Meet the startup that wants to corner Southeast Asia’s tourism chatbot market

On the surface, Joseph Ling seems like a typical Singapore government scholar.

He graduated as a straight-A student from the National University of Singapore under the SPRING Singapore Executive Development Scholarship. He later spent his two-year scholarship bond at SPRING Singapore before leaving to start his own enterprise.

Having succeeded all his life, Ling was humbled by his first crack at launching Vouch.

“I initially wanted to use big data for targeted marketing,” he recalls. “I got a grant of S$50,000 (US$37,000) from the government and planned to capture the market in four months.”

That goal proved too idealistic. Vouch ran out of money, forcing Ling to close the company and fire his team. It was a mistake that he attributes to “first-time entrepreneur stupidity.”

Ling went back to the drawing board and decided to try something new: chatbots.

“I realized there were a lot of people selling stuff on Facebook and Instagram, especially in places like the Philippines,” Ling says. “I noticed how people were asking questions that were very repetitive, like ‘How much?’ even when the price was right there.”

Ling pumped US$50,000 into the project out of his own pocket and hired a developer. They designed an app that would integrate with a seller’s Facebook page, understand what was being sold, and answer frequently asked questions such as “Is this item still available?” or “How much is this item?”

While the app was a hit with online sellers – 800 merchants signed up after a month purely from word of mouth – it failed to generate sales for the sellers.

“The buyers still wanted that human touch, which we couldn’t figure out at the time,” recalls Ling.

“At this point, my wife was pregnant with my third child,” Ling explains. “We had S$3,000 (US$2,200) left in personal savings, so it was a really stressful time for us.”

Fortunately, Vouch caught a break. Organizations such as the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and the Cathay Organization started approaching Ling about the potential applications of chatbots.

Moving into the hospitality industry

Vouch’s real turning point was in 2017, when it pitched for the Tourism Innovation Challenge for Hotels.

Plans for domination