Talking about traction running a workshop at MaGIC Startup Academy

YBhg Tan Sri Dr. Mohd Irwan Serigar Abdullah entertaining welcome address
(note: notice the 'm' from MaGIC looks like the logo of Gmail? ;)

Proud to be among the awesome speakers of MaGIC Academy in Kuala Lumpur, to talk about TRACTION.

Some of the main messages I tried to convey are:

- Write down your "business plan" (not the 150 pages long one, but one which shows that you know what you are talking about). If it's not written, it does not exist. Or as Jeff Bezos says, "There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking."

- Know the metrics to follow along your journey, that will be the traction you can communicate. It will help you attract staff and investors. Remember, investors invest in lines, not in dots. Start not: decide on 5 KPIs which matter for your business.

- Make sure you're not wasting your time (we have a limited 30,000 days to live when we are born): do quick calculation of your Total Addressable Market to estimate the max impact of your project.

Additional resources:

- I strongly suggest MaGIC participants to go for Yongfook talk about growth hacking. I love going through his list of growth hacking strategies and adapting them to projects I'm looking at.

- Find investors for your venture on MAVA, the Map of Active VCs in Asia.


Looking for a job in some of the best startups based in Singapore: Product Managers, Engineers, Marketing, Data Analysts, Country Managers... contact me

Stress-free import of OCBC transactions into Xero

Before the feeds are available for live sync of Singapore's banks with Xero, we are left to do so manually.
Which can be made quite easy with a proper template. Read more on https://medium.com/@floriancornu/ocbc2xero-the-manual-but-easy-way-to-import-ocbc-transactions-into-xero-9ffa1e5c9546

How many Series A round will happen in the next 2-3 years?

Just published MAVA, a map of active VCs in Southeast Asia.

It allows entrepreneurs to filter VCs they should talk to based on the amount they are trying to raise.
It also highlights the available capital for investment... through which we find that $1bn is available for investment... Good time to do a startup in the region!

About MAVA https://medium.com/@floriancornu/introducing-mava-the-map-of-active-vcs-in-southeast-asia-f62ca856d307

10m iPhone 6 within 3 days

Now that the iPhone 6 is available for 3 days, Apple released the sales number... breaking a new record with 10 million phones sold!

Updating the chart started for the 24 hour sales,  we see that while the growth of sales is still present, it's is not as dramatic as it was for the iPhone 5S.

In $ terms, considering a price of $1,000 and up, it's more than $10 billion of revenues in just 3 days that Apple generated!

How are iPhone 6 first day sales comparing to previous iPhone? Fasten your seat belt...

Curious about the sales numbers Apple just released for iPhone 6, I scrolled through the previous year numbers and charted them.

Open for pre-orders on september 12th, it's 4 million iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus which were bought over 24 hours.

Going through previous launches shows that it's 2x better than iPhone 5 launch in 2012. 

iPhone 6 and 6 Plus sold 2x more within 24 hours than iPhone 5.
2013's iPhone 5S and 5C numbers are not available.

The ratio of 3 day sales over 24 hour sales from 2010 (2.8x) and 2012 (2.5x) leads to believe that 3 day sales will reach 10 to 11.2 million for the iPhone 6 family this year.

How much iPhone 6 and 6 Plus will be sold within 3 days? Probably around 10-11m.

How many iPhone will be sold during the last quarter of the year? It was 48 million in 2012 and 51 million in 2013, with the ratio of sales over Q4 divided by 3 days sales of the new iPhone dropping from 9.6 to 5.7. The range of iPhone 6 family sales would then be 57 to 97 million.

We will get the answer in January!

For those who prefer tables over charts, here are the numbers from Apple's press releases.

Apple is 50% more valuable than Exxon! That's $200bn

Looking at the biggest companies in the world, I noticed that Apple is $200bn bigger than Exxon, the second on the list.
$200bn... is like 1x IBM valuation .
It's also 3/4 of Apple' cash reserve, which is much bigger than Exxon's one:

Cash: $150bn for Apple, vs. $20bn for Exxon

Other operating metrics for reference:

Revenues: $170bn for Apple, vs. $420bn for Exxon
Net Income: $37bn for Apple, vs. $33bn for Exxon

The extract from our monthly monitoring:

Previous review of listed companies through Google Sheets:
- Some news in the Travel Industry in July: http://floriancornu.blogspot.fr/2014/08/two-exciting-deals-in-travel-industry.html
- Explaining how it's done: http://floriancornu.blogspot.fr/2014/04/get-part-of-your-industry-intelligence.html

This month we added Media monitoring, which brings us to 8 industries:
Travel
SaaS
Gaming
Social Media
Media
eCommerce
Mobile Advertising
Global200bn (Companies with a valuation of more than $200bn)
F&B

If you're interested to receive any of these, email industry_intelligence@wearecxo.com

Two exciting deals in the Travel industry and 8 Industries available

We recently sent our monthly monitoring of listed companies to our subscribers, which now includes a few main news related to the industries. For Travel for instance:

Tours & Packages market is ready for growth
TripAdvisor acquired Viator for US$200m early July; that's 18 months after their partnerships for TripAdvisor to distribute Viator products. 
Viator is 20 years old (1995), based in SF, and raised around $11m incl from Carlyle. Focus was US, UK and Australia; with 20,000 activities in 1,000 destinations in 160 countries 8m MAU and more than 1m total downloads of mobile Apps; 3,000 affiliates incl 17 OTA, 18 Hotels brands, 33 airlines; 700,000 email addresses; 80% bookable with 24h, 90% within 48h; 250 employees Other actors in the tours/packages area are GetYourGuide which raised $20m, Peek which raised $7m, and Flocations (disclaimer: I'm a founder of this one ;)
more on http://www.tnooz.com/article/viator-gets-acquired/

China's travel market is still wide open
Global leader Priceline will invest $500m in cTrip and the companies will access each others inventories.
more on http://www.tnooz.com/article/Priceline-to-invest-usd-500-million-in-Ctrip/

We also added F&B (Food & Beverages) monitoring too, which brings us to 8 industries:
Travel
SaaS
Gaming
Social Media
eCommerce
Mobile Advertising
Global200bn (Companies with a valuation of more than $200bn)
F&B

If you're interested to receive any of these, email industry_intelligence@wearecxo.com