Helping you run a successful startup

Having started 2 companies and personally invested in a few dozen more, I thought I was reasonably familiar with how startup investments were structured and what deal terms were common. That changed when I moved back to Southeast Asia. I started seeing deal terms I had never seen before or had mostly disappeared in San Francisco (SF).

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.

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.

Meet the 15 companies across Southeast Asia that we're excited about.

To grow the GDP of Southeast Asia, we need more startups. If we view startup creation as a funnel, there’s significant drop-off at the last step: people with startup ideas who don’t start a startup.

We’re thrilled to introduce Iterative’s Winter 2025 batch - meet all 21 of them in this article.

We're excited for you to meet our Summer 2024 batch, comprised of 15 amazing companies! This batch, we’ve raised the bar even higher, with the acceptance rate dropping to 1.8% from 2.7% in Winter 2024.

We're excited to announce the very first Iterative Founders Retreat. It’s open to all Iterative Founders from any batch. If you’re from one of the first 6 batches who didn’t get an in-person orientation, this is your chance.

Upcoming 2-week cohort-based program: Should You Start a Startup? Everything you need to know about starting a startup to make an informed decision. Sign up by 25 August 2024.

Introducing the Iterative Scout Program, a new initiative designed to streamline the process of discovering the next Iterative Founders by enabling existing Iterative Founders.

Apply to Iterative by Friday, 3 May to be eligible for Pre-Batch Office Hours with Hsu Ken. In that office hour, you'll work on what the 3 to 5 metrics to optimize for should be, set weekly targets for those metrics and prioritize a list of 2 to 3 things they should work on for the next few weeks.

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?