Thoughts on a few startups that presented on Demoday

Techyizu Demo Day

Last Sunday, Techyizu organized a Demo Day in Shanghai.

About Demo Day

Demo Day allows seven selected tech start-ups with a minimally viable product to refine their demos via a closed session with selected mentors. On the following day, the start -ups will have 15 minutes to present their demo to a judging panel of investors and entrepreneurs.

Presenting Startups

1. Aimifan – Convenient online food delivery platform
2. Mamazuofan – A way for neighborhood cooks to sell dishes from home
3. Pengyouquan – (to be revealed)
4. Rudy Bike – High performance electric motorcycles with classic styling
5. Trader Analytics – Online game that teaches aspiring Wall Street traders
6. Tuiping – In-depth information search and analysis for users and marketers
7. VXPLO – Cloud-based new media solution based on SaaS tools

Pengyouquan

Pengyouquan brands themselves as the natural social network. With the tagline of 和不同的人分享不同的事, the social side differentiates themselves from other major players such as facebook by allowing users to know other users first before adding them as friends. The company believes that your friend list should only be those whom you treat them as your real friends, unlike those acquaintances you met at some party. This is the “natural way” of making friends. According to the founder in his presentation, he said that as you get more and more friends on your social network (think facebook), you tend to share lesser and lesser on it because the whole world is paying attention at what you are doing. This defeats the purpose of social network. Pengyouquan hopes to create a “world without strangers” where the friend list is not shared.

Building on the social network, to gain more users the social network leverages on the usability and efficiency of mobile devices where mobile phone address books are used as the method to import contacts. The mobile app of Pengyouquan also allows you to edit the photos before sharing it onto the social network. Pengyouquan also incorporated its services with the China twitter Singlang Weibo where one can share tweets from weibo to pengyouquan and viceversa.

Thoughts:

While the whole idea behind the social network is very new and yes “creating a world without strangers” sound pretty promising, personally I think that the Chinese market are dominated by renren, tencent and weibo. Pengyouquan to me sound just like another site for me to post some updates and share some photos and why should I go for pengyouquan when I already have my friends on weibo or renren? And I think that educating the netizens about the idea behind pengyouquan can be quite challenging especially the whole concept of和不同的人分享不同的事. 怎么样和不同的人分享不同的事？

Mamazuofan.com

Founded by 2 French guys, MamaZuoFan is the first online community for meal sharing within your neighborhood, to enjoy home-made prepared dishes, as if it were the ones your mama used to prepare for you. The idea like how I understand it: meet your awesome negihbours who cook awesome food, pay for their food! For the customers, this is a good way for those expatriates whom yearn for home cooked food in their neighbourhood or those who want to try out local homemade food. For the cooks, mamazuofan provides them with the platform they need to commercialize their product and earn some cash and also to gain some popularity. To make this possible, users are allowed to comment and recommend the dishes that they tasted before. There are also halal food promoted in the website and Im sure many muslim friends out there will find this website extremely helpful.

This business model is pure C2C where the cook will deal directly with the customers will have to pick up the food themselves. Mamazuofan only provides a platform for them to connect with each other and earns through transaction fee as well as through advertising. When asked about the liability issue and food safety concern during the Q&A session at the Demo day, the founders mentioned that there is a disclaimer that reminds customers that “the responsibility is wholly the one of the users to take the necessary measures to protect their and other’s health and safety”

Mamazuofan prides itself as the Asia based first food social network and as it suggests, the idea is actually not new in the startup space. Gobble [http://www.gobble.com/] is a similar startup based in the states just raised $1.2mil from Founder Collective and mamazuofan is just an incorporation of the idea into the Chinese market, catering to the needs of the expat markets here in China. While Gobble manages to raise funds for its startup which reflects the strong confidence of the investors towards the whole idea of ‘connecting home chefs with customers’, I don’t see why mamazuofan will not succeed in China, especially in Shanghai, where the expatriate community here is very big. And most importantly, they are willing to spend on good quality food.

Mamazuofan has also been covered by Cnngo. Read it here: http://www.cnngo.com/shanghai/eat/mamazuofan-shanghais-home-chef-cook-storm-014056

Thoughts:

Because I am considered an expat here in Shanghai, I would definitely use the service of the website. Probably the founders could spend more time and spare some thoughts on how to better reach the expat community and how to market the whole idea to them because if it weren’t for the demo day, I wouldn’t have known about this. And I am sure that although there are a lot of times where I would have sudden cravings for home cooked food, the first thing that come across my mind would be cityweekend or smartshanghai – to search for restaurants that serve my hometown cuisine. I’m sure if the marketing is done properly, mamazuofan would do very well in shanghai.

Rudybike

Weipingjia

Weipingjia in English means Weibo comment analyst, and as the name suggest, is a company providing real time weibo comment analysis. With features such as auto filtering of comments, trending keywords, clustering of commenting, satisfaction analysis as well as semantic analysis, companies can monitor their brand presence online on weibo. This B2B website is founded in May and earns mainly through weibo marketing, brand monitoring as well as online branding strategies consultation.

Thoughts:

To me, weipingjia is the perfect example of the incorporation of business models overseas into the Chinese market. It seems to me that weipingjia and brandtology is basically running the same business model:

Image: http://www.brandtology.com/our-difference/how-brandtology-can-help/

But a good business model always work. There are still not a lot of companies out there that offers social media monitoring and since the social media is growing exponentially, there is definitely market for weipingjia to tap.

Traders analytics corp

“Traders Analytics Corp is a social gaming company that makes niche games for finance nerds”, introduced Founder and CEO, Michael Tanenbaum. How does it work? Students or whoever is interested in the field of banking and finance, can sign up (for free) and take part in the specially designed game which is model upon real financial simulations adopted by banks to access their summer interns. In the game, the participants will be given virtual currency to trade in real life stocks/funds/options in real time based on real life market data. The top performers of each category can be identified and be recruited by financial institutions or bankings. For the students, there are also a specially crafted tutorial to teach them the basics of how finance work.

The aim of the company is to connect the banks and financial institutions with the right individuals. “Banks are hiring the wrong people”. Building on the company, behavioral analysts are also engaged to analyse the participants on their personality to ensure that the prospective individuals are the best fit for the company who are hiring.

“UltraTradr is a game, learning device, and recruiting tool all rolled into one fun, easy-to-use interface. UltraTradr lets users learn how markets work by replicating trading environments. Players trade units of one commodity, the absolute value of which is revealed at the end of an exchange.”

The revenue model? Banks can pay a subscription fee to observe the performance of the participants in real time. There will also be an engagement fee should any firm is interested in contacting the participant.

Thoughts: This is definitely something that I would want to try out. Personally I think the tutorial system is a brilliant way not only to draw in more users and to help educate them about finance but also to help them discover the economist in them. Trader Analytics Corp makes the learning process a fun and interactive one through the tutorial, enhancing the user experience. Nowadays, everything is about maximal user experience, creating word of mouth to promote the product to their social network.

Aimifan

The last startup to present at Demo Day was Aimifan. For Aimifan, it serves to address the problem of overdue food delivery flyers and the frustration of having to call in and place your food delivery order. With Aimifan, all the latest updated menu from various partner restaurants can be found at the website and when you want to order “waimai’ (food delivery), you can just log onto the website and place your order online. The order will be sent directly to the restaurant and there will be an email confirmation for you. What is exciting about this startup is that there are working on an English version of the website this would definitely cater to the expat community here.

When we look at the competitive landscape of Aimifan, there are a godzilian websites that offers food delivery services, be it independent ones [mealbay.net] or those delivery services offered by established restaurants or fast food chain (think McD), and whether it is targeted to the locals[http://www.wai-mai.com/ShangHai.php] with lower purchasing power or those catering to expats [www.sherpa.com]

Thoughts

While Aimifan has a pretty nice landing site and a cute brand logo, I think they are competing in a very competitive industry. The company is aiming to serve the needs of the white collars and expat community whom are price sensitive and who are looking for cheap waimai food. Existing Chinese waimai websites only provides the menu and phone numbers of the restaurants and customers have to call and place their order themselves, while aimifan took the liberty of helping their customers do just that. To stand out from its competitors, aimifan must build up its restaurant partners on its website, and they should not choose those restaurants with expensive food(thus competing head on with the well established Sherpa.com) but instead, should focus on partnering with restaurants with affordable foods. Maybe Aimifan can incorporate the groupon deals onto the website, after all, aimifan is targeting the price sensitive white collar market. Aimifan could also offer some incentives to its users if they were to refer new users to its website. The incorporation of google maps definitely enhanced the user’s experience on the website and probably Sherpa can learn how to do this in their website.

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