Startup Weekend Shanghai, My Top Startups

I had my own choices of top startups from last Sunday’s event–and they were completely different from the judges’ choices. When I look at a startup, my key question is: does it solve a user’s personal need?

In China, startups are now often so hype that they overlook the fundamentals, like what are your customers’ needs? How will repeat business be grown? Are there any existing substitutes and how will you compete against them? Using the word “startup” doesn’t mean you aren’t a business: you need to be profitable and operate in a business environment.

Top Choice: MedHome

MedHome comes from a team of doctors exploring a very well-defined niche market: finding trusted medical care for expats.

Living in a foreign country, it can be painful to access proper medical treatments when there are language barriers and even possibly cultural misunderstandings.

MedHome is a solution leveraging technology for you to be connected with trusted doctors where ever you are, you can send photos of symptoms, blood sample reports, chat or even Facetime with your doctor to diagnose and advise on possible treatments.

To me this is a practical that doesn’t ride on the hype of ‘breakthrough innovations’ or massive user base. It is simply a tool for very person living in a foreign country.

It’s not a clone, and the operation would actually require considerable professional backgrounds, i.e. doctors. So the entry barrier is considerably higher than a typical startup.

Second Choice: Smart CV

At some time in their lives, every person faces the challenge of creating a convincing CV. And for the HR managers it’s sure a painful process to read through CVs that come in all different formats, shapes, and sizes.

I once had a product manager complaining to me as to why college students send him CVs in PDF format. It took me a while understand why he was complaining: I finally figured out he didn’t have Adobe PDF reader installed on his computer at the time.

Smart CV offers attractive automated CV generation tools that can potentially provide easy access and viewing options. After talking with co-founder Lukasz Muzyka, I saw tremendous potential in this product helping million of college students graduating in China every year.

By design, Smart CV can offer standardized layouts of information and since it’s digital, users can potentially filter directly to the information they are interested in. Not to mention the value of an extensive database of million of user professional backgrounds.

However, there is the threat of it being cloned, or outcompeted by existing recruitment sites like Zhaopin.com or 51Jobs.

Other noteworthy startups from the event:

(Links are to Slideshare presentations of the teams’ final showcase)

Huamao (花猫) – a social event manager, similar to Jihua.fm (计划FM) who opened for registration last week.

Micro Media – a social business management platform.

Comedy.INC – sharing of funny videos to existing social networks.

Meet@Table – voice search based location service of finding restaurants and bars.

Mustr – social recruitment site aimed for startups to find talents, so targets users are mostly from tech industries.

SPOTTING – FAKES, GIRLS, DOGS – sites that resembled Food Spotting for these 3 categories.

Luxury Club – SNS that’s aimed for users to show-off their luxury products, in concept very close to P1.

Start Running (起跑) – collaborative mobile gym App, where users had to encourage each other exercise more.

Quick Rent – mobile location base App for finding apartments up for rent.

Window Shopping – 3D online mall, a virtual reality environment for shopping.