Startup of the Day - Techsailor

The company of the day is Techsailor, based in Singapore. Techsailor aims to create a complete ecosystem that connects people. You will find below an interview with Wayne Chia, managing partner of Techsailor Group Pte. Ltd. All the best to them and congrats for being the startup of the day!

Website: www.techsailor.com.


Interview with Wayne Chia, managing partner of Techsailor Group Pte. Ltd.

Who are you?

My name is Wayne Chia. I am one of the managing partners of Techsailor Group Pte. Ltd. We started out as a web solutions company that later took on a specialization in social media and social networks. It wasn't long before we decided to productise our expertise.

What did you do before creating your company?

I started my first .com more than 12 years. Activewin.com was an online portal for Windows related news and information. After that, I took on a couple of free-lance web development projects throughout university.

How did you get the idea? What s the genesis?

We started out when social networks was the boom and there was demand for custom social networks. By the time we had the third custom social network request, the idea of creating a platform that allows rapid deployment social network came about.

What do you sell? What is your company’s mission?

Techsailor aims to create a complete ecosystem that connects people. For now, social media and social networks seems to be the tools that fits the description. Jujuya, a platform to create free social networks in China, is Techsailor's pilot project in making our expertise available to the consumer market. We are intending to repackage it into something that will be suitable for the enterprise space.

What is your market?

We have two distinct markets. Firstly, anyone who benefits from creating or joining a niche social network without wanting to maintain multiple logins, and enterprises that will benefit from either an internal network to connect their employee base or an external network that will keep their customer base closer.

Any clients? References? Partners?

I-meet.com (a social network for independent event partners), Yum.sg (Singapore's premier food review portal), Scubuddies.com (a social network for divers).

Funding history? VCs? BA?

We were the pioneer batch of company under MDA's micro-finance scheme. Other than that, we have been surviving primarily on our own revenue.

Growth? Internationalization?

We have experienced doubling in revenue for the past 2 years. We expanded to China in 2007. Malaysia would be a good market to look into considering the proximity and opportunities.

How many employees do you have? How many developers?

35 in total, of which 25 of them are developers.

Are you hiring? If yes, what? Where?

We are currently looking for QA and sales people.

Which platform are you building on? Why?

We build primarily in ASP.NET 3.5 and SQL. As our platform consumes a lot of resources, Windows Azure particularly excites us.

Do you have any Software IP? Is there something that you’re the only one to do on the market?

We build primarily in ASP.NET 3.5 and SQL. As our platform consumes a lot of resources, Windows Azure particularly excites us.

Who’s your role model?

Steve Jobs. He inspires me to believe that there's always a way to create something that no one has created before.

Where do you see opportunities today in the Software/internet areas?

Social computing will be the future. That said, not everyone has figured out a way to monetize it yet, especially when social computing becomes more commoditised.

Looking for funding? If yes, how much?

Yes. Although we can survive on our own revenue, funding would definitely help our product development to run faster. We're looking at a Series A amount of S$1-2 million.

What about the BizSpark Program? What do you think? Are you going to join? Why?

We think its a great programme. By reducing our cost (both in development and production) environment, it has greatly reduced our operating costs and thus increased our chances for funding. Also, the easy access to MSDN definitely helped our developers answer some tough technical questions.

Any advice to young Software entrepreneurs?

Press on. Too many people give up early before their ideas has a chance to see daylight. Find the best business partners you possibly can, hold on to them, and trust them even in times of disagreement. Your faith in them will be rewarded some day.

Anything else you’d like to say?

Techsailor is launching Jujuya.com, which is still in early beta in China. We hope that it will graduate from beta by Q4 2009.