Can Sociolla’s supporting features take center stage?

Sign up for the Daily Newsletter, sent exclusively to our Premium subscribers. We break down the big and messy topics of Asia’s tech and startup community. Get the newsletter in your inbox everyday with a Premium subscription.

Hi readers,

Stewart Butterfield’s journey is one of my favorite stories in tech. I like how he built very ambitious online multiplayer games not once, but twice, and then failed to gain traction for both.

But, in those two instances, he struck gold with what were initially smaller supporting features of his games. These turned into popular internet platforms Flickr and Slack. (It’s also interesting that he grew up on a hippie commune.)

I was reminded of this story when I was working on my piece this week about Sociolla’s tech infrastructure.

Of course, there are major differences: Unlike Butterfield’s games, it’s safe to say that Sociolla’s core beauty retailer business has found product-market fit with millions of consumers across two Southeast Asian markets. And unlike Flickr and Slack, it’s too early to tell if Sociolla will indeed separately package its back-end tech as an enterprise product.

This goes to show that the path we start on isn’t necessarily the path we end with. But I suppose that’s kind of the point.

— Putra Muskita, journalist at Tech in Asia

Top stories this week

Image credit: Timmy Loen

1️. Can Sociolla become the AWS for smart retail?
The beauty marketplace built its own end-to-end smart retail system during the pandemic. Will this become its new revenue driver?

2. Recession Run: Antler to double funding deals
Jussi Salovaara, co-founder and managing partner for Asia at Antler, discusses the types of startups capable of weathering the current economic headwinds.

3. How this rarest of unicorns is shrugging off the crypto winter
Cake DeFi said that it hit US$65 million in quarterly revenue just two years after it started. And that’s not all it’s touting.

4. A cheat sheet of M&As in Southeast Asia
Need to get up to speed with SEA’s M&A scene? This one’s for you.

5. Singapore’s AV startups go beyond driverless cars
Seeking to go beyond public transport, the city-state aims to be a pioneer in other applications of driverless vehicles for its smart-nation initiative.

3 weeks left to apply for Startup Arena!