Looking for a contractor for that renovation? Or a place to eat? Or an attraction to visit? New Singapore-based start-up, The Smart Local, is aiming to be the TripAdvisor-Yelp-InSing rolled-in-one of Singapore. It’s also launched in Malaysia and aims to roll out local sites across the region.
Founder Bryan Choo tells WIT that the Singapore site is currently attracting 70,000 uniques monthly, driven mainly by organic searches, backed by social media and a YouTube channel.
“Being a vast directory listing gives us diverse traffic from a wide variety of search terms as people are always searching for information. So if you type “business name + reviews” you are likely to get our site in the top 3 of google searches e.g “adventure cove reviews”, “s.e.a aquarium reviews” or even non-seo-optimized searches like “anderson junior college” sometimes rank highly,” he says.
Choo, who studied IT in poly and majored in finance in University, went into web development when one of his hobby websites he started (a gaming community portal) turned into a business, “hence my belief in the power of a strong community”.
He shares his plan with WIT.
Q: Describe the business, core products and services in one paragraph
Our ultimate goal is to be a one-stop portal for consumers that helps them to make more informed decisions when travelling in Asia. People use wikipedia when searching for information. We one day hope people will use us in the same way before making any travel or consumer decisions, be it tourists visiting or locals living in Asia.
Our focus is on providing quality aggregated reviews from a community of invited bloggers and experts. Unlike other review sites, we do not rely on random one-off reviews and this is a fresh approach we believe is vital for the integrity and legitimacy of reviews.
Q: Who are your key customers?
Key revenue would come from businesses that want to advertise on our site to gain more exposure and publicity. These could be restaurants, hotels, attractions and even retail businesses promoting their offers.
Our key target visitors are consumers who would find a trusted review site like ours useful. Statistics commonly show that over 80% of web consumers rely on reviews before making decisions.
Q: Who are your key partners?
We do not have any key partners at the moment but will be looking at incorporating a merchant booking site in the future. For now we have worked with prominent attractions in Singapore and local travel agencies.
Q: What business are you most likely to be compared to?
TripAdvisor, Yelp, inSing.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve for your customers?
The lack of a trusted review portal in Asia that covers a diverse range of listings. We have a few portals at the moment. TripAdvisor focuses on attractions, Yelp on businesses and inSing on food. We cover everything, with our niche not being the industry, but the geographical location – Singapore. (And later Asia..)
From the mainstays like Attractions, Restaurants, Hotels and Businesses but also popular lifestyle decisions from which school to enrol your children in, to trusted local blogshops or the best tour agencies to use.
Singapore also lacks a dedicated tourism site built by knowledgeable locals that have extensive features on all the attractions and hidden gems in our country. We do have some good ones but most of the information on them has to be objectively given, there is a commercial focus and most the write ups are limited in detail.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve for your partners?
The lack of exposure towards locals, and lack of input from locals. Many tourists rely on TripAdvisor to visit places. As such the attractions tend to be very skewed from a non-local perspective. Also, locals seem to lack the knowledge of these attractions as they aren’t covered as much in local media.
For e.g places like Flight Experience, Ultimate Drive and iFLY Singapore – is there any Singaporean site where people can read up really informative reviews about them? Unfortunately not! We have worked with these companies and have done up extensive features, photography and videos of them to help promote these places to Singaporeans.
We hope to bridge the gap of knowledge with the locals and also be able to give tourist a more accurate perspective from a local’s point of view. After all, I have a firm belief that locals do know more about their country than foreigners.
Q: What financial support did you have to launch the business?
We are currently bootstrapped but I have accumulated a healthy amount of savings from my past (and current) work as a web developer. As I was using my own technical expertise, there was really not much “funding” required apart from a large amount of my own time which could have been used towards other “guaranteed” projects.
Q: Who validated the idea first – investors or customers?
In my case the investment came in the form of my own time and investment. As we are still in the early stages, I could probably make a better assessment in a few years. So the customers validated the idea first.
Many locals are thrilled to find such a website exists for Singaporeans. Businesses then noticed the traction we were getting and were keen to leverage on this exposure and support we had.
Q: What is the revenue model and strategy for profitability?
It works on an advertising model for now, with perhaps some sort of affiliate system being implemented later linked to ticket purchases or even restaurant reservations. There is a lot of potential partnerships we could have.
Q: What is the market opportunity? How scalable is this business?
We have already opened up a Malaysia portal and hit 13,000 reviews 6 months after our official launch. So we do intend to cover the whole of Asia. I have designed the site in such a way that it is very scalable and future portals can be launched within a week.
However, we place a huge emphasis on quality and so any expansion has to be carefully carried out. From recruiting talented seed writers, localising content and hiring the right managers / videographers / photographers – these will all come in their own time.
For now I see no point in “rushing it” for the sake of expansion and want to focus on building up our two starting portals up till they are moderately profitable by themselves before expansion.
Q: Competitive analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
S – The quality of our reviews and the lack of a local independent Singaporean tourism site. Other websites were caught deleting negative reviews because of the partnerships they have in the industry. Others accept negative reviews which are clear sabotage attempts by competitors. All these are big no-nos for any review site.
W – We aren’t backed by any large corporate so our growth is not accelerated. Though we are atm perusing funding so we can accelerate our growth.
O – We are looking into the whole of Asia. We hope to be the go to portal and resource for every consumer decision in the future. A bit ambitious but I guess it’s better to think big! 🙂
T – Other sites similar to us may decide to copy our review community model. I am actually really surprised there is no inkling of community on any review site at the moment. It is just disregarded. Anyway, I am not too worried about sites changing their approach as the big ones are pressured by their annual “review number growth” numbers and already have a large database of reviews that focuses on quantity and that would mean having to scrape or trim it.
Q: Who are the team members and advisors?
I currently run the site by myself, with several freelance writers and photographers.
Q: Why do you think you are the best people to make this vision happen?
I have a strong belief with every project I start on, that if you can create value for users, people are going to want to use your product. We believe at the moment we are able to offer more value than any other Singapore review site out there.
Because of our strong foundation, no matter what happens, we will still end up growing and be useful to people. To what magnitude, I am uncertain for now. My concern is with the acceleration of that growth. And that depends on opportunity, timing and funding.
Q: What’s the motivation behind doing this?
In the past I often ran into difficulty when searching for things in Singapore. For e.g which driving instructor to use, which contractor to hire for renovation, a reliable good air-con servicing company, a day care centre to send my children too, where to hold my wedding, where to take friends from overseas when they came visiting, etc. I had to spend hours trawling forums to get a decent indication. And still I would be unsure. I wanted there to be a structured and reliable way to find this information. Why do people trust forums for advice? Because they are essential a community of trusted members who’s opinion will be legitimate.
So I tried to make sense of this by providing a proper platform – allowing people to share information in a way its easily accessible, and making people lives easier by reducing their search time and costs. For any decision they had to make, they could simply hop on our site which would become a definitive resource, automatically sorted by aggregated ratings with quality reviews.
If we became an authoritative site, it will also in a way help companies to improve their services based on the feedback on our site if people left negative reviews. Therefore improving some industries and increasing competition for the benefit of the consumer.
Perhaps I’m thinking too far, but we already get overzealous marketing executives writing fake positive reviews to cover up the negative ones. Our review community makes these extremely easy to weed out and remove. We politely tell them to forward the feedback to the appropriate personal and invite them to respond to the negative review through the right channel, by leaving an owner reply. Regardless, we will never blacklist or publicly shame any company.
Our site is really just about highlighting the best for people so they make better decisions with happier outcomes and I hope we will one day be able to leave a mark on the world.
