10 startups I liked this summer pt.1

This summer I wrote a series of weekly posts in which I introduced small businesses I had discovered that solve small but specific problems or pain points. There is so much cool stuff happening in Southeast Asia, and I just wanted to share some of the activity that might be less well known. These are 100% unsponsored and all opinions are my own.

#1 - Bike Hero

As a cyclist, my bike needs some regular maintenance work. I have a guy I can trust (he was recommended) but he wasn’t available the week that I wanted to get the work done. So I went to Google and searched “bike mechanic near me” and found Bike Hero. They work with a network of freelance mechanics to provide on-demand repair service in Singapore. So instead of me having to carry my bike down to the mechanic, the mechanic comes to my house at an hour of my choosing.

Why I love it:
From a product perspective it’s as lo-fi as it needs to be. They quickly move you from their simple website to a Whatsapp chat and organize everything with you directly. Their overhead must be so small! There’s three pricing tiers targeting different types of customers (essential, advanced, premium), and that’s as complex as it gets.

From a market sizing perspective, a 2018 study showed that a quarter of Singaporean households owned at least one bicycle, a number which I suspect has only grown in the last few years — how many people do we know who got a bike during the pandemic? So that’s roughly a $150 million service available market (SAM) with their current offering in Singapore alone. Some strategic partnerships (I think they might have something with Decathlon) will help them to further consolidate market share. Their digital marketing strategy is very solid.

This is a very interesting business that can probably net $1m or so quite quickly, even if there isn’t much of a moat. I’m not sure this really suitable for VC money, but I suspect that these folks probably don’t need much outside investment anyway.

#2 - Deskimo

Last summer I was traveling for 3 months and I did not have a fixed office space. At times, finding a productive place to work caused a bit of anxiety. Enter Deskimo (YC S21). Through Deskimo I could rent coworking space by the hour anywhere in town. It was really handy — since I didn’t have a fixed place of work I could just pull up the app wherever I was after a meeting, before a workout, etc. and find the nearest office space. It’s quieter and cheaper than a cafe (coworking spaces usually come with tea and coffee), there’s no shortage of plugs, and the wifi is a lot stronger and more stable. For coworking businesses, it’s a great way to try and sell unutilized space, kind of like a ClassPass for office space.

Why I love it:
The product is fantastic. Checking in and out, payment, etc. is done through the no-frills app. When you check in you even get notified of the wifi password. It’s a very good product, and a very good service.

From a business viability perspective they are going to need to get a lot of users on this. Co-founder Mischler mentioned in 2021 that Deskimo users are on the app around 10 hours per week. If that’s 500 hours per year at $5/hour, and assuming Deskimo gets 20% of that, they’ll need at least 2000 loyal warriors to break a million — from their Jan 4th blog post where they mention their users have clocked more than half a billion seconds on their app it looks like they might be close to reaching that number.

For now they are only available in Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, UAE, and Malaysia… Can’t wait for them to expand to other markets.

#3 - Strange Soccer

I like to play football (soccer) recreationally, but among my friends I find it hard to find enough people who are also interested in playing and are available at the same time I am, not to mention I booking courts can be quite a pain. Stranger Soccer takes away all that hassle and makes going to play football as easy as going for a jog. Through their app you can browse dozens of games happening at different timings and locations around Singapore on any given day, book a slot for the one you want, pay, and then you show up and play. I’ve played 5–6 games already and met some cool new people, but mostly I’m glad I can play again!

Why I love it:
These are football enthusiasts who just want to make football as accessible to as many people as possible, and it shows. They have been adding new features that increase stickyness and which I find are valuable — some of these include ways to connect with people you meet, or adding a subscription option so you basically pay less for each game if you are ready to include football into your regular fitness routine.

From the operations perspective I wonder if there are ways to increase those gross margins while keeping prices the same. As a customer I am basically paying a very acceptable premium on what I would normally pay if I were to book a court with my friends — I estimate it’s around $5–10 per person, so probably totals around $100 per game after court fees. That needs to go towards the game hosts (I am not sure if they get paid or if they are volunteers) and then towards overhead. They are looking to expand internationally (3.2 billion football players out there, folks) and have already started franchising the business in India.

#4 - Usertip

One of the topics I put a lot of thought on during my time at my previous startup was how to make onboarding more self-serve. The product was good, simple, and easy to use, but there was still some minor onboarding to be done, as with any new digital or physical product. For sales-driven leads we could actually do this live through a video call or in-person training, but this is not scalable (the perennial CAC problem in the SME space hashtag#ifyouknowyouknow), and we always missed the customers who found us organically, which was actually a large portion of our pipeline. Their engagement was much lower, and we theorized that the lack of easy-to-follow instructions were putting people off. We had actually designed a “wizard” to help new trial customers navigate the product, but this would have had to have been hard coded and there weren’t enough tech resources to put this in place.

This is where Singapore-based Usertip can help. They provide a no-code platform that allows you to create assets to assist digital transformation/onboarding of digital products. It sits on top of your existing product and creates digital touch-points (like hovertips or spotlights) to guide new users through your platform so they can understand on a step-by-step basis how the product works and where their desired features live.

Why I love it:
If you’re targeting a product-led-growth hashtag#plg strategy, this is the kind of tool that helps you make your product more self-serve, thereby decreasing CAC and making the product show its magic better. All this without having to spend precious tech resources on creating an onboarding journey — this suggests that a good target customer might be younger scaleups/SMEs, as more mature companies will probably be able to afford to code their own onboarding in an even more customized way, but this is a tricky market!
They have three pricing tiers, including a freemium version likely aimed at young startups. If you know your annual revenue per user, then it is a very easy exercise to see how much UserTip needs to help boost conversion for this platform to be worthwhile.

Have you recently discovered any cool startups/businesses? Let me know in the comments!

#5 - BINERY

When I was running FoodRazor I was also in charge of the bookkeeping. I hated it. Reconciliation was such a chore, even if it was made infinitely easier through the use of Xero. However, we were too small to warrant an accountant/bookkeeper, even if I was willing to pay something to unlock those few hours every month (and I would have paid even more to avoid having to wade through that mess during the M&A DD process — keep those books *tidy*, y’all)

BINERY is an HK-based solution that solves this exact problem. They have a tech-powered army of bookkeepers that leverage the Binery technology to deliver seamless bookkeeping services at a fraction of the price of a regular bookkeeper. You simply send them your transaction documents (invoices, receipts, etc.) and they take care of the rest.

Why I love it:
While there is definitely some overlap between what Binery does and what FoodRazor does, Binery focuses on being a full bookkeeping solution, targeting customers not just in the F&B space but also young startups and eCommerce companies. They’ve made some savvy partnerships with Xero and Airwallex, so there’s a place for you to see and manage your books and a place to manage payments. Pricing is adjusted according to monthly revenue, presumably as a proxy for the number of documents that will need to be processed.

It looks like at the end of the day there is still some sort of human touch point — Binery states that they have real accountants working on your books, which surely drives costs up quite a bit. One of the likely pillars of success for the company will be to find ways to maximize the efficiency of those accountants through the use of technology and increase those margins as much as possible.