stories of a filipino startup

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...

March last year, Facebook stopped us from posting and banned us from paid advertising. Reason: our app (Hustle PH) was flagged to be a get rich quick scam, somewhat a clickbait. Context: our app contains surveys and tasks (ex. take a photo of the shampoo you are currently using), and when our users accomplish a task, we reward them with money transferred to their e-wallet. So our ads in Facebook communicate such, get PHP50 or earn up to PHP1,500 per day etc, this then got flagged by Facebook as scammy.

I am Jason and I am building/growing a tech start-up in the Philippines. Our company is called Agile Data Solutions, we gather market research data through our app, Hustle PH. Our business is quite simple.  If a client has a question about the consumer market, our app Hustle PH targets all relevant people and pay them to answer said question.  Very simple and straight forward, but no one really is doing it right now. Or at least no one is doing it right in the Philippines. I can blabber endlessly about our product - but the reason I thought of writing a blog is to give insight into the backstage. I would want to share what really happens behind building a tech startup, specifically in the Philippines. It may just be me, but I think the journey is quite interesting in itself even though our end is still very far from sight. Just a quick note before we move further, THIS IS NOT AN INSPIRATIONAL BLOG. If I get the energy to continue writing here, you would notice more failures th...