Interview to Kuan Yan Tan, CEO & Co-founder at Jublia (Singapore)

Hello everybody.

Today I want to present you to Kuan Yan Tan, CEO & Co-founder at Jublia, a tech entrepreneur that I’ve heard of at the MWC13 in Barcelona (Spain) last month…

Could you present you to my readers please ?

Hi! I am Yan, a tech entrepreneur from sunny Singapore.

I am currently the CEO as well as the frontend developer for a startup called Jublia in Singapore.

On the sideline, I am a budding alpinist who has a passion for running ultra mountain marathons as well as climbing.

We want to know everything about Jublia…

At Jublia, we strive to “make meaningful hellos” at events.

We aim to build a truly useful networking ecosystem for an event and we have started by recently launching our first product, Jublia match.

It is a platform for event attendees, making it really easy for them to network meaningfully.

Attendees will be able to discover meaningful contacts through the listing of other attendees sorted by relevance on the platform and make the first contact with each other, leaving them with a highly curated and personalised list of contacts (minus the spam).

What’s your business model ? how are you going to earn money ?

We are keeping the business model under wraps now as we are still in the process of refining and fine-tuning it.

What I can say here is that instead of paying a quoted fee determined solely by an event size, it is far better if event organisers, exhibitors and attendees are able to pay only for what matters to making their event experience more meaningful as well as reducing their costs in the event itself.

What countries do you target and for what type of events ?

We are interested in assisting all events around the globe but am focusing on working with event organisers in Singapore and certain European countries for now.

We will love to assist events of any size regardless if they are meetups, conferences, tradeshows, exhibitions etc.

We deal with all forms of networking where the group size ranges from small to big. We aren’t too worried about the size, but more of if the platform can be made to fit a networking need of the event.

Is the project running now ? are you happy with it ?

Yes, we actually just did a soft launch on the week of the MWC13 and we already have a few event organisers that we are working with to implement Jublia match platform into their events both in locations around Europe and Singapore. I am definitely happy at this initial traction that we have garnered and am really excited to scale past this traction in the near future.

How was your participation at the MWC13 in Barcelona (Spain) ?

Jublia’s primary motivation in attending the MWC13 was to attend the University Mobile Challenge hosted by the Institute of Applied Innovation as a finalist. We did not win the challenge, but have had a good experience by networking with really great entrepreneurs from other Universities like University of Waterloo, Harvard, Oxford, UC Berkeley and more.

Of course MWC13 was the first time that we attended an Expo of such a massive scale and it was both an eye opener, as well as a motivation for us. We definitely want to work with events of such scale at Jublia.

It was also at MWC13 where we publicised our startup with a unique namecard concept. This was how we chanced upon Lou and his nifty blog here at Louesfera.com.

I saw people of your project in Singapore but also in Sweden : where are you exactly located ?

All three of us co-founders in the team actually met in Stockholm over a entrepreneurship programme from our home university, National University of Singapore (NUS), where we worked in Swedish startups over a one year period. At the same time we started off by organising matchNhack (http://matchNhack.com) events in both London and Stockholm.

It is a hackathon concept where startups and developers interact over a speed networking session which then transit into a hackathon where startups and developers work together to push out really cool projects.
We are still running this as a non-profit project on the sideline (latest event to be held in Singapore) and would love to franchise it in other locations around the world.

Jublia is currently incubated under NUS Enterprise and we are really thankful for their support.

How has begun the Jublia project ?

After organising the matchNhack events as well as attending a number of conferences and hackathons around Europe, we were in a unique position of understanding the pertinent pain points as an attendee as well as an organiser.

That leads to the birth of Jublia in Stockholm and we have since returned to Singapore to relentlessly execute on the project.

How do you see the market of Singapore comparing to the others ones ?

The Singapore market itself is a small one (We are only 710km^2 with only a 5 million population!). However, the country itself is geographically located at a unique position in Asia where many companies have actually setup their headquarters in this small country itself. Furthermore, other factors like financial support, government policies and public security are all very favorable to Small Medium Enterprises as well as MNCs.

It is simply said, a really good launchpad into the rest of Asia.

Technically on what is relying the Jublia project ?

The Jublia match platform is built as a web app that is usable both on mobile and desktop. On the front end, we are using technologies that allow us to make a truly responsive web application.
On the backend, we mainly run our algorithms that determines the relevance of other attendees and act as the ‘matchmaker’ between attendees.
My CTO is definitely in a better position to answer this question much better with a full stack technical perspective!

The future ?

In the near future we are striving to not only reach but work closely with as many event organisers as possible with Jublia match and gain further insights into the events industry while working towards building a truly useful networking ecosystem for events.Exciting times ahead!