Last Friday 500 Startups held a “500 Investor Day” event in Seoul as Korea’s first Series A program came to an end. The Series A program aims to help startups with viable products grow rapidly and has been in held around the world in locations including London, Miami, Berlin and Singapore since 2014.
Selected startups for the Korean version of the program were Dano, Spoon, OP.GG and PeopleFund. These four teams all received support over a period of three months with the goal of core growth. We asked some of the teams about what help they had received.
CEO of diet startup Dano, Jeong Beom-yun, says that he was able to learn about startup metric model AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) more closely. “We received a lot of help with actually applying it to our business,” said Jeong. “Most of our management went into entrepreneurship while still in university so they didn’t have much experience learning about how to work. But listening to real-life advice from mentors was a chance to set goals and figure out how to work systematically and what the meaning of our work is.”
Kim Dae-yun, CEO of peer-to-peer finance startup PeopleFund, said that mentors themselves were the highlight of the program. “The mentors in the program were people who had actual experience founding a company and growing it,” said Kim. “We showed our internal data to over 10 mentors and received feedback on how we could grow our business.” Using this feedback PeopleFund was able to increase the number of investments via its platform by 30% during the program.
Audio streaming service Spoon previously had the opportunity to be part of the 500 Startups Seed Program in 2014 in Silicon Valley. “While we learned how to use Facebook ads last time, in the Series A program we were able to apply new knowledge to what we already new to target ads more effectively,” said Neil Choi, CEO of Spoon. Choi added that his company saw a rise in retention rates using what they had learned.
OP.GG is a data service for popular game League of Legends and received the most help with ad tech over the three months. CEO Park Chan-woo said, “Adtech is about making money from ads based on traffic, but there was no chance to learn about this properly in Korea. We were able to gain information that only people in Silicon Valley share with each other, and it helped our company a lot.” According to OP.GG, the company’s revenue has increased by 50% as a result of the program.
500 Startups manager Kim Gyeong-min says said that as the first Series A program in Korea, he originally started with the goal of taking Korea’s top local startups and making them into top global startups. “If Korean startups receive the training they need, I’m sure they can be competitive on the global stage,” says Kim. A second Series A program is also currently being planned for Korea.
