Upstart

I have just returned from the Echelon conference in Singapore. It was my first trip to Singapore and I must say what a great city! Very clean, very friendly and a great place to do business! The E27 conference was excellent too! I met a lot of really interesting people who are running some really interesting startups.

Startups that caught my eye

Foound – Probably the most exciting and mature startup at Echelon this year was Foound. Based in Singapore, it allows users to organize and arrange social (or business) meetings. One caveat though – it’s only available on iPhone at the moment!

Koprol – the recently Yahoo! acquired social networking site from Indonesia. All the guys were there including the CEO of Koprol and representatives from Yahoo! Koprol is a milestone for South East Asia as it is the first startup to be acquired by such a large player in this region. Well done to the Koprol team and we hope this will inspire other entrepreneurs to startup something of their own!

MyAdEngine – Makes it really easy for businesses to have an advertising campaign online with say Google AdWords or other other providers. It acts as a one-stop-shop for all your online advertising needs. A great idea for an exiting emerging market.

There were also representatives of several investors from incubators and venture capital firms who were on hand to give advice about the path to funding, acquisition or IPO.

Investors that caught my eye

Dave McClure – is from Silicon Valley and has many success stories including Mint.com. He also provides some great advice to startups on funding paths as well has how to improve the likelihood of success with your startup. He recommends following the Lean Startups methodology which falls neatly in line with our values here at Upstart!

Meng Weng Wong – is from Singapore and started the incubator JFDI.asia which focuses on quality and having an ever present mentor during the early phase of a startup. Sounds like it could be a successful model – we will just have to wait and see who comes out of JFDI in the future!

Saeed Amidi – I found to be a very interesting and approachable person from Plug and Play Tech Center. He had a lot of useful advice for startups looking for early stage investment.

What the trip did for our exposure

Obviously we handed out business cards, talked to the attendees, startup founders, asked questions etc etc. We were not sponsors and did not have a presentation slot or physical booth so our overall visibility was fairly low. Our real reason for attending was to get a feel and understanding of some of the challenges startups face.

In the end, we came away with a lot of new contacts and a lot of new ideas. For our blog, traffic remained steady and we managed to pick up 2 additional contacts interested to try out our software, taking the total to 5. What we want to do now is keep blogging, keep up the level of tweeting and exposure and stay on track for our first public beta launch this month!