Photo by Vaughn Hew
Wailun Hong is the co-founder of Snaptee.
Wailun is proud to be a Computer Science graduate and a software engineer. He wears t-shirts and jeans everyday and loves tying in weird physics analogies with everyday problems. He is extremely excited to be working on my second startup called Snaptee.
What is your startup?
I am currently building Snaptee with my co-founder Gary Lee. We wanted to give the ability of designing a fashionable t-shirt to everyone, especially to the people without any training in graphics, art, or fashion.
We imagine that Snaptee could rewire the whole t-shirt industry and make it 100x more efficient by reducing wasted creativity and materials. We are now available on the AppStore, and the Android and other platform versions are on the way.
How did you come up with this idea?
I am a great example of being one of those people without serious design training. And being a geeky kid growing up, I always dreamed of designing and wearing my very own t-shirt without a stupid branded logo on my chest.
I would brainstorm with Gary trying to figure out what is our next big thing, and suddenly we grabbed a camera and said “How about an App that lets you take a photo, add text, choose fonts and filters, then boom, you just designed your very own t-shirt!” We realized that this idea can actually turn everyone into a t-shirt designer, just like Instagram turned everyone into a photographer. And that is how we got started.
Who are you targeting and how big is the market in HK/Asia?
We are looking at the US and Japan market as our first step, and designing the app for people who regularly uses photo filter apps and an avid social media user, which is a huge number. The t-shirt industry is a US$20 billion market globally, so it is a big industry to tap into.
What are your future plans for your startup?
We just closed a round of seed funding and our current focus is to expand the team and get talented people to work with us. We are targeting to hit 1m downloads in the 2 key markets. Meanwhile, the team will be working on several fronts like perfecting the t-shirt product, fulfillment, fine tuning the overall app user experience, and very importantly, to get users to engage with Snaptee to design really cool t-shirts!
Can you tell us one Benefit and one Challenge in the HK startup scene?
Benefit: Being a global leading hub in trading and logistics, plus the globally connected city, HK is the best place for a technology X ecommerce startup, just like what Snaptee is doing.
Challenge: Lack of social or media interest on startups, this drives away talented individuals from joining the industry.
Snaptee:
URL: http://snaptee.co
Twitter: @snaptee
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/snaptee.co
Instagram: @snapteeapp
Connect with Wailun Hong:
Twitter: @honglun
LinkediN: wai-lun-hong
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