This is a guest post from Ray Wu, accelerator program manager at JFDI.
JFDI’s current application is open and we are looking for early stage founders to join us to build a future together. Apply before February 21st!
In the past two years, I had the opportunity to work with 19 teams through JFDI.2013A and 2013B from all over Asia. When I saw Collabspot’s founder Jeremi Joslin and his new partner, Laurent Gasser, recently, I thought to myself, “wow, I really made an impact in Jeremi’s life!”
This is what gets me up everyday. While I believe in making a dent in the world through innovation—JFDI, as an accelerator, also has profound impact on founders’ lives: Jeremi found his partner and investors, and made new friends and settled for a new life (first time dad!) in Singapore because of JFDI.
Our Mentor Network & Beyond
There are so many people that participate in our program, as investors, as mentors, as service providers—and beyond that, there are the founders within the same cohort.
A lot of opportunities come through chanced meeting—we often get visitors and friends of friends who visit and end up mentoring our teams because they have been there and done just what our founders are going through. Mentors like Mark Organ, Derek Sivers, who used to live in Singapore, and still occasionally return to visit.
We have also built a hub for entrepreneurs visiting town to come and get to know us through Open House and a lot of times serendipity drives opportunities. enMarkit met their first angel investor through just that: chanced introduction at our Open House.
In many ways, JFDI provides not only a path way to seed funding—yes, we stand by the results (60% of our startups raise on average S$600K seed funding)—but it’s the ecosystem that we are part of building, that is significant.
JFDI infographic startup staircase
The funding ecosystem exist and many of our 2013 startups are starting to tap into the realm of Growth Maximization beyond where JFDI operates. I’m super happy for Krish & Nishanth at Klinify, and Abhinav & Akash at OurHealthMate, having both announced recent funding events (you can read about Klinify & OurHealthMate here & here.
This gives me a lot of confidence because the problems both startups are solving are extremely hard and real to this region. I’m happy that investors like Jungle Ventures and angels like Bimal Shah, Ben Ball, see the value and believe in the founders that we back. Sometimes I’d like to remind myself that this is unique—Singapore definitely has the ecosystem to support early stage teams and empower them to pursue their dreams.
Customer Acquisition Focused
These teams are able to raise money in part because we work hard together with the founders to establish use-case for an early adopter market. Active Lean Startup mentors like Kevin Dewalt have helped our teams root their focus and create a culture for experimentation. Kevin even commented on how impressed he was with the focus on Lean at JFDI.
I have spent a lot of time writing and working with early stage teams on running Lean experiments—and I’ve developed tools that I contributed back to the Lean community, which many people use like: “3 Great Steps to Customer Development.”
Narrowing down a customer segment and a problem that is worth solving is exactly what I enjoy doing most—and what we at JFDI do very well. If this is where your startup is at, you may have found a right partner in us.
In Summary
Many of our teams come from places outside of Singapore—and I’m very proud of that. I, myself, ended up in Singapore because of my previous startup, and if you take a look at our portfolio page, you may know some of our teams just in your neighborhood, including China, Thailand, Taiwan, New Zealand, etc.
I have yet had the privilege to work with teams from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Korea, Japan, but I look forward to the many teams that I get to meet. If you are working on an early stage startup, consider JFDI, a place where you can find support to go after your market—let’s build future together.
If you’re not sure, please drop me an email ray [at] jfdi [dot] asia or sign up for a time at sohelpful.me/ray and I’m happy to chat.
Let’s make future together. JFDI’s next accelerator program begins in March 2014. Apply Now!
