The Naked Startup

Singapore is nice, but it’s not enough

April 6th, 2010 by Andy Croll

Filed under Chat

I watched Sneha’s e27 interview with Adeo Ressi, and one of the things he said troubled me. Like it troubled me before.

“Any startup that is outside the US and not in a large market… faces the challenge of too narrow a focus. We met some Singapore companies that are focussing on Singapore and that is a very small market.” Adeo Ressi, thefunded.com.

Singapore is a good place to live, it has it’s faults but where doesn’t? It’s basically clean, efficient and the sun mainly shines. And the food is amazing. Plus as a place to travel to and from it’s pretty much unbeatable.

The lifestyle, plus friends, plus a feeling that the web industry is on the verge of something and good local developers are all the reasons I stayed here and teamed up with Arun to start building the best sports league software ever (take that link Google-bot).

This is an interesting commentary post about an interesting interview discussing Singapore as a startup location. Especially what this poster has to say is quite relevant to HK as well, although our local market is about twice the size, but still similar on the order of magnitude level in comparison to global markets.

For me, I see HK (and similarly Singapore and other Asian startup locations) as being potentially a good place to build a business foundation. Looking at my own work, I’m looking at if I can get 1-2k local customers, that would be enough to keep going perpetually. And, for me, local customers would include businesses that are in the region, not just HK directly.

Would I want to stop there if I got the local customer base, no, but I think it is a unique opportunity to do customer development within a community that is physically accessible like HK. In most locations, you would be hard pressed to connect up with your customers that easily.