What makes a great startup?

Aside from having business know-how, good timing, and a huge amount of luck, having an innovative idea is critical. And according to Mark Lim, managing director of digital technology at Singapore-headquartered investment firm Temasek, sometimes, the best ideas come from a strong desire to address a social issue.

“A lot of the startups that are very successful today are those that started with very lofty goals for social good,” he says.

To encourage innovation in Singapore, Temasek partnered StartupX, the organizing body behind Startup Weekend Singapore, and launched The Start pre-accelerator program earlier in January. The initiative lends early-stage startups access to the organizers’ combined pool of resources, networks, mentors, and partners, and concludes with a demo day on April 15, 2019.

Here are some of the fledgling businesses that are participating in the program.

1. Mind Palace

Imagine living in an environment where you’re told what time you should eat or sleep and where you could go. That’s what elderly people experience when they’re placed in nursing homes, and this loss of agency can lead to depression among residents, according to Mind Palace founder Eugene Soh.

The solution to this, he says, lies in virtual reality (VR) technology. Using VR headsets, Mind Palace provides elderly nursing home residents with a virtual world where they can meet friends online and even partake in multiplayer activities such as virtual tennis.

Soh has already piloted the software with some local nursing homes. The next step is to build a community that he hopes can resemble the likes of the OASIS from Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One novel.

“The goal is to get as many people on this platform as possible and get a whole ecosystem going,” says Soh. “Then it won’t just be helping the elderly – young people can join as well.”

2. The Kint Story

In 2018, Singapore generated approximately 219,800 tonnes of textile and leather waste. However, only 6% of that amount was recycled, while the rest was thrown away.

“In Singapore, there’s such a huge ‘throw away’ culture, even for clothes that are still in perfect condition,” says Yushu Huang, who co-founded ecommerce startup The Kint Story with her friend Elisa Goh.

The self-dubbed “online thrift store” sells secondhand clothes from selected fashion influencers, in addition to the founding duo’s own threads. Launched in early 2019, The Kint Story was inspired by Huang and Goh’s desire to spread their personal advocacy of sustainability, while empowering millennial women like them to look good.

In the future, Goh says they plan to “cross-pollinate” with other markets, allowing Singaporean shoppers to buy secondhand clothes from other countries in Southeast Asia and vice-versa.

3. Bridge

E-payments are almost everywhere in Singapore, and they’re good for everything from cab rides to meals at hawker centers. However, the option to go cashless isn’t a luxury that most teenagers in the city-state can enjoy.

Rafael Soh, a 15-year-old secondary school student, hopes to change that. He and three of his schoolmates have been developing a mobile payment platform called Bridge. The app aims to help teenagers spend, budget, and save their pocket money, which their parents can transfer to them digitally, says Soh.

“We believe that we should grant teenagers access to cashless systems at an increased visibility and control so they can learn to manage their finances better,” adds Bridge co-founder Robert Xiu.

The founders will launch a beta version of the app at their school next month, allowing students to pay for purchases at the bookshop and the canteen. Soh says the team is currently in talks with payment facilitators like Visa, GrabPay, and Fave so the app can be used outside the school ecosystem.

4. StaffAny

Janson Seah was a manager at a local food and beverage joint in 2014 when he realized how inefficient the process of scheduling shifts for employees was. Four years later, this problem inspired him to set up StaffAny with his friend Eugene Ng and university coursemates Jeremy Hon and Kai Yi Lee.

The StaffAny app aims to help F&B owners manage their employees more efficiently. It creates automated timesheets and enables remote scheduling, removing the need for manual administrative tasks and thus freeing up business owners to focus on other more important tasks, says Lee.

However, the startup ran into some problems in its early days because the team failed to conduct proper market research. As a result, it launched a “barely functioning product,” which lost StaffAny two of its three clients at the time.

“Our first minimum viable product was trash,” says Hon. “So we threw it out and did 100 face-to-face interviews with F&B managers to really understand their problems and make sure the next iteration of our product can solve them.”

The initial hurdle taught StaffAny’s co-founders a valuable lesson on the importance of providing value to customers, explains Hon. The app now has users from over 70 F&B outlets in the country.

5. Master

Dalton Ng was struggling to memorize the lessons for his exams last year and realized that he needed a more efficient way to study. The second-year polytechnic student, who has been creating apps since he was 11 years old, decided to develop a program that enforced cognitive psychology through the use of visual aids to help him learn better.

Seeing how productive Ng’s studying methods were, his classmates asked if they could use the program, too. This inspired him to further develop the prototype – which he named Master – and roped in his brother and two friends to help him improve and commercialize the program.

Master lets students input sentences or words that they want to memorize. Its algorithm will then analyze the data by combing through its internal database for similar words. Once it finds a match, the program will show students relevant images or videos. The algorithm is built on machine learning and natural language processing, according to Ng.

“If you want to learn about gravity, you can type in the word ‘gravity’ and you’ll be shown a video of someone falling,” he explains. “That’s one of the ways Master works.”

The startup has partnered with local tuition center The Learning Modulus, where teachers and students can use the program. By the end of 2019, Ng hopes to launch Master in 50 tuition centers and 30 private schools across Singapore.

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These startups are part of The Start pre-accelerator, a joint collaboration between Temasek and StartupX. It will conclude with a demo day on April 15, 2019 at the Developer Space @ Google Singapore, where participants will showcase their ideas to potential investors.

Visit the Tech in Asia Facebook page at 3:15 pm on demo day to watch the event live.