<article>Young and driven, founders of the newly-launched Filipino crowdfunding startup <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.proteesproject.com">ProTEES Project</a> are scheduled to launch a franchise prototype platform overseas.</article>

Young and driven, founders of the newly-launched Filipino crowdfunding startup <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.proteesproject.com">ProTEES Project</a> are scheduled to launch a franchise prototype platform overseas.
The ProTEES Project is an online crowdfunding platform that helps a person or a group to jump-start a t-shirt fund raising campaign with no upfront cost.
ProTEES executive officer Napoleon Garcia, 25, founded the startup last year, and was later joined by the operations officer Alastair Narcisa, 25, and the 27-year-old information officer John Martin Figuracion. The group had pitched ProTEES to Launchpad, a program by tech incubator and accelerator <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.spring.ph">Spring.ph</a> where they get mentoring and do weekly meet-ups.
In an interaction with <a style="color: #000080;" href="http://www.dealstreetasia.com">DEALSTREETASIA</a>, Garcia gave a detailed account of the startup&#8217;s journey, the existing IT platform, business strategy, and target goals.
Garcia, who earlier worked  as a software developer, is now a full time executive officer for ProTEES. He served as the Philippine&#8217;s head of delegation in ASEAN Entrepreneurship Assembly 2014. Narcisa is a Registered Electrical Engineer and Registered Master Electrician while Figuracion is a licensed electronics and communications engineer and currently taking up Masters Degree in Information Technolgy.
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Excerpts of the interview: 
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What does ProTEES do and how did the idea came to life?
ProTEES Project is an online t-shirt crowdfunding platform that helps influencers, organisations and events to raise funds by selling t-shirts with no upfront cost. We came up with the idea when we had our traditional t-shirt printing business.
We realised that most of the organisation who got shirts printed were not able to sell them or did not get enough profit. Worse they don&#8217;t get their capital back at all.
How did your startup begin? 
We learned by doing. Me and my two co-founders have no business, marketing, or sales background, we are all engineers. We challenged ourselves by working on a limited resources. We focused on achieving product market fit.
Instead of perfecting our product, we launched early and learned to build through customer feedback and studying customer behavior. We make sure that we validate our assumptions in the market.
What is your company&#8217;s status right now? 
We are now in our seventh month of operations. I have been doing this full-time since January, our chief operations officer will join full time on April, and our chief technology officer will be full time by July. We have launched different projects already and sold more than a thousand crowd funded items.
How many investors does your company have? How do you plan to use the invested funds? 
We have been bootstrapping since day one. Initially, we put P5,000.00 fortnightly from our day-job salaries to our business funds until the third month. From there we came up with P90,000.00 capital. Since our money is rolling over, and there&#8217;s not much fund needed. We are already collecting enough profits since the third month of operations.
How much do you spend on research and development? 
Though we have a weekly activities for research, we don&#8217;t put much budget since we are running lean.
What are your future business plans?
We are planning to expand the business to Indonesia by August 2015. We will be testing our franchise prototype as there are people who are interested in investing in our company and willing to lend their resources both in Philippines and Indonesia. If all goes well, then we will start tapping other ASEAN countries to take advantage of ASEAN Integration.
How do you plan to attract investors?
We just want to build our customer base while building our product to solve our customer&#8217;s problems. We believe that if the investors see our customers happy (with our products), then they will be attracted to invest in our business expansion plans.
What are you most focused about now between raising funds and earning money? 
I think earning money is more important because it is the validation that the startup idea is giving value to the customers and is worthy of pursuing. Lean startup&#8217;s idea of minimum viable product, was very helpful in idea validation.
When we raise funds, we have to make sure that we have a solid plan, pipeline for a year or more. Just like what Spring.ph founder Arup Maity teaches: &#8220;You will only get funding when you achieve product-market fit.&#8221;
Also read: <a style="color: #ff0000;" href="http://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/philippines-a-haven-for-startups-arup-maity-1289/">Philippines gives more time to startups: Arup Maity </a>
How do you see ProTEES five to 10 years from now? 
Five years from now, our platform will be integrated across Asia. This means we can easily support any project in every country in Asia; and 10 years from now, we hope to be present in most continents of the world.
What do you expect of the startup space in the Philippines?
I expect more of product launches with the help of different organisations, meet-ups and events happening around the Philippines. These things really helped us build up our startup.
What&#8217;s the effective pitching strategy for you? 
The effective pitching is pointing out the problem that we can address rather than the features and solutions we want to build; because unless we have a problem worth solving, our product isn&#8217;t worth building.
What kind of attitude do you think a startup founder should have? 
One should be relentless. There are times when things don&#8217;t work out; but we have to make sure that we learn from it. Never be afraid of failing and moving forward.
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Young and driven, founders of the newly-launched Filipino crowdfunding startup ProTEES Project are scheduled to launch a franchise prototype platform overseas.



PH crowdfunding startup ProTEES to launch prototype in the overseas markets

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