D.Camp Southeast Asia Program - Hosted by Ascendo Ventures
On March 25th, D-Camp (operated by the Banks Foundation for Young Entrepreneurs) and Ascendo Ventures organized and hosted an event for D-Camp family startups interested in Southeast Asian business and expansion. We would like to express our thanks to Team Leader Saerom Lim and the D-Camp Global Program Team for all your efforts. We’d also like to thank Wedding Book CEO Sangdon Joo, Swingvy CEO Jin Choeh, and Sellury (Store Camera) CEO Seunghoon Lee for all of your insight. We learned a lot too!
In preparing for the event, we took the opportunity to review our portfolio of around 30 startups, calculating that a third (approx. 10) are active in multiple countries and not limited to the Korean market or a single expansion country. In brief, here are some key points and themes that factored into the enabling of our portfolio companies to build important traction via cross-border expansion.
- Effective “landing” and meaningful growth through the support of capable local accelerators
- Growth via close collaboration with strong business partners (including strategic investors)
- Meeting influential advisors who help build local networks or partnerships
- Aggressive market entry and investment only after intensive preparation of long term in-depth research, financing, staffing, partnership building, etc.
- Rapid business growth through a remote, distributed team structure and impactful hires in each country of operation
While these factors were critical to the success of early global expansion for our portfolio companies, it is important to note that frankly, an assessment of one hundred other companies could realistically yield an equal amount of unique strategies and approaches. In other words, there is no cookie cutter formula that can ensure successful outcomes, but these factors proved instrumental in our portfolio success cases.
Startups throw out “global expansion” as part of their plans with ease (especially in Korea or in “smaller market” countries), as if to say it is in and of itself a justifiable agenda with an obvious destination and upside. The reality is that with respect to a given startup’s growth, even if it possesses unique tech, products, and a playbook that addresses their local market’s needs, there are many considerations to make when engaging potential customers outside of that market, even in situations where strong demand is deemed to already exist. Though generally unapparent, many startups that operate in a single market like those in Korea are actually addressing sizeable domestic markets that require significant resources focused on stiff competition, customer retention, and aggressive sales. The actual consideration itself, the timing, and the ability to execute factor into the great risk that global expansion entails, and can singularly be the cause of a given startup’s downfall.
As is with all critical success factors for startups, startup success cases can only be used as reference and not purely as a basis for decision-making; this particularly applies to overseas expansion, too. Just as it with things like validating product market fit, from the preparation phase on there must be well-planned, orchestrated execution as a unit (with both existing and new local team members) with clear processes that transparently check and vet progress until objectives are met. For those that can facilitate this and have both the experience and expert network (advisors, investors) to effectively drive this forward, you are blessed! You are one step ahead in terms of being able to reduce the overall scope of trial and error in your journey to success.
Most of all, it is an extremely rare case where a startup can successfully expand without help from local partners, investors, and advisors. That’s why in many respect, finding the right fit of such ‘team’ members is so important to enabling global expansion.
