JFDI: The Frog’s Story, Secret Sauce, and Challenges

JFDI, which stands for the Joyful Frog Digital Incubator, is an accelerator program in Singapore that helps entrepreneurs turn their ideas to investable businesses in a hundred days. Founded by Hugh Mason and Meng Weng Wong in 2009, the accelerator has turned out to be one of the more successful accelerators in Southeast Asia. It is also the first Southeast Asian member of the Global Accelerator Network.

In exchange of a small percentage of equity, JFDI offers founders S$25,000 (About US$20,000), mentorship, and facilities to build their startups in 100-days. Its first round of incubatees, which “graduated” last year, was quite a success. Out of 11 teams of entrepreneurs, six were funded with an average funding size of S$650,000 (About US$520,000) per team: Kark, Fetch Fan, Flocations, ShopSpot, Tradegecko, and TribeHired.

Starting JFDI

JFDI actually stands for “just fucking do it.” Or rather, it was supposed to stand for that, but for some people, especially government officials, find it hard to say the f-word publicly. So JFDI is now more commonly known as the Joyful Frog Digital Incubator. It’s an easier sell to a wide range of people and the frog mascot sticks in people’s minds. It works, although Hugh and Meng get asked “why frogs!?” so often that the duo has a page to explain all the awesome goodness of frogs.

In 2010, Hugh and Meng wondered if it was possible to bring world-class mentors to Southeast Asia to help entrepreneurs here grow. Both found the answer to be a yes. In 2011, they wondered if they could get the quality raw startups in Southeast Asia they needed to make the accelerator work. JFDI ran Startup Weekends at six different cities in Asia and found that they could source good entrepreneurs for their program. In 2012, Hugh and Meng kickstarted the actual 100-day accelerator program to test if it would work. Again, the answer was a yes, with both believing that an accelerator program would work well in Southeast Asia.

Bring your company to us and we will either make or break your company in a hundred days. If we make it, that’s cool. If we break it that’s cool because you can move on to do something else. You give your best shot in the 100-days.

Our goals at JFDI are:
1. We help individual people explore who they are quicker
2. We help companies reach their potential quicker
3. We are also about building an ecosystem

Secret Sauce

There are numerous accelerators or incubators in this region that haven’t quite reached the returns of JFDI. When asked, Meng said that there isn’t any secret sauce to making an accelerator work. It’s all about execution. Meng explained further:

What we mean is taking advantage of what the state of the art is in helping startups. We’re taking advantage of agile development, we’re taking advantage of lean startup methodology. We’re doing customer development as taught by Steve Blank. We are looking at all the best practices and we’re executing. And this makes us a bit different [compared to those] who aren’t aware of these practices.

JFDI probably has one of the most well-thought-out programs in Southeast Asia that I have seen. Apart from the constant mentorships and product development in the day, every evening, is packed with courses to provide that extra nutrients for startups to grow stronger. For example, JFDI offers core curriculum such as:

Challenges