Can you tell us what roiquant does and who it serves?

Paul Lee:

Simply put, roiquant is a cloud-based business decision support system offering startup founders actionable insights to build strong competitive businesses and generate high return on investment (ROI).

In other words, our proprietary one-stop-shop solution serves our users through the journey from ideation to competitive market analysis to business modeling to prototyping to customer validation to smart fundraising to generating high ROI.

Our goal is to offer startup founders the hybrid solution of Bloomberg Terminal and Y Combinator.

 

Why do you think your target market is ready for your solutions right now?

Paul Lee: Firstly, technology adoption and digital innovation have become the essential drivers to wealth creation in successful businesses that led to the growth of startups worldwide.

Secondly, from our own research findings and observations, over 85% of companies worldwide do not survive up to 10 years. The business shutdown rate is staggeringly high.

Most companies failed to identify their problem-market fit and/or validate their solution before scaling their business in a highly saturated and competitive market that resulted in costly failure.

Thirdly, even though a lot of money is pouring into the venture capital markets worldwide but underrepresented founders (women and people of colour) still lack the access to such capital.

This is why our data-centric product offering is purposefully designed and powered by business failures data, company performance data, capital markets data, historical data, investors database, business tools, and simulators to help founders make prudent strategies, innovate creatively, reduce costly mistakes, and fundraise strategically.

 

Did the COVID-19 pandemic change the way your team works or performs at your workplace?

Paul Lee: In a way, yes. Before the global pandemic, our team was working in the office. During the pandemic, we all had no choice but to work from home. Post-pandemic, my co-founder and I decided to permanently adopt the hybrid work model by flexibly supporting a blend of in-office, work from home, and remote work arrangements to cope with the future of work that is happening at workplaces around the world.

Due to the nature of our work, the shift from working physically to working digitally was not an issue at all. As a team leader, I care more about the quality of work performance than where it’s performed.

As a result, our team’s general wellbeing and productivity improved, so to speak. 

On the other hand, we’re learning to cope with the new challenges of hybrid work, such as managing burnouts, unstable internet connection at homes, lack of in-person social interaction, mental health from room confinement, maintaining creativity under such conditions over the long run, and so on.

 

The Brunei-based roiquant team.

 

You mentioned the “future of work”, can you explain what it means and how you benefit from it at Regus?

Paul Lee: I’ll refer to Gartner’s definition, “The future of work describes changes in how work will get done over the next decade, influenced by technological, generational, and social shifts”.

On the upside, we all witnessed how the pandemic accelerated the adoption of technology, digital innovation, and interconnectedness. On the downside, it impacted the nature of work and workplace.

During the past two years of pandemic lockdowns, we downsized our office space (after we fulfilled our 2019 contract) to a virtual office (we renewed our 2020-2021 contracts) at Regus to save cost.

After the lockdown restrictions were lifted, we renewed our contract with Regus so we can pop into our small office whenever we want to enjoy stable internet, in-person discussions, social interaction, and so on.

Moreover, we have access to Regus’ global networks of business lounges, which I benefit from my business travels. In embracing the future of work, our hybrid work model allows me to remotely hire top talents globally next year, who could be working from anywhere or at a Regus serviced office if they want to.

 

Exciting! So what’s next for roiquant?

Paul Lee: We’re currently developing some new features such as, no-code builder, live collaboration, public APIs, and so on, which will be released over the next 3 to 4 months. These new product offerings will be powering our virtual startup competition in Q1 2023.

Speaking of which, we’re hosting a virtual pre-seed startup competition on the January 9 until March 31, 2023 to showcase top global entrepreneurial talents to our stakeholders by offering over USD $126,000 (total competition prize value) in equity-free cash and in-kind prizes to the top three winners. 

Our registration is now open until January 7, 2023, and we’d like to invite aspiring and pre-seed founders from all over the world to participate. 

Lastly, we were recently appointed as an official AWS Activate Provider. Therefore, all of our competition’s participants are also eligible to apply for USD $25,000 in AWS credits (valid for 2 years) to save their AWS billing costs. So click here to register now.

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