Last week, I spent time to meet with young entrepreneurs based in Seoul. My search for young entrepreneurs continues. I hope to find a good quality team to closely work with. My venture investment is largely co-related with my time and managerial effort, not only monetary injection, to bring business on. One thing I want to achieve in Korea is to move forward these young entrepreneurs faster than global competition and make meaningful mark in the market to maximize investment value.
As a matter of fact, it is not surprising to see 80% of dozen of business entrepreneurs that I met in the past week had app business plans. Regardless what they were trying to achieve with their core business plans, medium was largely drawn to the app. App is easily grab-able and acquainted to wider range of people these days, and also less-capital intensive to break the ground. It is like web entrepreneurs’ foray in their early “go to the web, young men” era. Google and Apple also bring on this app universe to its Internet browser and operating system platform to embrace more non-techie users to their eco system. Non-techie users can easily obtain value from using apps. They can download from singular app universe with no need to search for hours. People like free stuffs but the price of app is reasonable, not intrusive. So, people easily let go their payment transaction to buy what they want at a fraction of cost of what they used to pay for.
Problem of app business is still clear, though. As app business becomes like media business, it requires more wisdom to grab attention from general public. App entrepreneurs ought to compete for time usage of target users, not money. App business requires fairly intensive marketing and PR investment than usual. Soon after app is moving into the wing of long-tail app universe, it is a lot harder to revive it. App entrepreneur is concerned to immune his app to stay in the top of cloud and maintain steady seller status. Singular market place is great to position his product as long as app gains top rank for a formidable period. However, soon after it goes under water, business becomes sluggish. It is similar with other traditional publishing business like book or music label.
I will keep focusing on following areas of app innovation even if clear problems are well-addressed above. Like everyone loves this platform terminology, I am no different and I keep my eyes on following platforms for:
• mobile advertisement
• micro-payment and in-app purchasable business
• trade and transaction for goods and service, and
• social planner that cuts away borderline between your online and offline life to get more social
I hope I can come up with a team with more fundable and big picture business idea to make us more excited and beat the global market expectation. Small media business like a magazine publication is probably good for sponsors in a small scale as long as it is a profitable business. However, we talk about venture type growth that can draw J-curve graph and reaches three digit million revenue in 3-4 years, don’t we? One or two creative apps idea is not enough and savvy investors have no appetite for assorted chocolate box, either.
