Why we started Techlist

Techlist feels like a cub now.

Tech in Asia’s mission:

To serve and build Asia’s startup ecosystem.

When we first started Tech in Asia, we had no idea the impact it could bring to Asia. Heck, we had no idea this could even be a business. Article by article, we covered what entrepreneurs were building in Asia. People started reading and sharing. And then we branched out to organizing conferences because it was useful for people to connect face to face.

It was about 18 months ago that we started to think what we could do next to help spur the entrepreneurial growth in Asia. We talked to a lot of people in the community and it was clear that something like an AngelList or Crunchbase for Asia is needed. We built one in late 2013 but it didn’t work out well. We discovered that many founders within the Asian startup ecosystem aren’t quite willing to give up data openly and freely. Some investors loved the first version of Techlist we built because, for the first time, there was a startup database that was focused on Asia. They loved the data despite its limitations and many were disappointed that we had to close it down while we rethought Techlist’s path and strategy.

We knew there was, and still is, a huge problem to solve and continued to talk to investors. A lot of people told us that while Tech in Asia and our events were great resources to discover startups, it was hard to pull together startup data unless you get an associate to copy, paste, and manually enter information into an Excel sheet. On the other side of the table, founders told us that it was hard to connect with suitable investors. It became clear that Techlist could be a win-win product between investors and founders. It should be built as a platform where:

• Founders feel confident sharing information with us,
• investors get quality data,
• and both sides could connect on Techlist

With that in mind, Techlist was born. We built it for investors and founders. While founders provide data to Techlist, they gain access to our investors search tool and data. Investors on the other hand could pay and gain access to a searchable, trackable, and quality startup database.

We aren’t just stopping there, though. As we keep talking to users, we learned that there are a bunch of problems that we could solve for them. We will keep talking to users and learn how to build Techlist into something they truly want. Admittedly, we are not quite there yet – but we will get there.

PS: We are just getting started on this journey and would love to invite every founder and investor to sign up for Techlist to help make our data and product better.