You’ll never have to top-up your phone again if Yoyo gets its way

About 24 million smartphones were sold in the Southeast Asian region in just the first three months of this year. If that’s not enough to make your head turn, consider this – the figure represents a 65 percent growth year-on-year. Demand for smartphones has finally outstripped that of feature phones, with Vietnam, Thailand, and Philippines considered as the top three markets.

Naturally, when you have such an acute proliferation of smartphones, there’s bound to be a multiplier effect. Firms will look at ways of cashing in on the trend. Building a product that’s easily scalable across the region and which has monetization potential is a no-brainer. The difficult part is conceptualization and execution.

Singapore-based Yoyo believes it has a trick up its sleeve. The startup’s value proposition, through its products PopSlide and Candy, is to provide free mobile airtime. All users have to do is click on advertisements on their phone lockscreen or complete tasks such as filling out surveys. The airtime can be used either for accessing the web or making calls.

This is available to Android smartphone owners in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand. Clearly the startup wants to grow with the fastest-growing smartphone markets in the region. Yoyo founder Yosuke Fukada tells Tech in Asia that Candy had 250,000 users last year (but declined to disclose figures for monthly active users).

Free internet

The startup’s monetization strategy is simple. Clients purchase ad space to be viewed on a user’s lockscreen. Each time a user clicks on the ad, Yoyo earns revenue. Part of that is shared with the end user, which pays for the free credit top-up they get. A similar principle applies to other tasks, such as filling out surveys. Yosuke says they’ve secured some big clients to partner with, including Unilever, Nestle, McDonalds, and Intel.

The goal is to target prepaid mobile users. “The smartphone market is booming in developing nations and we plan to expand to such markets in which prepaid phones dominate – which is actually most of them,” said Yosuke last year.

The next focus of the firm is to entrench itself in the South Asian market. “The internet ads market will grow to more than US$5 billion in the next three years, and the majority is smartphones. The population is over 1.8 billion people. There’s big potential,” he explains.

Yoyo is backed by Gree Ventures, CyberAgent Ventures, KLab Global, and Incubate Fund. The specific funding amount hasn’t been made public, but Yosuke claims it’s several million dollars.

Part of the startup’s mission is to assist in poverty alleviation and have a social impact. It believes it can do so by connecting business and technology. Yosuke explains that two-thirds of the global population still lacks internet connectivity due to inhibitively high costs. While many people own a smartphone, some do not wish to incur recurring costs by investing in data plans. If they are able to access the internet for free then a world of opportunities opens up for them. This is where Yoyo comes in. “We have just started our journey to solve one of the biggest problems [in the world] – poverty in emerging countries,” asserts Yosuke.