What a strange day. The beginning of something new for our start-ups and the end of the first JFDI–Innov8 bootcamp. We have a hunch there will be many more but, in the meantime, here are some quotes from people who were there:
@gherry: The best time of my life
@trafflers: The perfect environment for developing new businesses.
@markjco: I went through this amazing journey, met awesome people, and started something that matters.
@saumilnanavati: Awesome #jfdi2012 class.
@serrynaimo: Crazy good feedback on #jfdi2012! The best startup pitches in Asia so far!
@jofell: No B.S. It was one of the awesomest things that happened in my life.
@AskWildby: Awesome 100 Days!
Visitors to Singapore will note that the country is very fond of tracking Key Performance Indicators, so we present ours here, in the form of a timeline:
- 300 people downloaded the Request for Comments document we issued in January 2010
- 30 people showed up to hackerspace.sg to contribute comments in an open event and 50 people gave detailed written feedback by the end of February 2010
- 200 local businesses and individuals benefited from our pilot year in 2010, when 8 mentors came from around the world to share their insights, giving over 500 hours of mentoring and 44 public talks,
- 15 members of what was then called the TechStars network welcomed us as their first SE Asia member in February 2011. Now renamed the Global Accelerator Network, it has grown to over 35 members.
- 16 local business angels, 2 government agencies and 1 major sponsor committed to support JFDI by August 2011, so we pressed the Go button to do the full roll out.
- 31,602,696 impressions of our ads ran on Facebook, attracting 15,018 clicks through to our application page. Initially the image on the ad was of the frog. When we changed this to a picture of one of the younger female entrepreneurs who was joining us, the click through rate increased x2.1. In addition to Facebook, we reached thousands more people through LinkedIn and partnerships with start-up groups around the world.
- In all, 150,000+ unique visitors came to this site and the microsites we set up to run Startup Weekend events with partners in Australia, Indonesia,Philippines, India, Thailand and Singapore. In total over 1,500 people attended those events, forming over 200 teams that each developed a business prototypes. Hundreds more followed each event on Twitter and LiveStream video.
- Over 300 teams applied for the bootcamp, mostly from Asia but also from as far afield as Netherlands and New Zealand, through the Startup Weekends and the Global Accelerator Network gateway. We selected 12 teams to join us. 3 were from Singapore, 2 from Philippines and 1 each from USA, New Zealand, Netherlands, Indonesia, India, Malaysia and Thailand.
- 44 larger-than-expected plants arrived over Chinese New Year to create the JFDI Jungle in space kindly loaned to us at Block 71.
- 46 strangers arrived on 26 JAN 2012 and over 100 days worked with around 50 mentors through an incredibly intense experience.
- 1 team member became a Dad and another found out he was going to have a second child. 2 members of our community lost a parent or grandparents who raised them as children. 2 team members got married (to each other).
- 2000 Nespresso capsules and 18kg of cheese were consumed by teams and visitors to 58 public events. Opinion varies at to which was the best flavour of either.
- 2 teams (Kark and ShopSpot) announced investments before Demo Day.
- 11 teams presented on Demo Day. They were watched by 110 investors, all of which had been prequalified as active angels or working with over 50 firms. Over 80 initial meetings were set up immediately.
- More than 50% of the start-up teams pitching on demo day have firm offers for at least part of the cash they hoped to raise, as of today.
- 0 animals were harmed in the making of these startups. There were 0 fatalities in the forest and 0 hours were lost due to accidents.
- 26,330 viewers have watched one or more of the 243 videos we have so far posted on our YouTube channel. 82.9% of them are male and 17.1% are female. 52.2% of them are in the age range 25-44. In descending order, the top ten countries from which we drew viewers were: Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, United States, India, Australia, United Kingdom, Malaysia and The Netherlands. 10% of viewers were using mobile devices.
- 70,909 visitors had come to this website, as of this morning. They reached us most often, in descending order, through Search Engines, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and the TechStars website.
We will keep those stats updated as the weeks and months go by on this site. We make that commitment because everything we do is rooted in the evidence-based Lean Startup approach … and JFDI.Asia is of course a start-up too. If anyone reading this would like to connect with us for the next leg of our journey, please get in touch
Meanwhile, there are some bigger ambitions for JFDI that can’t quite be accommodated in the Lean Canvas, metrics and all the other tools and methods that I’ve discussed in video blogs through the last 100 days. One look at our Facebook community shows that this is about much more than making money or hitting KPIs.
Meng and I talk often about building the social capital – relationships, shared insights and know-how – that will create a vibrant, sustainable start-up ecosystem here in Asia. That’s our ambition. We will have succeeded when some of our start-ups founders become funders for the next generation. We hope that will happen in the next 3-5 years.
For now, a huge thank you to everyone who helped us do this. The Frog Has Left The Building but he’ll be back soon 🙂
