Duo realising their reel big ideas

The aspiring technopreneurs have left well-paying jobs to set up an online video platform to showcase quality short films from Asia, reports AARON LOWFOR many fresh graduates in Singapore, the smoothest path to a comfortable life would be to snag a high-paying job, preferably in a multi-national firm or bank and then start climbing the corporate ladder.迷你倉If they manage to do so and draw a five-figure monthly salary which would pay for a nice car, they would be thought of by many people as being successful.Not so for Derek Tan and Ho Jia Jian, former filmmakers and aspiring technopreneurs.Both left their comfortable, well-paying jobs in a telco here to pursue their dream of setting up, right here in Asia, a business to rival big video-streaming platforms like Vimeo and Hulu in the US.Mr Ho, 25, said: "Many guys I know have told me that they too have big ideas and want to go out to realise them."Yeah, sure they may be earning $6,000. But after five years, they are still stuck in the same place and haven't moved on."He and Mr Tan, 28, who both graduated with engineering degrees, had been product managers at StarHub, in charge of Internet TV products and digital marketing. While they say their jobs were fulfilling, they decided that they wanted to strike out on their own to fill what they saw was a niche in the film industry - an online video platform to showcase quality short films from the region.With the help of a $50,000 grant from the Action Community for Entrepreneurship and $20,000 of their own money, they launched their site, named Viddsee, early this year.They started with just 40 films on their site; today, it has 180. The number of visitors to the site has also gone up steadily to about 80,000 unique visitors, said Mr Ho.The company was named among the top 50 start-ups in Asia's largest tech conference Echelon 2013 in June - not bad for a company all of seven months old.Dressed in blue jeans, sneakers and Viddsee T-shirts and carrying iPhones and huge iMacs around in their backpacks, the pair fit the typical image of tech start-up owners.They did not start out wanting to create the next YouTube, or to create a site they could sell for millions of dollars.In fact, their desire to create a video platform to stream quality videos came from the lack of a platform to do this for the short films they had made during their undergraduate days; they had made three films together, the most recent one in 2009 - a 30-minute film called Cashless.They sent their movie to film festivals around the world and managed to get the film screened.Mr Tan said: "But then we sat down and thought, 'OK, what's next? How do we distribute the film and get people to watch it?' "The natural next step was to put it on YouTube and hope that it would be watched by the millions of eyeballs the site pulls in.But they realised that YouTube's one billion viewers had the pick of eight billion videos, and that their film was "simply being drowned out by the Gangnam parodies and the Harlem Shake videos", said Mr Ho.In their conversations with fellow filmmakers, they realised they were all in the same boat: After spending blood, sweat and tears on a film project and sending it for screenings, the film would simply be a DVD stashed away in a corner of their homes.In the middle of last year, they decided that they would fix what they saw as a problem with the the filmmini storageindustry's distribution model.Mr Tan said: "About 95 per cent of films don't go to mainstream cinemas. But there's so much quality in all these films. We wanted precisely to unearth good-quality films and show it to audiences."Mr Ho quit his job to focus on this full-time; at the time, Mr Tan, who left StarHub in 2011 to work in a Silicon Valley tech company called Cooliris, had returned to Singapore.It took the pair - friends who go back seven years - about two months to build the site up from scratch.Mr Ho said: "We are pragmatic. We have a grand vision of what the site could be, but want to start small - build something small and manageable, see how the market reacts, then come back and tweak and build it up."For instance, instead of launching the site immediately, they started a Facebook page and started putting up films they had collected from the network of makers of short films they knew. They invited friends and family to visit the page and spread the word. Soon, they noticed that even an older crowd was watching the videos they had put up.Mr Ho said: "So we thought, 'Hey, there is really something there if we have aunties coming in to watch'."The industry has also been receptive to their efforts, Mr Tan said, noting that Viddsee has scored partnerships with the Singapore Short Film Award and the National Museum."The industry folks have also been keen to listen to us and want to know how we can help each other. It's a real validation of our efforts and shows us that we are heading in the right direction," he added.What has helped their cause is that start-up acquisitions have been the rage in recent months.Just two weeks ago, Singapore start-up Viki, a social video platform, was acquired by Japanese e-commerce firm for a reported US$200 million; local SGCarmart was bought over by Singapore Press Holdings for some $60 million.But others have also started to warn about a bubble building up and are asking: How can a start-up generate revenue?Mr Ho said he does not believe that Viddsee will suffer the same fate as firms back in 2001, when the tech bubble burst, destroying billions in value, plunging the US into a recession."We didn't do this to jump on the bandwagon. We did this because we genuinely believe that there is a gap in the industry."Mr Tan said investors have been talking to them and that progress has been good, but did not go into the details of these talks.Eventually, they hope to build a site that would be about Asian films by Asians, and spawn a new way of delivering films that thousands of lesser-known filmmakers make every year to a general audience.Showing this reporter their office - a small room housed in an old bungalow along Prince George's Road, furnished with three bare tables and a whiteboard filled with scribbles - the duo are positive that fulfilling their vision is not just a pipe dream.Mr Tan said: "Many people talk about dreams, but it's also about being able to start working on them, even if the steps taken are very small. That's what we are doing here."HAVE an interesting story on an SME to share? 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