Luckmon 2nd Place at K-Startup Grand Challenge

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Luckmon

5 min readNov 8, 2023

[Startup Story of Luckmon]

This year, 2023, Luckmon participated in a Startup Challenge in Korea called “K-Startup Grand Challenge.” Let’s dive into our story.

What is K-Startup Grand Challenge?

The Korean government is taking steps to attract and support global startups in Korea.K-Startup Grand Challenge(KSGC) is an annual startup competition and accelerator program hosted by the South Korean government to attract and support promising foreign startups and entrepreneurs from around the world. The program is aimed at fostering innovation, promoting international collaboration, and accelerating the growth of startups in South Korea. Therefore, seeking startups from various industries, including technology, healthcare, renewable energy, and more, with the goal of fostering economic growth and driving innovation within the country. This has been an inbound program to attract, incorporate, and expand promising foreign startups into Korea, supported by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups of the Republic of Korea. This year, the program started from the 31st of June to the 2nd of November. A total of 1924 teams from 108 countries around the world applied to participate in the K-Startup Grand Challenge. After screening and audition, 41 startup teams that will enter Korea were selected in August. Why are we introducing this KSGC? Because… Luckmon was, one of the 41 startups that were selected :). We want to tell our progress and story from the experience. As for the requirement, for 15 weeks, we were fulfilling government projects in Pangyo Startup Campus.

What does the Program Include? What was our Luckmon Progress at the Challenge?

Big benefits of the challenge is that the top 20 teams from the 2023 K-Startup Grand Challenge will receive a total of 122.5 million won in settlement support funds. The settlement support funds will be used for office space, personnel, and marketing costs.

Big 5 Gains:

International participation
Accelerator Program with matching with VC
Access to the South Korean Market for business
Networking and Promotion
Diverse Funding Opportunities

Therefore, our CEO David, decided that this could be a huge opportunity for our company to expand in the Asian market for our expansion in the future. We had planned to develop our entity in Korea and this was a perfect opportunity for us to be present and challenge ourselves in the competitive world of startups from diverse backgrounds. If we are able to prove our value and our progress, we think this will definitely be a great opportunity for Luckmon and our team that we are a promising startup especially in the royalty game platform industry and we can continue to push our product as we have.

Although our process during the program was challenging and there were many ups and downs, out of 41 startups from around the world, we, Luckmon, won the second place, which provides a game royalty platform for gamers, receiving $70,000 as well as the settlement support funds from the Korean government.

SMEs and startups continue to plan on improving the overall KGSC infrastructure, including the operation of a dedicated agency to support foreign startups in Korea, while drastically improving the startup and employment visa system.

We are excited to announce that we are currently marketing with 40 global companies keeping our promising growth. Sales are also coming in as we expand our business. It has been quite a dramatic improvement of Luckmon, as the game royalty platform for gamers, if we consider that Luckmon was unveiled in November last year and launched in earnest in April this year. Luckmon was launched in the United States, and is now preparing to enter Japan and Korea.

Things We Learned from the Experience Overall

On the left is our CEO, David Son, with our design intern, Song-yi)

Starting a business may be challenging, but throughout the experience, it seems that these four things are the most important.

1: TEAM

2. Business Model

3. Luck(90%…?)

4. Hanging in there (aka. endurance =존버)

“There will be moments of luck, and if you keep persevering,

there will come a time when you see the light.”

Our team couldn’t have come this far without all these 4 factors. We continue to grow for our success and can’t wait to see what is next.

P.S. David’s note from the program: “I was certainly impressed to be selected for second place. I remembered the days when everything seemed vague and difficult in the US that I had to sell my house for funding for the vision that I, and my team, had. My confidence has been restored from this experience. Thank you for the great experience! “

IN ADDITION, we would like to cheer all the teams who have worked so hard during the program and congratulate those who were awarded as well.

◆ Introducing the 1~5th Team from KGSC.