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TradeHero, iCarsClub win Singapore Satellite

Finance app TradeHero and peer car-rental service iCarsClub emerged as winners at the Echelon Singapore Satellite. e27′s Jacky Yap provides a recap.

Wednesday saw intense pitches happening at our Echelon Singapore Satellite. Split up into two groups, 21 startups gave their best pitches to two different groups of judges. Judges provided feedbacks and comments to the startups, and after an afternoon of judging, the winner for group A was iCarsClub, while the winner for group B was TradeHero.

The focus this year was to identify companies with solid traction, revenue models or founding teams. Both iCarsClub and TradeHero were able to prove their business model through solid traction with the backing of investors and of course, a solid team.

Founded in October 2012, iCarsclub now has more than 300 participating cars on their platform, with over 3,000 registered members. The peer to peer car renting platform also managed to raise US$482,000 from Red Dot Ventures earlier this year. TradeHero on the other hand, has reached US$5 billion worth of virtual currency through 350,000 trades within its community. Launched in December 2012, it has a total of 50,000 registered users.

Read also: Peer to peer car rental startup iCarsclub drives away with US$482K from Red Dot Ventures

Personally, I was impressed with most of the team which presented at our Satellite. While I only had the chance to listen to all the pitches from Group B, most of the companies had traction and was generating revenue and real monetary transactions.

singapore satellite
singapore satellite

Other than the two winning startups, Echelon Singapore Satellite attendees also had the chance to listen to three keynotes from local community leaders.

Hiring for your Start up and the importance of culture – Tian Qiuyan, Co-founder and CEO

With experience in both the corporate and startup world, Qiuyan started off by sharing some of the reasons why people choose corporate over startups. Working at corporate gives you the prestige as most of the guys from the corporate world use where they work to represent themselves in social settings. Corporate jobs offer stability, too, as you have a clear career path and you probably know that your company will be around in the next couple of years. Corporations are able to pay you higher wages, and when you travel for business trips, you could probably travel by business class, as well as staying at 4 or 5 star hotels.

With the various pull factors for talents to join corporates, what happens to startups, then? While startups are unable to provide those benefits, they can provide these to early employees: empowerment and responsibility. On top of that, startups usually have a flat organization structure and are very “family oriented,” the term Qiunyan used to described her team at Soldgers. Unlike working at a corporate firm, when you are tired, you can take a quick nap, and take a quick break whenever you want. Qiuyan concluded her sharing session by stressing the importance of a culture.

On hiring too, don’t hire just because the person has awesome credentials or you can be buddies. Get referrals and only hire someone who believes in your vision, and someone who is self-motivated. Don’t be desperate, too, and settle for next best, because patience always pays off.

Read also: March 2013 Founders Drinks saw Soldgers soldiering on

Hiring for your Start up and the importance of culture from e27 Singapore

Mobile trends and opportunities in local and regional markets – a Blackberry Perspective

Casey Yoon of Blackberry also shared about their various BlackBerry platform statistics:

  • BlackBerry has grown the number of developers who have registered for BlackBerry App World by 180 percent.

  • The company increased the number of apps approved for sale on AppWorld by 130 percent.

  • BlackBerry delivered 70,000 apps during BlackBerry 10 launch, and hit the 100,000 mark on March 21.

What marketing channels make sense for a (digital consumer) startup, and when? – a RedMart perspective

Finally, Todd Kurie, the VP of Marketing for RedMart shared some tricks and best practices for marketing:

  • Observe your customers, leverage on tools such as Google Analytics, KISSMetrics, Usertesting et cetera.*

  • Listen to your customers and their feedbacks on your social media channels.

  • Use the right marketing channels: different channels have different strengths (Google Adwords, Facebook ads, Print, et cetera*).

  • Start tracking lifetime value now. Data points should be collected as early as possible.

  • Know what growth is just right. Growing too slow might result in pressures from investors, but growing too fast might cause you to lose focus on existing customer experience.

What marketing channels make sense for a (digital consumer) startup, and when? – a RedMart perspective from e27 Singapore

Read also: Online health portal TanyaDok wins Indonesia Satellite

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