Four New Startups Launch at iWeekend Beijing

If you love startups, you should love iWeekend. The event brings together entrepreneurs who team up around an idea and then work like crazy to build a prototype within 52 hours. I attended the closing ceremony for the April 15-17 iWeekend Beijing, where four new startups were released to the world.

Before introducing the four, I’ll quote a few words by Stephen Wang, former co-founder of Rotten Tomatoes, current co-founder of AlivenotDead, and iWeekend mentor, who exhorted the budding entrepreneurs:

Running a startup is not a part-time job, not a full-time job, it’s a full-life job. Ideas are 10%. Blood and sweat is 90%. You all have great ideas, now go out there and get the other 90%.

Ideas and launches are sexy, but most of the real work comes afterwards. Execution, iteration, execution, iteration, execution. iWeekend is probably better measured by the learning experience it provides than the startups it launches. At least the ‘winning’ entrepreneur had the right idea: “Hopefully there’ll be no real blood, but definitely sweat!”

1) SportsBetNet: Bets for Bragging Rights

SportsBetNet solves a problem Chinese entrepreneur Benjamin Ba (霸强) encountered after studying abroad at Michigan State, a big-time US sports school. How do fervent sports fans keep up social bets when geographically dispersed?

It is NOT a gamble-for-money site, but rather to bet for bragging rights (and thus avoids many legal complications). SportsBetNet connects to social networks like Facebook and Renren, so allows users to face off against their friends over who will win the NBA Championship. Winner gets bragging rights. The target is casual male gamblers at universities.

To me it’s still unclear that there’s much cross-border US-China action here, but it could also launch independently in each market. The revenue model is to place sports (or gambling) ads next to the content. Another potential moneymaker would be to offer premium information or analysis services for bettors. Congrats to SportsBetNet for winning the iWeekend award for “Best Startup” via audience vote.

2) iShiYou (爱室友): Roommate Dating

I love startups where the genesis is solving a problem that the founders themselves face. This is the case with iShiYou: one founder commuted 3.5 hours because he loved his roommates, another got free by teaching English, and another moved out because the roommates couldn’t get along.

So how do you find awesome roommates and avoid lemons? Right now the process is a lousy user experience via classified listing sites like Ganji, 58.com, or The Beijinger (for expats)–I know, I went through it to find my shared place in Beijing’s Wudaokou district. And Wudaokou is in fact the very student-laden, heavy-turnover area where iShiyou intends to launch.

iShiYou will connect to your favorite social network to pull your profile and match you with others who are also looking for roommates. The site is targeted at young Chinese looking to save money and have a blast living together with friends, instead of with strangers (or worse, adversaries). iShiYou’s revenue model is still under consideration (moving services, household furnishing advertising?), but one thing’s for sure: it address a major pain point for the founders and I.

3) Shafama (沙发吗): The Chinese Couchsurfing

www.shafama.com

At the Guangzhou games, a few young people welcomed visitors at the train station with signs, “Guangzhou welcomes you, crash at my place for free.” The story was picked up by the press and couchsurfing.com（沙发客）became known in China.

Now Shafama (沙发吗) aims to make the Chinese version. Similar to iShiYou, it’s about both saving money and making friends with likeminded individuals. Couchsurfing provides a free couch (or even bed) and a friendly host in a foreign city. The presenters reported that Couchsurfing has 2.6 million users, 3 million “coaches surfed,” and 99.7% positive comments.

The social experience is so important to some users that they’d prefer it to five-star hotel. Shafama will connect with the hipster social network Douban.com to build profiles and seed the initial audience.

4) Toureet: Centralize Your Travel Plans

www.toureet.com

Toureet centralizes all your travel plans from disparate websites, somewhat similar to TripIt in the US, so that you have one easily accessible itinerary. It’s targeted at the booming demographic of Chinese traveling abroad independently. (As an aside The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has a wonderful article about the “tour group” travel abroad experience common for many Chinese).

But it also acts as a social platform and information source. Share your travel plans with others, view your friends’ journeys, or choose from easy pre-created 3, 4, or 5-day suggested itineraries for famous cities like “Luoma” (Rome).

The obvious monetization method is lead generation on flight, hotel, and tour booking, as well as LBS-based “local recommendations.” Need a Chinese restaurant in Rome? Toureet has you covered.

Conclusion

Finally, as a word of advice to future participants, it struck me that three questions that came up again and again from the audience:

1. How will this make money?
2. Will you survive when this is inevitably copied by one of the big players (Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Renren, etc.)?
3. Will your users understand this? Can you make it simpler?

This was the second iWeekend, but if you missed it fear not, there’ll be another one in November. Sponsors included Zhen Fund, SNDA, P1.cn, Java User Group, and ChinaNetCloud.