Do you need to go to Silicon Valley to succeed as a start-up? Steven Goh, co-founder and CEO of mobile content and entertainment provider mig33, thinks not. In fact, he considers moving the company’s headquarters from the Valley to Singapore in 2009 to be one of his best business decisions. “It’s a wonderful place full of amazing people doing great things, and I have no regrets for going there,” he tells us. “But recognise that there is opportunity around you everywhere. Greater Asia is where the world’s attention is turning to and Singapore is in a position to take advantage of this like no other.”
mig33: A Primer
mig33 was founded by Goh and co-founder Mei Lin Ng in Australia in December 2005. Like so many other good ideas, the concept for the business was born in a coffee shop. “We wanted to do a global business and saw an opportunity with chat for mobile phones. Long before Facebook, we had a belief that there was a larger universe of social functionality wanted by users of mobile phones, beyond voice calls and SMS, and that we could deliver that functionality at the application level on the phone.”
A mobile application, it brings all the social networking features that you can find on the Internet right to your phone (yes, even the most basic model as long as it runs on Java.) Think Instant Messaging (IM), chat rooms, photo sharing, games – you get the idea. It also lets you make cheap local and international calls from your mobile phone to another mobile or a landline.
Started with AUD$500K (USD 527K / SGD 658K) in seed funding (which was raised under three hours), mig33 has since raised a total of USD 34M (SGD 42M) [PDF] and gone on to become a mobile social-networking juggernaut in emerging markets such as Indonesia and India. At present, it has more than 40 million users in over 200 countries and it looks set to grow even further. “mig33 has been reasonably successful,” says Goh modestly, adding that the company expects to turn a profit this year.
The success of mig33 in the region is, among other things, a textbook example of a company with a clear sense of where its loyalties lie. “We’re an emerging markets player,” says Goh. “We’re not a first world player. We’re playing to the strength of our user base and we have a unique monetisation channel. If you think of mig33, we are a mobile entertainment community based around people in chat rooms playing games. That’s what we are first and foremost.”
So yes, you can forget about seeing a mig33 app for the iPad. “Tablets are interesting in first world markets. It’s an evolution of the way that people access computing power and a new niche for the consumption and delivery of digital media but they are not relevant for the [emerging] markets.”
Coming Up
So what’s next for the company?
Apart from maturing its presence in South and Southeast Asia, and looking into “some interesting markets” in Eastern Europe, it’s also beefing up its game offerings. “We’re working with a number of companies and game developers throughout this region and the second half of this year is going to be very exciting. We’re rolling out a lot of games.”
In fact, the company just signed [PDF] an agreement with Japanese social networking service provider GREE to adopt its platform for smartphones. As you can imagine, given that they have over 70 million users combined, this looks set to be a goldmine for social game makers everywhere.
No plans for China
It may come as a surprise to some that despite the buzz about China’s booming tech industry, the company has no plans to enter the market there. “There are opportunities for us in China but not as a market,” he says. “One unique thing about mig33 is that we actually make money from our users – we monetise 150 countries. As a result of this, a lot of gaming companies in China want to export their services to these markets. Working through network operators is notoriously difficult. Having your own form of payment in these markets is hard because the bankability there is pretty low. mig33 offers a platform where companies get paid for delivering a game.”
“There is talent everywhere”
mig33 is Goh’s second major start-up. He founded Australia’s first online stock brokerage company Sanford Securities Limited, which was acquired in 2003, and sits on the board of Belldirect, another financial services start-up and the country’s largest independent online stockbroker.
Asked what his best business decision is, he replies, “It’s a tie. Moving from Australia to Silicon Valley – I have friends with less successful companies in other countries but with higher valuations, and it really taught me what a limited Australia was as a place to grow [if] we wanted to build a company that had a global footprint – and moving from Silicon Valley to Singapore.”
He is all praise about Singapore’s proximity to key emerging markets in the region and dismisses the oft-heard criticism that it’s difficult to find talented developers here. “There’s a lot of talent in Singapore. I’ve met a lot of people who’ve bitched and moaned about it but the fact of the matter is when we were in Silicon Valley we had the best recruiters, shareholders and relationships but we weren’t as successful as we could have been. There is great talent everywhere and I think each of these markets has its own entrepreneurial culture. It would be wrong to think that entrepreneurs are a special thing that happens elsewhere.”
Apt then that his parting words to aspiring entrepreneurs should be this: “Don’t be myopic, play to your strengths (including location), and be bold. Be really bold. As James Bond’s motto says, “Orbis non sufficit.” (Latin for “The world is not enough”, also the epitaph of a Greek overachiever.)”
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