The Software PRoducts Incubation Group (Spring.ph) in the Philippines has surpassed its goal of having 50 software startup teams this year for its LaunchPad program.
Spring.ph co-founder and head Arup Maity told DEALSTREETASIA that since Spring.ph was formed in August 2011 by the Philippine Software Industry Association (PSIA), it has accumulated a total of 56 startup product teams, seven of which were newly-absorbed over the weekend.
“Our objective has been to bring the startups to ‘product market fit’ and help with growth hacking so they either make enough money on their own or get funding from others in the market,” Arup said.
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“The whole growth hacking is a funnel, how do you generate, refine to make it fatter so you end up with conversion, retention, and referrals,” he said. “Some teams are purely digitial like commercial apps and their focus is to drive traffic to the site, but some who are into the B2B space involves direct selling.”
PSIA’s goal in launching Sring.ph is to help make the Philippines a center for software product creation, innovation, and commercialization.
Currently, Spring.ph has more than 15 software product startups in the market, and some of these are Orchestrack, Pickld, MyConcierge, Spaceal, iCPA, LeanAsset, PerxClub, MakeApp, Tarkie, RaketPH, 199Jobs, Klaseko, and Cogito.
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“We might not yet have Unicorns but there are lots of Cockroaches surviving and moving forward over the years. All this thanks to our partner from DOST ICTO (seedPH), AIM (Asia Institute of Management) and several sponsors like Microsoft,” Arup said.
The seven newly-absorbed startup teams are Aling Nena (online grocery delivery), UncoverBugs (crowd sourced software testing platform), Duette (activity-based double dating mobile app), Tralulu (growth hacker platform), Juan To Invest (first local equity crowdfunding site), Beep a Ride (mobile platform for car rental business), and EnglishBox (English language learning mobile app in a gamified format).
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However, as to its previous target to achieve a recurring revenue of $1 million for its startups in the market, Arup explained they have shifted gears realizing it to be too high since Spring.ph is not into funding and making the startups scale purely under them would be tough.
“We have changed and accepted that to be too high to achieve, so step one is to focus on making them a viable and scalable business ready for funding. Once that happens with funding it can scale to the million dollar ARR,” he said.
Spring.ph was first launched by PSIA in 2011 as Product Development Special Interest Group (PD/SIG) which later changed in 2013 to its present name. It is meant to help the local software development industry create and commercialize at least 10 globally-recognized software products in various categories.
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