Interview with Guyi Shen: How LobangClub got 38k users, and more

For those who’ve been following the startup scene lately, it’s hard to miss Guyi Shen, co-founder of Singapore-based LobangClub, a price comparison app.

He was a supposed “victim” on the Dragon Den-like reality show Angel’s Gate, where the angels offered him a year’s worth of mentorship in exchange for ten percent equity — a proposition many find ridiculous (read his side of the story).

But more than that, his app has gained quite a decent amount of traction in Singapore, at 38,000 active users in a city of five million since its launch in September 2011. His challenge now is to expand to the region and generate enough revenue to sustain his business.

We caught up with him recently via email to see how’s he doing.

SGE: So what are your plans regarding expanding regionally? Where are you looking to at the moment?

Guyi: We are looking very closely at philippines right now. It’s english speaking, has a 100 million population, and the iPhone is exploding in the country right now. It’s demographic is super connected and social, and Pinoys love a deal even more than Singaporeans. In fact, I am emailing you from Manila right now.

SGE: It’s probably tougher for a startup like yours, that utilizes network effect, to go from zero to 38k, than say an utility app. What advice can you give to startups that cultivate communities and rely purely on user-generated content?

Guyi: I feel like this is by far the most important question for startups in this region. To be honest, there are lots of ideas done by startups in the region that have the proviso, “this would work, if you can get enough users…”

People here in this region look to the Valley for thought leadership on all things startup, and pretty much verbatim execute the “best practises” they see overseas. However, distribution is a very local thing, especially given the different Internet ecosystems that exist in this region, and copying stuff that works in the U.S does not necessarily work locally.

For user-generated content and community sites, the advice is pretty short and sweet, do whatever it takes to make your first users happy, usually this means doing things that don’t scale; for us, we spent a few months manually seeding the data with everything we could get our hands on, so that the very first user had a good experience when they scanned something.

SGE: On Angel’s Gate, it was mentioned that you’ve had three failed businesses over eight years. Could you tell me more?

Guyi: I wouldn’t exactly call them failed businesses (that was an AG embellishment); one was in ecommerce, one was in lead generation, and another one was in financial services. My role in all of them was user acquisition and online distribution, so I cut my teeth in extremely competitive online markets doing user acquisition.

SGE: How do you bounce back each time?