Have you spent more time on Zoom calls and webinars this month than you have ever spent in the previous year before? You are not alone.
With enforced social distancing in all Greater Southeast Asia countries, and bans on travel and public excursions in a number of them, this may be the new status quo for a few years, if statistical projections of the Covid19 pandemic are reliable.
Founders can take insights from pretty stressful experiences like this to help them get better at their startup journey. This current situation is a good example.
This month, I talked to Lewis Pong and Alan Chan of Hong Kong-based startup Omnichat (AW#16), to find out what these founders were learning during this disruption.
They reported that their acquisition of new clients grew 20% during the weeks of the pandemic lockdown, as they turned to using online tools to hold webinars and to interact with client leads.
I wanted to dig into why this is, because I think young founders can learn from this during search for product-market fit in a rather constrained environment. Keep in mind, this is my interpretation of my chat with them, and I'm focusing here on the insight. Here's some context, first.
Lewis and Alan operate a marketing automation startup that helps retailers learn about and stay in touch with customers through automated omnichannel messaging. There's more to it than that, but that's the core.
One of their business development demographics is bricks and mortar retailers who would benefit from connecting to customers online.
If you are a bricks and mortar retailer, the insights and connections you have developed through foot traffic make up part of your competitive advantage.
But overnight, foot traffic vanished. Retailers that had prioritized bricks and mortars methods for sales suddenly found they had no more advantage. And for founders like Pong and Chan, they also lost their ability to do face-to-face meetings.
Chan and Pong turned to webinars and online tools to step in and connect to these business leads. It turned out, this not only showed these clients how online truly worked. It deepened their interest in Omnichat.
They were able to move beyond describing concepts to previously uncertain bricks and mortar business owners, to showing real value.
The core lesson in a situation like this is what Regis McKenna, a marketing guru, pointed out way back in 1997. Marketing doesn't sell a product or a good as much as providing the actual service and experience does. Marketing is an entire process that stimulates a customer to have this shared experience. This happens to be the DNA of online platforms. They are built to provide this in so many ways.
Pong and Chan were able to create conversion because they were able to work with clients in the same environment where their marketing promised value for end users. They lived online with their customers.
This is something, in my opinion, that is useful for any kind of business, but is absolutely essential in startups. Startups are always something new. They can rarely be described by talking about them. They have to be lived. And that goes for the customers founders bring along on the journey.
If you are a founder figuring out product-market fit and want to learn from other founders, we welcome you to join our network of over 1100 founders from around Taiwan and Southeast Asia during our next accelerator program. Applications for our AI and Blockchain focused Accelerator will be released in May here: https://bit.ly/2XWJshX
Doug Crets
Communications Master, AppWorks
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