The Innovation Playbook of 3 Southeast Asian Founders - E724
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
27 min
1 speaker
5 chapters
transcribed 18 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Where does innovation actually begin in Southeast Asia?
Where does innovation in Southeast Asia actually start? Here are three conversations from the archive, Anthony Chow of Igloo on a smart lock for doors with no Wi-Fi, built after 11 hour installs and a recall. Kelvin Teo of Funding Societies on Turning Asia Doesn't Need Innovation into a Playbook. And then is Velasco of Prosperna on why none of it counts until small businesses trust you.
What's interesting is that, you know, you're making this set of decisions around this, right? You have to figure out how to hack the product together, which is hardware, you know, so selling, et cetera. So I'm just kinda curious because it's such a also rare thing, that's in hardware startups. Not very common. Everybody yeah Singapore was like doing like, you know, software service or fintech or everything. Did you find it like difficult the hardware side or was it very straightforward for you?
I think at that point in time we were a little bit naive as well. But we thought that locks have been around for hundreds of years, thousands of years. How difficult can it be? So those are famous lasts for us, you know. So when we created our very first lock, I still remember, we basically bought parts from China. And then we wrote our little bit of firmware within there so that we can remotely manage it. And then we started selling it. Yeah. Sold it. I remember the first couple of locks that we we started to get to market. We sold it at $99. We sold about two, three hundred. units out there and then we started to ship it. É hora. And what happens was that we can't even install the first 10. Because like doors are different.
How did Anthony Chow create the first offline‑PIN smart lock for vacation rentals?
And then we forgot to ship a certain part in the door log. And I remember the first installation that we did, right? This was during a little bit of the beta trials. It took me 11 hours. Oh, to install the lock. Because like I mean the door maybe similar to what you have here has a big glass pane in the inside there. So even the installer didn't really know how to figure it out. So we were very worried at that point in time, right? Initially we thought, hey, we just need to sell locks to every Airbnb host and we'll be rich. But once we started getting down to the execution piece of it, the installation, different doors have different kinds of regulations, specifications, and all that. And um and we started becoming pretty concerned now, right?
And then even the entire supply chain as well was also very difficult for us because when we have very low volumes, only certain manufacturers will work with you, right? You can't work with those which are big at scale where quality and QC is like 100% with ISO certifications, where the smaller ones, many of them tend to maybe ship you one time and that's it. There's no even like warranty, you know. Yeah. So I think the first two, three years were years of pain and learning, figuring out how to manage hardware supply chain at the right scale that we need it to be. And also finding distributors to bring our products to market who actually know a thing about That we sure really didn't know anything about.
Yeah. So I think some of the learning challenges at the first two, three years of the business. But I think one of the things that really helped us, you know, along this way was the customer point of view, right? Because we were really creating a solution that the customers wanted. Now, because no one else, at least at that point in time, were really solving for this niche market. Think about it, right? There's about three million hosts all around the world. But you know, I'm a small player from like one of the big competitors, they are not gonna care about it. Million people. They're going to care about the billions of people who need smart locks on the door, right? So that's their market. But we were very raiser focused on just this segment.
So the solution that we created was not just the lock itself, but also the entire software suite. So we were creating, we were writing scripts to connect to Airbnb so that we can, you know, once somebody makes a reservation, we can automate a check-in process for the guest to check in.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Where does innovation actually begin in Southeast Asia?
0:00–1:22
2
How did Anthony Chow create the first offline‑PIN smart lock for vacation rentals?
1:22–4:40
3
What challenges did Igloo face with hardware supply and installation?
4:40–18:02
4
How did the non‑connected smart lock win the Airbnb partnership and scale to tennis courts?
18:02–21:54
5
Why does Kelvin Teo say Asia needs execution more than invention for fintech?
21:54–27:28
Speakers
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