JFDI Discover helped Ritchie Ng, Andre Tan and Varun Patro round up a flock of funding for their startup Kinsheep, writes Crystal Neri
Kinsheep Team: (from left) CEO Ritchie Ng, COO Andre Tan and CTO Varun Patro
Ritchie, Andre and Varun Patro met at college. Their friendship survived the failure of a first startup, Gloqo, as did their faith that their combined skills could make them an awesome team. Yet their next project put all that to the test.
Kinsheep started with the idea that a location-based social network could help improve the quality of professional interactions. But the founders feared that failure would stalk them once again unless they got support to achieve traction. Beta users weren’t signing up. “We also did not know how much to build before launching and finding a large enough addressable target market,” says Ritchie.
So, in June 2015, they entered the Singapore Youth Hack competition, attracted by a prize that included the chance to enroll in JFDI Discover. The 21-day program gave them a logical process through which to ‘debug’ their business model. Ritchie recalls: “We validated our problem and solution before moving on to build an minimum viable product (MVP) to get our initial adopters.”
Kinsheep allows anyone to instantly connect with working professionals nearby
Immediately after the program the team were awarded the prestigious VaSCo grant from National Singapore University worth SGD $10,000. “We’ll use the grant to launch our application in two months,” says Ritchie, who hopes that after validating their idea in Singapore the next stop for Kinsheep will be to expand to the US through Y Combinator.
The team is generous crediting the structured learning that JFDI Discover offered as key to their success “It helps you ensure that your idea morphs into an MVP people want, gain beta tests, launch your application and conquer the world,” says Ritchie. “We made friends, people that will use Kinsheep. We definitely recommend this to others.”
Crystal Neri writes content and handles social media at JFDI Asia. Say Hi to her on Twitter, @nericrystal.