch Program Manager
We're looking for a self-motivated Batch Program Manager to help with running the batch and Demo Day. This person takes pride in their work, has high attention to detail and is organized. The ideal candidate has an interest in startups and entrepreneurship. On a regular basis, they will (1) help organize events for companies in the batch and alumni and (2) coordinate with mentors and (3) and help organize Demo Day. They will work closely with Brian and Hsu Ken.