My Top Zero Press Philippines Startups and Making Revenues
As a humble startup advisor here in the Philippines, I actively communicate with over 30 companies from starting out, all the way to 3 years into their respective ventures. Traditional seed investments have become bear lately, forcing more entrepreneurs to bootstrap and earn capital through raw revenues. While most entrepreneurs fail at this, there are still a select few that make the grade. Admittedly I did not scope out the progress of every founder in the Philippines, the following startups mentioned here are a few of the ones that I have the privilege of learning about, talk to and subjectively feel are well deserving for “My Top Zero Press Philippines Startups and Making Revenues”.
PaidUp
https://www.paidup.io/
Designed for customers that go out and eat at restaurants and from their website “Paidup enables users to skip the line, and order on the go”. I met Asim Haneef about 2 years ago and he a fearless founder that does things that follows “Do Things That Don’t Scale” except I never confirmed if he read that article or not. Asim started out validating his idea and signing up merchants, one restaurant at a time, in Quezon City (QC). Sharing to me that they started with him and his team literally cold walking into each establishment and waiting for the manager or owner to meet with them; The PaidUp team is a live example of “startup hustlers”.
After signing more than 100 restaurants in QC, his team has slowly acquired restaurants covering north to south of Manila. You can definitely use PaidUp in QC, Eastwood, Pasig and Mandaluyong at the moment. Unlike similar mobile apps, PaidUp expresses that coverage is not their priority. They have a real passion to solve problems in restaurants through technology. Based on the feedback of PaidUp’s current merchant base, they now are in development of a cloud powered point of sale (POS) system with positive feedback from their base including Potato Corner. If your interested checkout utak.io.
While Asim and the team are passively looking for investments, their primary focus is customers, merchants and product. Their team is too lean to focus on raising. Reviewing their investment requirements, I can conclude that it is very reasonable and rationale. They are in search of investors that understand and support what they are trying to achieve.
AdMov
http://admov.tech/
As a technologist that has exited two ventures so far, AdMov puts me to shame in terms of tech (and I would rarely admit that, but I will say that proudly). With Google level technology, AdMov uses a combination of artificial intelligence and facial expression detection as factors to deciding what kind of ads are delivered to consumers while riding in a car. I demoed it and was shocked on its accuracy! AdMov is a gold mine for data driven professionals with its abilities to analyze real time location, gender, age range and time (don’t worry they are also data privacy compliant). This information can be used to maximize marketing budgets offering an honest and real cost per conversion. For example: a male consumer heading to the beach, over the age of 40, could be offered sun protection cream. And these are not your mere rotating ads. AdMov promotes that you can also make custom interactive ads and measure specific conversions. There really is nothing in comparison in the Philippines.
Grab and Uber drivers (if your not in SEA) treat their car, phone and internet as investments. AdMov offers an additional way they can earn income because they share its ad revenue with drivers that invest in the device and are signed up with them on their platform. It make sense for drivers, since they are on the road already. Bootstrapped from the start, AdMov currently has over 1,000 cars signed up and more signing up each day.
Not to mention that AdMov has some major brands already using their platform, they are already costing out the expansion to 5 different countries next year. AdMov will be looking for Pre Series A investments in the next few months and after reviewing their raise, they have very practical goals and projections. Their tech alone is ahead of the class and I wouldn’t be surprised if their raise is completed quickly.
Wizher
Wizher helps distribute internet connections to customers using their specially branded wifi router and at a fraction of the cost. I met Edel Alva at Founders Institute Manila in 2017. Edel is a humble entrepreneur that believes in his product.
Coming mostly from a product background, Wizher had a rocky start in terms of business direction. Pivoted twice, but stayed with the program. Listened vigilantly to their advisors and has recently found their groove. Winning PLDT’s IdeaSpace this year (2018) and closing on over 40 paying establishments in the first two months since their last pivot, they are currently on a roll.
With a working business model, discussions of a few partnerships, strategic mergers and a good foot in the door of PLDT, the Whizer team will be preparing to open up a pre series A investment round in the next few months, primarily to expand their sales reach nationwide. Currently their valuation is very reasonable compared to what they already accomplished and their tech is above par for sure.
Rehatch
Rehatch is a platform where investors can crowdfund real estate projects. Bongging Royola, the founder of the Rehatch Group has solid business experience in traditional industries. Going straight to the numbers, Bongging with the Rehatch Group currently is closing on over 30,000,000 pesos for projects, manually working their platform without a tech founder/partner and an actual tech platform! This is the first time I saw a Wizard of Oz strategy with no wizard or Oz.
Rehatch wanted to “make it work without the tech” purposely because “the tech should be used to enhance and scale our process” instead of being a business crutch. By learning specifics of their business model they are in turn fine tuning the requirements of their eventual platform to be both simple and specific. Despite lacking a tech element, they do have a lot of tech advisors, the founders are surprisingly well informed on blockchain technologies and in the middle of writing a white paper for its applications.
The group bootstrapped their company from the start and has closed on serious partnerships with cooperatives like Seafarers and other investment groups. Learning more about real estate project needs through out the way, they are also now developing another platform for bridge funds (again without an actual tech platform). Rehatch will be looking for a pre series A, as well as open for a tech founder in the following months after closing a few more project cases.
Conclusion
With media focusing mostly on big money press, bootstrapped startups aren’t praised enough for the hard work and personal sacrafices they make. Founders with bootstrap backgrounds come out thick skin and understand the fundamentals of business.
