This startup has 33 Uber-like services in one app
Last year, I wrote that Uber’s spectacular rise was the biggest startup story of 2014. I then said that, like clockwork, we’ll see a glut of “Uber for X” startups come up in Asia. It looks like I’m not far off the mark.
Sendhelper, ServisHero, Beezee, Fipin, and Page Advisor. What they have in common is that they’re startups offering on-demand services through a mobile app. And they’ve all launched just this year.
Singapore-based startup Page Advisor, however, stands out in may ways. Open the app and you’ll be bombarded with an assortment of colored tiles. Each tile represents a different service that you can book through the app. As of now, I spot 33 types, ranging from aircon services to car grooming to wine delivery.
Page Advisor wants to be the go-to app for a whole host of services, connecting consumers to small- and medium-sized merchants through the smartphone. Users select and customize the service they want and wait for the bids to come in. They then pick their preferred option and pay within the app through PayPal.
It’s an unconventional approach. One Thielism goes that startups should try to monopolize a niche market and expand outwards; Page Advisor appears to be tackling many different markets at once. Even mighty Uber started out focusing on very specific segment: premium, classy rides for people who “wanted to be baller in San Francisco.”
What works in Silicon Valley may not work in Asia though, and Peter Thiel was speaking from the lens of the Valley. Founder and CEO Fabian Lim tells me focusing on a tight niche works well in the United States, a largely homogenous market. Not so in Singapore and Southeast Asia.
Lim’s goal is to create an app that users will find super sticky, an app that will sit comfortably in their home screens and stay there. An on-demand laundry app, for example, just isn’t going to cut it.
His guiding principle is to increase the startup’s customer lifetime value as much as possible. This is essential as Asia’s fragmented market drives up marketing costs. By offering users a buffet of services, he hopes they’ll spend more on the app, adding to the startup’s bottom line since it earns from transaction fees. Since the customer acquisition cost for a pure aircon servicing app and a multi-services app are the same, why not shoot for the latter?
And given Southeast Asia’s venture capital environment is not quite as frothy as the United States’, this approach could extend its runway.
A colorful personality
It sounds good in theory, but execution is tricky. Startups focus for one reason: limited resources. Can Page Advisor get enough merchants behind it to satisfy users with a decent selection?
Lim is confident. He’s not exactly conventional either, with a colorful history that matches his app. He has an army of 200 marketers in Singapore and Malaysia who are willing to sell Page Advisor’s services without a base salary. This group has been busy onboarding merchants to Page Advisor, with the promise they’ll gain a cut of future transactions on the service.
How does he get them? You see, he has been running internet marketing and “wealth education” courses. These 200 marketers are his students, and he taught them search engine optimization and internet market skills. They in turn offer their services to small and medium enterprises.
In past interviews, Lim said he’s a millionaire. He owns a private plane, bought from money he earned as an internet marketing and web analytics consultant. Some of his clients included Nanyang Technological University, Estee Lauder, and Fujitsu.
He claims to have made a six figure annual income from wedding videography alone. He launched a venture selling a stock trading system and a website for contests and giveaways.
He had his fair share of spectacular failures too: he sold silicon bras online, but lost a price war to bigger competitors and stored tons of unsold inventory at home which he later gave away.
Fabian Lim with his private plane.
Just a couple of millionaires
Lim has an entrepreneurial founding team. CTO Boon Peng Ho started a couple of digital marketing agencies. He later founded Indonesian online jewelry store Orori and online healthcare site Tab a Doctor.
Jian Yong Tan, the CMO, apparently became a millionaire by opening a swim school with 300 swimming instructors who trained over 20,000 students. He also runs a golf academy and yoga school.
Also on the founding team is CFO Jamie Lee, who’s part of the husband-and-wife team at Lunch Actually, a dating agency focusing on Southeast Asia. Page Advisor also has finance lawyer Daniel Tan on board as the COO and legal whiz, and it brought on Inderjit Singh, an experienced entrepreneur and politician as an advisor.
The various ventures these guys are running could cause distractions, but Lim counters that he has found people to take over his previous ventures, giving him time to focus on Page Advisor. Further, having a team of people with traditional and stable businesses means they don’t have to worry about paying themselves.
In fact, they have a S$1 million (US$740,000) war chest that’ll allow them to bootstrap. The money gives them leeway to develop a really solid business before going to venture capital firms, which they plan to do in a few months’ time.
Why it could win
The idea has been development for two years as a side project. Initially conceived as a lead generation site for merchants, Lim found that wouldn’t work here.
In the US insurance agents would buy leads from a website or from a lead broker. That’s very common; that’s how they build their businesses. Over here the local businesses are not sophisticated enough to appreciate paid lead generation. It has to do with the fact that they’re all simply busy, they don’t have the systems, they don’t understand how to follow-up. So their mindset’s like, “Why should I pay for leads, I’ll pay for sales.” That’s why we pivoted from lead gen to m-commerce.
This complicated things for Lim; it meant he’d have to reconceive Page Advisor as a complete ecommerce product with a marketplace, an auctioning system, and a merchant interface. He also switched from a web and mobile service to mobile-only, believing the “days of web-based interfaces are numbered.”
In the arena of service marketplaces, Page Advisor has competition. Malaysia has two: Kaodim and Servis Hero. But both are what Lim calls “half-loops.”
In other words, they only bring leads to businesses, whereas Page Advisor allows you to complete the transaction – giving users more convenience. Lim believes this could help secure loyal customers and defend the company’s position.
Early days
The startup held an official launch last month, meaning it’s only just at the beginning of its consumer push. It has been focusing on building the merchant side of the platform, and its 200-strong sales force has signed contracts with 3,000 merchants in Singapore and Malaysia.
In a couple of weeks, Page Advisor received 1,149 job requests, 3,187 bids from merchants, and 167 actual appointments. Increasing the ratio of appointments to job requests is key for Lim. So is dramatically increasing the number of consumers accepting bids – perhaps the biggest unknown in his business model.
The service has kinks to iron out. I found the experience of ordering from the app too complicated. The app worked well enough, but I received calls from a customer service rep notifying me that I’ve received bids and asking me to key in a verification code into the app after I’d gotten my goods.
For an app that targets users familiar with Uber, the intrusive approach is unnecessary and unwelcome. It’s too early to pass judgement on the service though, and over time it should be able to create a smoother user experience.
Nonetheless, the startup already has regional plans. It’s making a push into Malaysia by next month, and plans to step into Indonesia before the end of the year.
In both these countries, expect Lim’s army of internet marketers, armed with their database of prospects, to storm the beaches.
Our saving grace is that this would not have been possible without my 200-strong account management team. If I was alone and I had an idea, I would go single vertical quite honestly […] Trying to motivate 200 people to follow you for two years without salary requires a big vision. I have to sell a big picture. And my big picture is to say, work with us, I believe if we model it correctly we have a chance to become a unicorn startup. And when we get there, I will set aside an options pool for everybody who gets us there.
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