stories of a filipino startup

I believe in our product, I fully believe in my team's capabilities, but it is still cool to have someone else reaffirm that we are doing well. This is a story of one of those rare occasions we felt good about ourselves. So it was around Feb last year, we got this email from a foreign market research company, one of the biggest in Japan and in the world. They said they were visiting the Philippines and would love to visit our office to chat. Companies never reach out to us, mostly it is the other way around, specially big players like them, so we found it interesting. We ensured to have everyone in the office for starters. Note that we only rent a small room (fit 6 people comfortably) in a co-working space, so having all of us 15 was a challenge. We also reserved extra conference rooms and meeting rooms to look like we own the whole co-working office space. We were an insecure bunch of people meeting with a giant company with 3,000 employees - we kinda overcompensated a bit. So we ...

Sick. Feverish. Insecure. It was my turn to enter the room and pitch. Fake bravado. I said a little prayer, and walked through the door. There were a lot of lights. There were 2 cameras I think. 5 judges/investors sitting in front. There was a screen where I would present. Behind the camera stood Carl, watching. I faked a hop in my step to show that I was confident, coupled it with a smile. I didn’t know if I was fooling anyone, but at some level it worked to “fool” myself that I was indeed confident. “Good morning investors!” I exclaimed as I stood in a spot marked X beside the screen. Then John, the host of the show just walked to the center in front of me. He spoke in a shushed voice. “Are you nervous? This is it man. Could you repeat saying good morning in a louder voice?” Ok, that took me off my spontaneity, but what the hell. I think my voiced cracked a little, so yah, maybe I should repeat. Also, come to think of it, I have not really said more than a few words for the past 2 ho...

 Murphy's law somehow always catches up with us.  This is no sh*t, the 2 days before the pitch on the "Final Pitch" show, I started suffering from a fever. Note that at this time, despite lower cases, Covid 19 was still a thing. So there was always paranoia. Also, to be able to join the shooting, I should send a negative covid test. So I am going to divulge some really irresponsible sh*t I did. The morning of the pitch I still had a fever, 38 point something degrees, still quite high. I gulped up glasses of Berocca and had a BioFlu tablet. I had to take a covid rapid test and send an email of my result. I had one at home but I was too afraid to take the test because I might get a positive result. So yes, here is the sh*tty Jason showing up, filled with desperation, I faked the result. I had my wife take it and took a picture of it and emailed it to the film staff.  It was irresponsible and there are no other reasons to justify my actions putting at risk a lot of people. B...

Okay - this is a continuation of my previous post on having short funds to pay for salaries, and by some miracle (actually a result of my oversight) we were able to survive the month. But then, that was only for a month. After surviving by the teeth last May, I was set to balance the books. So I had two tracks: Get more contracts/projects + Get some seed investment somewhere. The whole team hustled on both tracks, but let’s just first talk about the journey for our first outside seed investment. It was late Thursday, I was at home drinking whisky with my wife while scrolling Facebook and I saw an ad: The Final Pitch Season 8 is open for applicants. After being rejected by different VCs I found in the internet (it is cool though that they reply), I just thought, why not. And this is no sh*t, Friday was last day of application, what are the chances? It said that I submit a pitch deck (done, we have that), answer some questions (done, easy) and create a 1 minute video of me explaining our...

Culture is not the lifeblood of a company. It is not Ideas. It is not innovation or open communication. It is cash. Even with the best minds working hand in hand in complete harmony, churning out the best ideas, if you ran out of cash - the company is dead. So let us call a spade a spade, we all are (and need to) chase “the money”. May it be investment money or revenue money, we all need to hustle our way into ingesting as much to survive. It is true that most of us build our startups to change the world or at least solve a problem. We wake up each day in-love with that problem, hacking ways around it to solve it in hopes it would make the world a better place, or at least a little more live-able. I am not preaching, I am also convincing myself as I write this entry, and I do that personal conversation every morning. As much I hate to admit it, I am not (or at least not only) the savior of consumer data gathering, I am (also) a barren hearted-cold blooded-money hungry business person. ...

Ok - we settled with an influencer. We let go of PHP50,000.00. I think it was 90% of our liquid cash after expenses at that time. Painful. Celina, our head of marketing, partnered with this guy with a page called Joseph’s Blessing. The guy had 700k followers. It was our first time paying someone to make a video for us - so we really did not know what to do, what to provide him and worst, what result to expect. But Celina was quite confident with him. In all honesty, my head of marketing was not really the best person with numbers, but she had strong gut which she follows most of the time. So we bet on it. 3 weeks left to run 2 projects from 2 big clients. We had less than 20% of the base needed. We spent all our liquid cash. Celina went to brief the guy, which went quite smoothly. The influencer got the point immediately and with very little to no guidance, he made 5 minute video on how to use our app. Quite interesting really how creative these influencers are, and how close to their ...

So yes. Our Hustle PH app page got banned in Facebook.  We lost our main customer (Hustler) acquisition channel. Approximately 90% of where we get new Hustlers to answer our surveys and accomplish our tasks. For a newborn company who is hacking user growth, this is a big dilemma. Couple this with a sudden interest of big companies for our data, it was a nightmare. The months spent trying to woo clients like Unilever and Globe Telecom is starting to pay-off. They started emailing us with consumer insights projects they want to run with us, but we do not have enough Hustlers to gather the data from. Of course we did not give up immediately, we tried different approaches. 1. In-app Referral Programs. Refer a new person to the app, and get a cash reward. The traction was very very slow, a little more expensive, and is a fraud blackhole. It was fraudulent user upon fraudulent user. And as a company that sells data, fraud is our cancer. So we nipped it. 2. Facebook raffle posts. Download...