After a power-packed previous week which culminated in our very own DLT: Pratu team winning the NTUit.io game, this week continued the fast pace with a bevy of Masterclasses. The topics this week were more varied and hands-on, with practical tips and introductions to programmes and software aimed at helping us break into foreign markets and develop our prototypes.
The week commenced with instructor Fang Yi’s Masterclass in DLT market access. He first posed the question of the best strategy for penetrating foreign markets. The conventional wisdom was using customer validation in foreign markets — finding distributors, investors, gaining access to investors’ money, resources and recommendations.
Because of the high costs involved in foreign market access, it is always prudent to use other investor’s resources when expanding into foreign markets, and this cost can weigh heavily on a new startup.
Furthermore, startups who lack the connections usually hire proxy companies to gather requests and find the needed resource, often at a high middleman fee.
However, the above gloomy scenario was soon met with the joyous introduction of Pangaea — a DLT market access tool developed at NTUitive.
Pangaea is a facilitative platform created to give fluidity to market access and foreign economies. Pangaea helps find the key people needed for the deal — customers, distributors, and investors — all through recommendations. Qualitative research has shown that people are more ready to trust and work with partners found via recommendations. This leads to the high success rate that Pangaea has to offer — 60% of meetings are deemed as successful and led to further collaboration as compared to a proxy company.
Built on blockchain, Pangaea’s ability to find the critical key person on a granular level, and its peer-to-peer features help aid its easy facility of cross border payment.
This was once again a great reminder of all the opportune tools and resources that NTUitive had in store to help us achieve our entrepreneurial dreams.
Next, we were introduced to Amazon Web Services. We were hosted by Bryan, one of their Rapid Software Developers.
Amazon Web Services is one of the world’s most comprehensively and broadly adopted cloud service provider platforms. We were amazed when he told us its starred capabilities and how it has helped transform many startups’ prototypes and products.
Boasting 175 services to use, including Analytics, Compute Database and Computing, the entire Amazon Web Services ecosystem has a wide range of options for startups and enterprises to help scale their operations and offerings.
He also gave us a real life example — NTUitive’s very own Speechary which was using Amazon Web Service’s “Transcribe” speech-to-text capabilities. We ended off with an amazingly detailed walkthrough of Amazon Web Services, from the log-in all the way to a demonstration of Speechary’s human speech conversion.
Our Friday class was with Instructors Leon and Eric, and we learnt about finding the right sources of funding.
The lesson started with an introduction to the various grants available, as well as their corresponding restrictions, privileges and criteria.
It became clear that picking our grant needed to be in tandem with the core of the team dynamics and vision, as well as the stage of growth of our startup.
The detailed sharing of documentation involved in grant processing also made us realize the value of tidy bookkeeping and audit.
All in all, we discovered a plethora of fundings available to us, if we were able to put in the hard work — the Multi-Disciplinary Grant, Bansea’s Angel Investment Network, StartupSG Tech, StartupSG Equity and StartupSG Founder.
All-in-all, the continued fast pace of our NTUitive VB18 journey bore much fruit this week, as many of us reached personal milestones in understanding our projects.
Adriel shared with us his immense growth and understanding in Blockchain, which he has fastidiously written down here.
Peter envisaged how to empower the gig economy from the perspective of skills and training here.
Alas, some others like OMG Coating faced some setbacks as they had to reevaluate their business plan and start back at the ideation stage.
It is always frustrating to keep going backwards. Going back to ideation stage, reformulating the business plan, and getting it validated.
Though frustrating, I have got to admit, I am closer to be heading towards a better direction. A better decision. A better business. — Hansen
Nevertheless, we will always continue to strive on for our success! There is no giving up now!
Until next time, this is VB18 signing off!
