Journalism is expensive and well worth your investment

Dear readers,

As we arrive in December, it’s a good time to reflect on the year. I hope it’s been a fruitful one for you so far.

We did a little reflecting of our own, specifically about the state of the seed stage investment scene in Singapore.

The trigger for this was an online discussion about whether the scene is “dead” or “lifeless.”

We thought we’d contribute in our own way. We looked at actual data and spoke to the people who know best – investors.

It’s also the hard way. Over the years, we’ve been methodically combing through tech media coverage of funding rounds in Asia.

To make sure the data we have is useful, we created guidelines for classifying the data.

We then gathered up the information, combed through it to spot errors and missing pieces, and plotted a chart.

We also reached out to investors to get their views.

Finally, there’s the process of incorporating all of that together into a narrative, rewriting, and two rounds of editing.

The end result is a pretty definitive take on the state of seed funding in Singapore (and no, it’s definitely not dead).

Rather than writing another opinion piece – which requires at most a couple of hours – this took days.

But the end result was worthwhile: the piece provides data-backed arguments and elevated the debate.

It’s something we definitely want to do more of in the future, though a key obstacle is resources.

There’s a lot more that can be improved upon, such as:

• Collecting data directly from investors and business registries, rather than just relying on media reports
• Creating automated lists and interactive charts from our data, which would allow us to write analysis faster (and readers would be able to analyze the data themselves)
• Speeding up the cleaning of the data, which would allow us to generate even more insights

All of this will require a lot of investment. The bottom line is this: We’d love to devote more time to lovingly craft each piece, but we need your support in order to do so.

If you’d like to see more of such reporting, analysis, and exclusive content, do consider subscribing to us.

Anyway, as is customary, here’s a list of the ten best subscriber-only content we’ve published in the past two weeks. Enjoy:

1. JD and Go-Jek deepen their relationship to conquer Indonesia
2. 10 exciting Indonesian startups you should know about in 2019
3. Airbnb had only one engineer for their first year of existence. Here’s how he hacked growth
4. Masayoshi Son: The man behind a $90b empire
5. Opinion: Why WeChat is a good product but a bad company
6. They’ve built the top Muslim app with zero marketing budget. It now has 62m downloads.
7. Rising SE Asian startups this week: Hmlet, JobHop, and more
8. Why doesn’t Starbucks have a serious competitor in China?
9. Grab is shutting down GrabCycle and replacing it with its new e-scooter app
10. An insider account of how Lazada changed the ecommerce game in Indonesia

Best,

Terence Lee
Chief editor
Tech in Asia