I co-founded my first start-up at 18

As my time in Junior College came to an end, there was something I really wanted to achieve before the year ended. Create a an app, have a passionate team market the product, and see how far I could go.

With 2 other bright friends of mine, Jamian and Jonathan, we co-founded The White Card. I served as the technical lead while the other 2 focused on Marketing and Product Development.

The White Card - Snap a picture of your receipt and let us tell you how to save your wallet; and the planet!

Creating the app

The White Card essentially works by scanning receipts, running OCR on it and analysing its contents. The data would then be stored on our database and visualised to provide insights to the user.

The core idea was to be able to cut costs on what users were overspending on, and at the same time be able to budget more efficiently, in an environmentally-friendly manner.

After hacking up a prototype in React Native, getting the camera modules up and running with OCR, setting up a basic text extraction/interpretation engine, our Android/iOS app was ready for testing.

Testing & Market Research

Besides constantly refining the app for bugs and bug fixes, we also reached out to our closest friends, getting them to test flight The White Card beta.

Their initial reviews were highly positive. Most of them were just simply impressed that we had come together to create an app that actually worked. We didn’t manage to get the critical data/feedback we needed to improve our product at this stage. Thus, we moved on to a market survey.

We performed a market research survey of about ~1000 people, showing the public how to use our app and asking them whether they would use it.

While most users agreed that there was a lack of an easy-to-use budgeting system…

19% of users said they would simply be too lazy to snap a picture of their receipt

12% of users would be willing to snap a picture, but give up making adjustments manually (incorrect OCR, awkward item names)

Marketing the Product

The initial idea of our Marketing Leads was to secure some form of funding, while I developed the app and improved its features. We could then hopefully use the funds to push the idea to market.

Eventually, they stumbled upon a youth entrepreneurship challenge that fit the requiremenrs. We built a pitch deck and after some practice, we were ready for our first business pitch. We ended up receiving $7900 in grant funding. $5000 in initial funding as well as $2900 in additionals.

Here’s a picture of the HUONE at Clarke Quay, where we presented our idea. We were very impressed by the atmosphere.

Professional feedback

At the business pitch, there were industry VCs who assessed us and gave us useful feedback.

One particular professional expressed that our app idea was ‘fundamentally against the concept of consumerism’.

If users spend more on a certain type of item, they desire them more. Hence they would be unwilling to cut down on the spending of those items, he explained.

While we felt that this point was true, we also brought up the fact that our app not only does budgeting, but also evaluates the carbon footprints of those consumable items that the user may buy. The VC said that our app may appeal to environmentally conscious users, less so to those who were not.

Personally, I felt that the VCs feedback was way more insightful than the market research. It was very direct and to the point, and they managed to point out the exact flaws in our idea/app.

Conclusion

The story of my first startup ends here. As we each walked into our busy lives, we decided to end the project here.

I think there’s a huge difference between saying something, and actually doing it. And the difference is pretty, pretty big.

Nobody teaches you stuff like this in school, but that wasn’t an excuse for our team. We pieced things up along as we went, making mistakes and having disagreements on the way.

In the end, it was incredibly rewarding to see our little idea flourish into an actual product.