WSO2 takes the reins to hatch new tech startups with Hatchery

By Hiyal Biyagamage

WSO2 recently launched ‘Hatchery’, its unique startup initiative that will nurture budding tech startups in Sri Lanka. 

The program introduces the concept of ‘CTO-as-a-Service’ where an in-house enterprise architect becomes a mentor (broadly, the Chief Technology Officer) for a startup and over a course of three months, he or she will be guiding the members of the startup on how to overcome their challenges by providing technical guidance and helping them to fuel their greatest ideas. 

WSO2 will be also providing its open source software so that startups could develop their product on top of their middleware stack.

Sixteen teams have been selected through a carefully-vetted selection process in October and all these teams gathered at WSO2 head office in Colombo last week to meet and greet their CTOs. 

A catch in life

Speaking to the audience, Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, Founder, CEO and Chief Architect at WSO2, spoke about knowing the importance of two concepts: alignment of interest and the skin in the game.

“When you are a startup, you need to keep this important principle in your mind: the concept of alignment of interest. Whenever somebody does something for you, you should always ask what is in it for me and what is in it for them. There is always a catch in life. There is no such thing called free lunch. People should always know what that catch is and understand whether the catch works for you.”  

“A lot of people will tell you to do revenue-shared marketing. What you have to understand is whether they are putting something genuine into what they do. That is the second piece of advice: skin in the game. If you are going to do something with someone, make sure that they also put something into it. If there is no contribution, if there is no risk that they are willing to take, there is no point of continuing what you have planned to do. If they have skin in the game – if you fall, it will hurt them too. That means they will work against falling. If the idea you are working on fails and if it has no cost to the other party, they have no reason to help you succeed either because there is no cost for failing,” said Weerawarana.

However, Weerawarana mentioned that the ‘catch’ of this initiative is the idea of using WSO2’s middleware stack to implement the solutions.

“The catch with WSO2 Hatchery programme is that we want you to use our stuff. We produce a bunch of software and they are open source. We are not trying to get money from you but still there is a catch which is we want you to build whatever your cool idea is, on top of our technology stack. Our vision is to become world’s best software company in the Middleware level. One of the ways to achieve that would be to try and get people who are developing new businesses and new technologies and encourage them to build those ideas on top of WSO2 technologies,” he said. 

WSO2 wishes to be very transparent and clear in seeing startups building their products. “We will genuinely help you to figure out what is the right way to build your solution. If the right way to build your solution is using PHP or Java, that is fine. At the same time where there is an appropriate need for technology that we produce, we want you to use it.  Our employees have volunteered to assist you; not just for one day but for an ongoing process of three months.”

Don’t sit on an idea

Weerawarana also shared a few stories about how he founded ThinkCube and WSO2 and starting Lanka Software Foundation to encourage Sri Lankans to develop open source business models. He mentioned that anyone could come up with an idea but what is important is to execute it, rather than sitting on it for a long time. 

“I know the challenges of building new business ventures quite well. My advice to people is think big of whatever you are trying to achieve, look for things that are very difficult to solve and be creative. You might look at WSO2 and say we are successful. The truth is we are nowhere near successful yet in the game we are trying to play and in the market we are trying to penetrate. We are still a tiny chunk of that. So we always have to imagine something we are not right now and aim for that.” 

“What differentiate a startup is that it is trying to change the world in some way or the other. It is trying to have an impact on the world in some deep and meaningful way. It is perfectly fine to improve something that affects a small part of the Sri Lankan population to improve their lives. The objective is to improve their lives, not to make some money. People who have been successful with startups in my view at least are not focused on making money. Money might come in or not but they have meaningful mission to accomplish through their startup,” Weerawarana concluded. 

What to learn from ‘Gappiya’

Sri Lankan YouTube sensation Tharindu Wijesekara, best known as Gappiya, also joined via Skype to speak to the audience.

“I never wanted to be a YouTuber but I always had the passion in filmmaking and graphics,” started Wijesekara. “I went to Australia in 2003 and after meeting my wife in Maitland, I had to move out from Sydney. When I went there, I could not get a job. Since I had so much free time, I thought of making a video. I did a video and shared it in Facebook. It got good attraction from users and they were requesting more. That is when I thought of becoming a YouTuber.”

Wijesekara said he was greatly influenced by another Sri Lankan YouTuber Jehan Ranasinghe (JehanR) and created his first YouTube video, taking some leaves out of his book. It was in English and the focus was solely international, not Sri Lankan.

“The comments I got were not the best. People kind of criticised the content for being too international and some people said I was trying to replicate what Jehan was doing. That is when I thought I should do my own videos with a unique style: a style that has my identity. The lesson I learnt was that you could always look at others and learn the basics but you should always strive to create something that is yours. Something which relates to yourself, something that shows who you are.”

“I researched my own life and tried to understand what my audience is. I realised that I could be more comfortable with my content if my audience was Sri Lankans. Then I started creating videos with a local flavour and constantly engaged with my local user base through various concepts of videos. People started to love Gappiya and his videos and the feeling was mutual for them,” he said.

According to him, it is important to understand the personality of the brand, when you are all set to develop a new product. “You don’t have look or sound professional. All you have to do is fine tune your personality and inject it into your product or service. Your brand should look consistent as well. It is not just colours or your logo but you need to really have your brand across all mediums and it should look like one person,” he said.

“I don’t have any secret mechanism to make videos go viral online. I don’t know how to create a campaign that would go viral but I do know how to believe in my product so much and believe in what I do, when everybody says it is going to be a stupid idea. You need to focus on your product and believe in it,” opined Wijesekara.

He also spoke about replying to critics and gave several tips on how he handled negative feedback and criticism strategically. 

“A lot of people have many things to tell you when you produce something, including negative comments. I handpicked the comments that I had to reply to and the rest I ignored. You need to figure out the comments you need to take as constructive criticism. They will help you to fill those gaps, brush out your product and plan your way forward. There will be stages in your startup journey that you would feel sort of let down by your users. I guess the way to come back strong again is to go back and remember why you did choose this path. In the early stages, it might look like your product is not going to work but never let go of that belief of yours,” said Wijesekara to the audience. 

Packaging a greater promise

Dilendra Wimalasekere, Co-Founder of Takas.lk, also shared some insights on raising funds and talked about the importance of maintaining a distinctive value for a product. Wimalasekere is also the founder of 24/7 Techies, a company that provides tech support with a global presence, and the co-founder of Takas.lk.

“Today, it is really hard to raise funds on an idea. From Silicon Valley to this part of the world, no one will really give you money for an idea. You really have to build your product or your service, put it out there and get some customers and prove your concept to them. In that environment, it is really important for you to understand the strategy behind your business,” Wimalasekere said.

He took 24/7 Techies’ story as an example to provide insights on how to develop the perfect strategy for your business. The company was born out Eureka Technology Partners, a managed services business company in Sri Lanka. It used to support 90% of its customers remotely. This level of service helped Wimalasekere to think out of the box and look at the opportunity of providing services remotely on a global scale.

“We set up 24/7 Techies to do remote tech support for consumers and small businesses in USA, UK, Australia and Canada. Before we started, we actually tried to understand who buys online tech support. What we found out that most of the people who buy these services are older people in the late ’50s and ’60s. We started talking to these people through various contacts and asked about their tech experience: what they liked about it and what they did not. What came up constantly was that tech support members who are very young have not been very patient with these people. They were billed by the hours and some techies have purposefully dragged sessions to bill them more.

“We took all these elements and created a new service to cater to this target audience. To start things out, we introduced an unlimited tech support package for a fixed price. We used culture as a strategy. We hired young Sri Lankan people and the common norm is that Sri Lankan youngsters are far more respectful to their elders, compared with other countries. We tapped into this particular element and all our training programmes were built around this concept. We packaged all these elements into a promise called an ‘Outstanding experience or your money back’. 

“From the time people call us, we thought through how things needed to be executed. So, we understood customers and understood their problems. Then we hired, trained and developed the service to address each of those problems and finally we looked at what are we going to measure that will show us our level of delivering services. We looked for keywords in testimonials we received to build an emotional connection between us and customers and brought Net Promoter Score (NPS) because it is loyalty score. And we never measured how quick a certain support session ended because we wanted our techies to take their time and provide great tech support,” Wimalasekere added.

Wimalasekere mentioned that when 24/7 Techies was initially formed, they used to charge $ 99 for unlimited support for a whole year whilst their competitors were charging $ 80 per hour. Today, they charge $ 189 per customer for unlimited support and competitors charge only $ 179 for unlimited service. 

“We are now considered as a premium support company in USA. Reviews from global publications like PC World and Top 10 Reviews have elevated us into a position to charge a premium. The result of that also has been 24/7 Techies has only raised two rounds of funding.  A lot of thought went in on how and what we are going to deliver and how to measure our competencies. We just kept improving that so it was very hard for other people to copy us,” he noted.

Like Wijesekara, Wimalasekere also stressed on the fact that entrepreneurs have to understand what is the unique value of their idea or product, which is going to add to the base of their customers.    

“You have to start thinking about it from today because the features, functionalities of those products and services, how you price and market them; all these are related to your strategy. If you then go to an investor, he or she would know that you have done your homework well. Even when we formed Takas.lk, so many players in the market had online portals. But what we clearly understood was that the differentiator for Takas was going to be the ability to have the largest selection of electronic products. That was our focus and that is what helped us to win in that market,” Wimalasekere said. 

WSO2 plans extended Hatchery to the global community as well. While a large part of the program will focus on sharing WSO2’s technical expertise, there will also be some knowledge sharing on how other activities are handled, such as marketing, sales, and operations. The 16 teams enlisted in the programme are: Mythesis, Deli Serve, CarMate, Express 418, Teesir, Cascadia Solutions, Insurance Solutions, TicTacToe, Ciyrus, Siplo, TradeHuts, Peerview, Goswapit, Unidel, ideaGeek and Analytics.lk.