Helping you run a successful startup

Read this before applying to Iterative, where we break down some of our questions in the application form.

Accelerators are often thought of as only being helpful with early stage companies but founders of seed stage companies have found our program helpful. Here's how.

It's a persistent question founders ask themselves - and the most difficult to answer.

How are founders in Southeast Asia defining product market fit?

Your top questions on validation, answered in videos.

How to validate your startup idea? We've compared the five common methods: what they are, how they compare to one another, and how you can use them.

Product market fit has no set definition - how are investors in Southeast Asia defining it?

We think it's instructive to share our rejection reasons - and hopefully it'll help founders better communicate why they are great founders with good ideas.

Our first AMA, where Hsu Ken answered the questions founders had on how to grow your startup.

In the world of startup fundraising, mistakes are costly. While a mistake can look different for different investors, there are common threads in the VC industry.

Yolanda Lee is the Co-Founder of Uncommon (Iterative Winter 2022), a Singapore-based private network for female leaders. Uncommon redefines professional development for female leaders through a powerful and trusted network of peers, group coaching, tailored masterclasses, 1:1 connections virtually and in person.

Alvin Ea is the Co-Founder of Haulio (Iterative Summer 2020), a Singapore-based container haulage platform, with the greater vision of connecting global trade to local first-mile transportation across ASEAN.

Liyen Tan is the Co-Founder of Hawkr (Iterative Summer 2021), a Malaysia-based food delivery marketplace for homemade food that is looking to reduce barriers to entry for anyone passionate about making a living through cooking and/or baking.

Charles Lee is the Co-Founder of Coderschool (Iterative Winter 2021), a Vietnam-based edtech startup that is training and educating a whole generation of coders and data scientists through its courses.

Lei Wong Lei is the Co-Founder of Ottodot (Iterative Winter 2022), a Singapore-based edtech startup that's creating schools for the metaverse. Before Ottodot, she was a Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Scholar and valedictorian. She also runs the Rice People Podcast.

In this episode, we have Yolanda Lee, co-founder of Uncommon. Uncommon is a private leadership network for the next generation of female leaders in the nation. Uncommon is a private leadership network for the next generation of female leaders in Asia. Uncommon provides a strong and uplifting network, a personalized development roadmap, tailored courses and workshops, and enriching speaker series, all in one membership.

Tim Grassin is a Co-Founder of TendoPay (Iterative S20), the largest online installment provider in the Philippine. On this episode, I talk to Tim about his earlier influences, switching from finance to entrepreneurship, how he built a multi-million dollar design agency, why he gave that up to start a startup in the Philippines and how they tested their initial idea by building a fake website that sold fake products to see if people would try their fake financing product.

Vibhas Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Outside Voice (Iterative S20), a no-code app builder for WhatsApp. On this episode, we talk about Vibhas (Vibes) childhood growing up in India, getting into and moving to Stanford but never actually attending Stanford, how he met his co-founder and came up with the idea of Outside Voice.

There are a number of ideas or trends we’re particularly interested in. We thought it'd be helpful to be public about them in the hopes that it would (1) encourage founders working on these ideas to apply and (2) help people get started on ideas we think are interesting.

We pick 10 startups, share them with over 200+ investors and connect you with the investors that are interested.

In the past 3 months, we've met with over 220 companies from all over Southeast Asia and are excited to announce our Winter 2021 batch.

We started a podcast! Most of the time, we will be interviewing people who start, operate, and invest in startups, on how they got started and what their experience is like. Once in a while, like in the first episode, we'll be giving practical advice around a specific topic.

We're excited to host open online office hours for startup founders every Friday throughout the month of October. Office hours are 20-minute sessions between you and one of our partners, where they try to help you with your startup as much as they can. This is very similar to the partner meetings we hold with companies during the batch.

In three short months we met with 200 founders from all over Southeast Asia and narrowed it down to the eight startups you see here. We've also included a short blurb on why we're thrilled to have them as a part of our program.

For a startup to be successful, it needs to be solving an important problem.

What do we look for when deciding to invest in startups?

The most important thing for a startup, and by extension the engineers at the startup, is iteration speed.

Here are the 3 questions I ask myself when trying to answer this question and what to do about it.

Fundraising is slow right now. My hunch is fundraising both will pick up in the second half of this year. Here's why.

Interestingly enough, 'product market fit' is a term often used by founders starting out but almost never by more experienced founders. Why?

A year ago, I wrote our first Request for Startups - and I'm revisiting the themes again to see what I got right or wrong.

A common question we get is: “Which is more important in fundraising: a strong story or strong traction?” But what is a strong story and strong traction — and why are they important?