Singapore-based Gushcloud Launches Office in SF, Eyes Indonesia

Gushcloud is on a roll. The social media marketing platform who pitched and battled at our Startup Arena last month has recently gotten funding and is currently expanding abroad. Its first stop? The US, with a base in San Francisco.

Prior to expansion, the team told me that they thought Gushcloud, being a social media related product (integrated with Facebook and Twitter), would be well suited to the US market. Plus, Bryan Chow, CTO at Gushcloud, also has ten years of experience living and working in Silicon Valley and is pretty certain that the US should be the team’s first stop.

And so Gushcloud’s US expansion happened. Co-founder and CEO, Vincent Ha (right of above picture), also shared this blog post which talks briefly about his US experience so far. I congratulated him and we started chatting about expansion plans via Facebook chats. As high-spirited as he is about all this, Vincent is also proceeding cautiously as he leads his startup into new markets. We also chatted a little about market size, as he said that the US is “mind boggling” as it took him a while to get used to the idea that the US isn’t Singapore in terms of scale. He added:

You can have four big agencies in just one state and there’s still enough to go around.

Indonesia is also part of Gushcloud’s plan. Vincent declined to comment much about movements in Indonesia except that they are “in a few discussions with local partners.” He added: “We’ve invested quite a fair bit of time in ground work there.”

Vincent and I very much agree with each other’s thoughts. Companies in Singapore need to expand unless the strategy is to remain local and to be acquired by expanding players, a la Groupon/Beeconomics, as he puts it. It’s risky but fun too. Opening up an office in San Francisco is just a first step and he humbly admits that his team is not quite a role model, yet. Nonetheless, he has his own thoughts on expansion:

My personal thoughts is, if you’re really trying to disrupt an industry or change the world, you have to at least go regional fast. In a country like ours [Singapore], I give it six months before you should be in another country. But that presumes you have an okay product, market fit, and customers.