8 teams of Start-up Nomad returned from the 5 weeks acceleration program in the US. We heard about the results and post-program plans from the participating teams.
[Startup Nomad] Let Us Have Fun and Make Contributions, Ultracaption
It seems that Your Friends is more suitable to Asian cultures. Did you have any difficulties while you were preparing the business in the US?
Since we have Abel, who is a co-founder and from the US, we analyzed this by ourselves while preparing for the global business. We had the concern of racism and it might seem childish in the context of the culture here that people have contests over photos of faces. Having planned from the Asian, Korean in particular, perspective, we have never thought about this, and this might cause a serious problem in the US where racism is a very sensitive issue.
We also had a gender issue. Tinder, which is a dating app here, offers that users can choose male or female photos regardless of the users’ gender; however our service only offers photos of opposite gender. Without the option, this might bring the service under users’ criticism, we are currently preparing Your Friends US version by getting constant feedback. We regret that we couldn’t have launched the English version of the application. We would’ve been able to see the reaction during the program if we had had more time.
Regarding ‘Dieter’, which is a diet application, we heard that there was talk about collaboration between Design Your Life and Ultracaption.
Dieter is a quest-based diet application that is based on webtoons and helps more people start and maintain dieting easily. The problem is that it is not easy to make content for each quest, and we are talking with Design Your Life on this, and hoping for a synergy.
Since Design Your Body by Design Your Life has great content made by great trainers, Dieter can make the users satisfied by providing the actual workout images of trainers through Design Your Body.
What is the future plan of Your Friends?
Whereas you meet a friend of friends in Your Friends, what we think the next milestone is that we extend the service further covering all users and materialize the choices based on geographic and age. We will try to emphasize positive feedback about appearance in our service, rather than just a dating app as Your Friends has changed to be more like a dating app, different from our initial plan.
It was also a big change that we adjusted our revenue model after we had undergone the mentoring during the program. There will be an update in December, and we will reflect the feedback from this project on it.
Since most of the team members are from the same club of the same school, we tried to proceed our projects based on the idea ‘let’s try to make fun things and do what we want to do’. In order to do what we want to do, we’ll set up strategic visions in terms of our business.
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