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The new CEO of Y Combinator, Garry Tan, gave inspiring opening remarks through to motivate all the entrepreneurs in Taiwan. “ There are a lot of problems in this world. I hope all of you can be the ones who solve them with technology to improve the environment. I look forward to seeing each of you at Y Combinator.” said Tan.
Meet Global Tea Time dedicates to connecting Taiwanese startups with international expats, business leaders and investors. On November 19th, Meet Global invited startups that were selected in the top accelerator, Y Combinator, the most selective startup accelerator with only 1-2% of acceptance rate, to share their experiences and insights. The speakers included the co-founder of Phiar, the co-founder of Heptabase, and co-founder of Chainsight, and so on.
The new CEO of Y Combinator, Garry Tan, gave inspiring opening remarks through to motivate all the entrepreneurs in Taiwan. “ There are a lot of problems in this world. I hope all of you can be the ones who solve them with technology to improve the environment. I look forward to seeing each of you at Y Combinator.” said Tan.
The founder of Heptabase, a note-taking software for visual learning, Alan Chan, said that the development stage of the APP had taken him 6 months by attempting hundreds of different versions through Figma. However, he had never shared the prototype, resulting in the gap between product and consumer pain points.
Therefore, he took a new and different strategy: develop one single function instead of investing in several at the same time. Chan then joined various groups in Discord and Telegram, contacting each potential user, organizing one-on-one interviews, and creating polls in Discord to discover and collect user insights and needs. As a result, he could correctly develop a function that corresponds to users’ urgent needs. “The most important is not how many users you have but how many “target users” you get.”
However, Chan admitted that pivoting is a common phenomenon in startups. Nearly 30% of startups have been pivoting since they joined Y Combinator. “We are afraid that we are solving an unexisting problem. Thus, we have to always listen to the reviews from users to better ourselves.”
Recently, lots of crypto users have lost their fortunes overnight because of the FTX bankruptcy. “I once got defrauded and lost a lot of money.” said the founder of Chainsight, Ernie Ho. He, therefore, developed an API for web3 background checks.
Ho also shared the story when he bumped into the founder of Y Combinator, Paul Graham. “How to convince the investors when the product is still developing?” asked Ho. Graham took Stripe, a suite of APIs powering online payment processing and commerce solutions for internet businesses, as an instance: Before hiring engineers to develop their own products, the founders went to banks to do interviews with people to ensure their pain points.
“The cruck is to find out the problem worth being solved,” said John Keh, who was selected by YC twice for Cavair, a food delivery platform, and Welcome, an online meeting platform. In 2013, only chain restaurants such as Domino’s Pizza offered food delivery in Taiwan. “Why can’t I order the food from the restaurants I like?” Keh then joined Caviar as the second team member.
Afterward, Keh founded another online platform “Welcome”, a platform that enables restaurants to order ingredients. However, he had to forgo this business plan due to COVID-19 right after joining YC. Therefore, he initiated a brand-new business strategy by discovering the weaknesses of the existing online meeting platforms and creating one tailored for marketers.
The founder of Phiar AI, Chen-Ping Yu, shared his past user experience of GPS: the GPS had never changed for 15 years despite the advanced technology, making drivers miss the time to take turns or change to the wrong lane. Therefore, he designed an AR GPS that calculates the remaining distance before taking turns by showing an arrow and the distance on the map.
“Also, we have to emphasize how user-friendly the product is to picture a complete consumer journey,” Yu said that it’s the uniqueness of the product and the pain points you deal with making you stand out. “For instance, many compared Phiar AI with Google Map on Demo Day.
After the sharing of 4 entrepreneurs, an audience asked how to attract investors while there is only a preliminary model. Coming from an engineering background, Yu said that we have to make investors believe that we have the ability to make a competitive MVP (minimum viable product) in the end .
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