We Are HK Founders: Tommaso Tamburnotti of Easyship

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Tommaso Tamburnotti is one of the Easyship’s cofounders. Tech in Asia awarded Easyship as the best startup in Asia last year. Founded in 2014 in Hong Kong, Easyship was part of the first batch Swire properties’ accelerator, blueprint. It has now reached 110 countries, the logistic startup aims to facilitated shipping to its customers around the world.
Tommaso was born and raised in Italy and he attended Bocconi University in Milan. He worked in investment banking at Nomura in London for a year after graduating and then joined Rocket Internet where he worked as a director for marketplace in Lazada Malaysia and the regional director in Hong Kong. After two years at Lazada his next move was to start Easyship.

 

In your own words what does your startup do?

Easyship removes the pain of shipping internationally from eCommerce sellers.

 

Why did you create your startup?

 

When I was working at Lazada, my job was to help companies in Hong Kong and China expand their sales abroad. The main obstacle for them was the logistics. Shipping is not easy and shipping internationally is even more complicated. You need to know which shipping company to choose from the over 500 that exist, compute taxes and import duties, and know which documents you need and how to fill them in. It can be overwhelming. At Lazada, we were providing support and teaching merchants how to do this, but there were still millions of eCommerce sellers out there not receiving any help. So, together with my co-founder Augustin Ceyrac, we decided to start Easyship. Our idea was to build a platform that could be used by any eCommerce seller looking to expand their business overseas and wanting to save money and time on international shipping.
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5 Questions with Cassie Mak, Co-founder of Happy Owl

Happy Owl Co-founders Daniel Cheng Cassie Make

 

What is your startup?

 

Happy Owl is a subscription based wine and dine membership mobile app. Members can redeem one drink every day at any of our partner venues. We currently have more than 50 venues across nine districts. FInd the complete list of partner venues here.

At an unbeatable monthly subscription fee, our members are able to get their first drink for free at any partner bars. At restaurants, they can choose a drink within the menu options. The value proposition that we provide for our members is obvious.

We combine technology, innovation, and marketing to provide bars and restaurants with a platform to drive more traffic to their venues. They can get at a targeted demographic, at a very low marketing cost, too. This is a much more efficient way for bars and restaurants to upsell their offerings and bring in new customers to their venues: No other marketing tools out there can guarantee real customer traffic like we do.

Exclusively for Startups HK readers, use promo code: drinkwithstartupshk to subscribe and enjoy 10 days free trial and then a discounted rate of $99/ month going forward. (promo code valid till Jan 31, 2017)

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Facebook Partners with StartupsHK for FbStart Program in Hong Kong

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You saw their booth at RISE and now they are here full time – Facebook’s startup program FbStart is officially in Hong Kong and now we are happy to announce that us along with blueprint, Cyberport and Metta are all partnering with Mark Zuckerberg (or rather the team in charge of FbStart but we’re sure he knows what they are doing) in helping HK teams work with Facebook together to support FbStart members in various ways, such as offering mentorship opportunities, training workshops and networking events.

If you want to access these benefits please reach out to us via our Facebook page and we will see what you’re up to and get you into the program if you fit the criteria.

Read on to learn more:

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