Cultural nuances in startups
Cultural nuances are everywhere — school, workplace, relationship, and the startup arena is no exceptions. What concepts or ideas do startups from different regions value the most? Do startups market themselves differently around the globe? Data from the RISE 2018 startup list tells us some interesting stories, from elevator pitch to PR channels.
RISE Conference
RISE 2018 was a 4-day tech conference in Hong Kong where startups set up booths to showcase their products, investors to search for companies with high potential, and industry leaders to share their insights.
This year there were over 750 startups from 58 countries exhibited in the 4-day event. Hong Kong itself attracted over 150 local startups attended the exhibition, followed by India, Singapore, Malaysia and the US. Most companies were based in Asia but we do see companies from different continents in Europe, South America and Africa.
Fintech and eCommerce & retail were the most popular categories among all the 25 industries, with 104 and 103 companies belong to respectively. In particular Fintech in Hong Kong brought 35 companies to this event, topping the list all region-industry pairs.
I was there last July and it was a real eye-opener (for me at least). This year I didn’t get the ticket, but the data I found on RISE’s website is equally interesting, if not more.
Elevator Pitch
Here starts the fun part — all the startups were asked to provide an “elevator pitch”
Most companies gave a 17–18 words (mean — median) tagline summarising who they are and what they offer (probably different from what one would expect from an elevator pitch). But there’s an outliner — Web Summit — putting a 92 words paragraph!
Web Summit is a global technology conference company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. We run a series of international gatherings across the world. Our flagship event is Web Summit, currently held in Lisbon, Portugal. In the last eight years, Web Summit has grown from a small team to a company of over 200 focused on disrupting the conference industry through technology and data science. In 2018, over 100,000 startups, investors, speakers and attendees will gather at Web Summit events, including MoneyConf in Ireland, Collision in the North America and RISE in Hong Kong.And in case you don’t know, Web Summit is the team hosting the RISE conference.
Concepts embedded in the line
Above is the count of companies using the most common “word”s found in all the elevator pitches (they may not be the actual word used, but rather the base form of the word — “lemma”).
Among the common words, “platform” is the most frequently used with 177 companies including this word. Platform startups never get old. Or Platform-as-a-service?
Many startups include words like “service”, “solution”, “provide”, “help” — providing service and solution is a key idea that many startups want to convey to their customers.
Not surprisingly AI (ranks 8th) and blockchain (ranks 12th) are among the top in the list. Perhaps a few years later AI will be the top of the list? Or maybe the other case, where only few companies will be putting “AI” in their marketing lines because it is no longer worth mentioning.
AI is the new electricity — Andrew Ng
Other than AI, “Blockchain” is another hot theme found mainly in Hong Kong and Singapore, each with 12 companies including this word in their tagline. Relatively speaking “Blockchain” is hotter in Singapore because it ranks 2nd there, while in Hong Kong it is only the 10th most common word stem in these elevator pitches.
Other concepts like IoT (Internet of Things), cloud and crypto/cryptocurrency (less than 15 companies) etc are less popular than originally expected. Especially the popularity gap between “blockchain” vs “crypto” — it may suggest that startups are more willing to market themselves as a “blockchain” company rather than a “crypto” company.
Cultural nuances and Industry trends
We already know that “platform” is a very common theme for startup companies, and in the heatmap above we do observe some relative preference across different regions. Thailand, India, Malaysia and Hong Kong seem like “platforms” more, and relatively less popular in South Korea (cultural difference?).
The distribution does reflect some interesting patterns for cultures nuances. South Korea startups focus more on “we”(-PRON-), “service” and“technology”; Indonesia emphasises “solution”, “app”, “platform”; Hong Kong, India, South Korea and the US companies like to refer to “world” more than startups from the other countries; Philippines “online”, “something‘s“, “connect”.
The metric for industries also have a few words to say. If you are not an eCommerce company, it is probably redundant to claim yourself to be “online”. Hardware & IoT companies are likely to be a “solution” of something. Ads & marketing, Big data together with enterprise solutions startups are adopting more “AI” concept into their products. If you are not a Fintech company and you do want to stand out, consider to include “blockchain” into your elevator pitch (if that makes sense).
PR channels
Other than an elevator pitch, startups were also asked to provide the url of their PR channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, as well as the profile page in startup platforms like Crunchbase and AngelList.
The heatmap below visualises the percentage of companies in each region with their corresponding PR channels available. (I believe it makes sense to assume that startups would fill out the form if they maintain such channel unless they are really lazy…)
Observations on Social Media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin)
#1: Facebook is the predominant channel in for quite a few ASEAN countries (Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand), Taiwan and Hong Kong. While US and Australia companies seem to care Twitter more.
#2: South Korea startups, at first glance, seem to rely less on social media as their PR channels (among the lowest). While this could be true, it is also probably due to the vast popularity of the localised social media (Naver, Kakao etc) in South Korea, and therefore western world social media like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin may not be their priority.
#2.5: China also shares a similar pattern to South Korea, but the reason could be different. Facebook and Twitter are blocked by the Great Firewall of China but Linkedin is not, which explains the 20% margin for Linkedin over Facebook and Twitter.
Observations on Startup Profiles (AngelList, Crunchbase, press release)
#3: AngelList seems to have relatively less coverage in most regions, especially among ASEAN countries, South Korea and Taiwan. But AngelList is slightly more popular among US startups (59% vs 52%), and both companies are US based.
#4: It seems that China and Taiwan takes “press release” more seriously than the counterparts in the other regions, both have over 50% of the companies providing a press release link; On the other hand, US companies care less about “press release” (36%), but weigh more on startup profiles in AngelList (59%) and Crunchbase (52%).
On the industry side, the patterns seem to be more obvious.
Facebook is almost a must for startups in the Lifestyle & fashion space (94%), while a Linkedin profile is more like optional (56%). Meditech & pharma startups do the least PR in general, probably due to the fact that their clients are institutions that care the actual tech, and less affected by the hype and marketing.
And the relative importance of Linkedin vs (Facebook+ Twitter) in the AI & machine learning sector is reversed — perhaps their clients are more professional-oriented? (But we don’t observe in the Enterprise solutions sector, so it could be an over-interpretation).
Conclusion
I found some of the trends and observations are like “common sense” — as a Hong Konger I know Twitter is less popular compared with Facebook, and China blocks Facebook and Twitter. And some observations could be over-interpretation, which is normal as we didn’t adopt very robust statistical approach to derive those observations. But some insights did inspire me to think deeper and try to relate to our existing knowledge, like the PR channels in South Korea and China.
Data and analysis can be found in my github. In the notebook I prepared some interactive visualisations (from an interactive world map to t-SNE visualisation using word embedding), but then I realise there is no way to embed it into this post. But still I had a lot of fun exploring this dataset and I hope you enjoy reading this as well.
