Meet Sai Sudha (pictured right, next to co-founder Anasua), the co-founder of Hidden Truffles, a platform that helps Hong Kong discover high quality local businesses.
Before moving to Hong Kong back in 2011, the mother of two completed an MBA from Great Lakes Institute of Management in India along with a specialization course at Harvard University.
Although Hidden Truffles is her first venture, Sudha has also been involved with multiple startups including microfinance and healthcare tech companies in both India and the US. Raised by a pair of entrepreneurs, Sudha had been inspired by her parents at a young age (her father was a first generation entrepreneur and started his own auto ancillaries company, while her mother has been running a saree boutique for two decades) and believes that guts and intuition are more important than theories of books.
She cites being comfortable with risk and ambiguity, her passion for conceptualizing a solution and appetite for trying the untested as what’s driven her to launch Hidden Truffles.
What is your startup?
My co-founder, Anasua, and I started Hidden Truffles about 6 months back as a platform to “Help Hong Kong Discover High-Quality Local Businesses & Home Businesses”.
Hong Kong is home to several fabulous small business and home business. Due to their current scale, most business have only 2-3 team members, including the founders who run the entire show. A majority of them are mothers or day job holders who juggle this. They end up doing a lot of administrative work and hence have lesser time to spend to on working on their products & services or time to spend to increase their reach. As a consumer, it is impossible for them follow 50 Facebook pages of business they like or get 50 newsletters for them. Hidden Truffles bridges that gap!
Our concept is simple.
1. We feature the best hand-picked small & home businesses in Hong Kong. These businesses have fantastic products and services, personally profiled and reviewed by us. However, some of them don’t have websites yet and most of them are managed by less than 5 employees. We want these businesses to be able to reach more of their target audience in an easier and cost-effective manner.
2. We want customers in Hong Kong to be able to easily find these businesses as well – and enjoy the experience while they’re at it! On Hidden Truffles, customers can go through various high quality small & home businesses, read about their founder and his/her background and browse the products and services including listings, pictures and reviews.
We interview each entrepreneur before we profile the business. This is because we believe it is important for the customers to connect with the face of the business, especially if it’s a new or small business. Each business is accompanied by 10 pictures, including one of the founders, which captures the story visually for the customers. Customers can also rate and review their favorite businesses and simply get in touch with the founders directly through our page.
Our latest initiative is the Hidden Truffles’ Artisanal Bazaar, where the consumer can come and meet the entrepreneurs and buy from them through the bazaar. We will have stalls for each business where consumers can meet founders and sample products and buy them or sign up (in case of services businesses) . On top of all of this, we have also planned a ‘Kids Corner’ with activities for kids all day so the families can come, discover, shop and relax peacefully. In the first Artisanal Bazaar we will have vendors providing great food, drinks, jewelry, body care, children clothes, home-décor and gifts. We would love to see you at Hidden Truffles’ first Bazaar on June 7th at The Space, 210 Hollywood Road from 11 AM to 5 PM!
How did you come up with this idea?
Before I moved too HK in 2011, I stayed in India for 2 months so my children could spend time with family before our next big move. That is when I decided to take my mother’s home boutique online on Facebook. With 2 weeks of creating the page, I came to the conclusion that it was the single most difficult thing to get LIKES on your page and get people to follow you. In a month we got 500 LIKES which meant I asked 500 people including every customer to check out our FB page and LIKE it if they would like to follow the business, its products and new collections regularly. That is the moment, when I realized how difficult it is to promote your business online without an ad budget and my respect for small business owners sky-rocketed! The idea of creating a platform for such small businesses was planted in my head then.
Shortly after moving to Hong Kong, I came to realize that the city had a lot of high quality small businesses providing a wide range of products and segments. However, most of these businesses were not well known and had to rely exclusively on word-of-mouth to advertise themselves. They faced my exact same problem. From my background and after 3 years of managing my mother’s Facebook page with ~10,000 organic LIKEs today, I can re-assure every entrepreneur that we completely understand their problem. This is the point when a firmer idea of Hidden Truffles started forming in my head.
Anasua was a very good friend of mine with whom I shared many similar interests. When I shared the above idea and thoughts with her, she completely resonated with them. I started discussing more with her and realized that we were very keen to work on this together to find a solution. It took us nearly 6 months of attending fairs and local markets, speaking to small and home businesses, conducting consumer surveys with friends and strangers and slowly building and building the website – and thus Hidden Truffles was born!
Who are you targeting and how big is the market in HK/Asia?
Our target customer today is a citizen of Hong Kong who speaks English though we think that our customers are likely to be female. We estimate that the total addressable market is ~700,000 people (10% of total Hong Kong population = ~7 million), of which ~350,000 would be women (50% of 700,000). While we don’t attach a $ value to this market yet, we believe that we can monetize this audience in the future through e-commerce.
What are your futures plans for your startup?
In the short run, making our maiden “Hidden Truffles Artisanal Pop-Up Bazaar” a huge success is our goal. If this works well, we plan to organize regular event to bring the LIVE marketplace together through HiddenTruffles.
In the short to medium term, we plan to enable e-commerce capabilities that will allow customers to buy products and services from these small businesses through our website. We think that this will further enhance the value of our platform to both businesses and customers.
In the medium term, we want to reach a larger audience of businesses and customers by opening up Hidden Truffles to Mandarin and Cantonese speakers as well. We think that this will also be a win-win for both businesses and customers.
Finally, in the longer term, once we think we have a working model for Hong Kong, we don’t see any reason not to expand to other cities in Asia… and the world!
1 Benefit and 1 Challenge in the HK startup scene?
Benefit: People are open and people are very collaborative. There are a lot of founders with a lot of potential since the city is a melting pot for talented people from all around the world. We think that this is a big positive for our venture!
Challenge: Tapping into local market, businesses and customers, is difficult because language is a barrier. We think this is a challenge but we hope to find a solution for it in the coming months…
Stop by the Hidden Truffles Artisanal Bazaar to meet fabulous businesess on Saturday, June 7th from 11am-5pm at THE SPACE, 210, Hollywood Road, Shueng Wan. Email [email protected] for more details.
Hidden Truffles on Startbase.HK: Hidden Truffles
Sai Sudha on Startbase.HK: Sai Sudha
