Hi, I am Jacky Yap.

I am currently the senior writer at e27, one of the main tech blog covering technology and startup news around Asia. e27 runs one of Asia’s leading technology conference called Echelon, and is backed by B Dash Ventures (Japan), Ardent Capital (Thailand), Pinehurst Advisory (Taiwan), Dan Neary (Singapore), and 8Capita (Singapore).

Editorial

I joined the company back in August 2011. In 2012, I wrote a total of 472 posts for e27, generating about 32% of e27′s 2012 total page views. The total page views of e27 in 2012 also grew more than 200% since 2011. On top of that, 8 of 10 of e27′s 2012 most read articles were written by me, with the other two authored by guest writers. I cover startup news around Asia, particularly, Singapore, Australia, Taiwan, Thailand, and Malaysia.

Dave McClure, founding partner of 500 Startups also dropped a comment on an article I wrote for e27, showing his nod of approval on some of the facts I wrote about FoodSpotting’s exit.

Read the full post here: Foodspotting’s US$10M exit: Is it attractive? What does it mean for other players?

Products

I am also the product manager for e27′s Startupkit. I crafted the whole product single handedly. This is what I did in 2 months:

• Created the overall product vision + branding
• Mocked up the UI of Version 1.0 + finetuning UX (ongoing) and customer funnels
• Single handedly pitched and secured the partnership of more than 30 partners, including Facebook, Shutterstock, Zendesk, 99designs, Freelancer, Airbnb, WP Engine, Vsee, Zendesk, Microsoft Bizsparks, as well as coworking spaces around in Southeast Asia.
• Set up pricing strategy
• Strategized publicity/marketing outreach and media partnership
• Generated revenue for e27
• Customer acquisition + customer feedbacks
• Launched the product exactly 2 months since the initial idea inception.

See live website here and version 1.0 here.

Community Management

Other than that, I also run e27′s monthly Founders Drinks, a free community event for e27 to connect with the community and our partners. Each event saw an average of 100 attendees attending the event. I curate and craft the content for Founders Drinks, as well as handles publicity of our events along with my colleagues. Here are some of the events I handled:

• January 2013: January Founders Drinks: Revisiting 2012, Exploring 2013 [content curation, securing panel of speakers, publicity of event, worked with sponsors] – Sold out, 120 attendees.
• February 2013: Inside the minds of CTOs [content curation, securing speakers, panel moderation, publicity of event, worked with sponsors] – Sold out, 90 attendees
• March 2013: March Founders Drinks: Building an e-commerce empire, Soldgers style [Content curation, securing speakers, panel moderation, publicity of event] – Sold out, 90 attendees. See: Feedback on moderation
• April 2013: 21 growth hacking tips [content curation, securing speaker, emcee, publicity of event] – Sold out, 85 attendees. Generated event revenue.

Others

Some of my other involvements in the Singapore startup scene include:

1. Cofounder of Lunchsparks (closed down due to low margins + founding team’s other commitments. Received 2 seed funding offers.)
2. Startupquote.sg (closed down due to difficulty in scaling and it was only a side project). See screenshot here.
3. Startup Weekend Singapore 2012 (was the coorganizer of a 140 pax Startup Weekend. I was in charge of mentor relations, media relations, some logistics. The paid event was oversubscribed, huge success, and spawned off Singapore based Carousell.) See screenshot here.
4. N-House (I was the pioneer resident assistant, tasked to lead 100 residents during their stay in Singapore’s first entrepreneurial themed dorm. I pioneered the weekly Wicked Wednesday session where we invited speakers to come and speak to the residents of N-House. N-House was featured on Bloomberg too).
5. iLead Silicon Valley Overseas Study Trip 2012. (Was the facilitator for the NUS iLead programme. Brought 19 entrepreneurial students to Silicon Valley for a study trip in December 2012. I was in charge of deciding which companies the students visit in the 2 weeks trip. I arranged company visits to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Kiip, Evernote, 500 Startups, Zendesk, Meetings.io, Coursera, Pair (now Couple), as well as 20+ other companies.)
6. Judged at Start-Up Dynamo, a lean startup and growth hacking workshop by Start-up at Singapore, Singapore’s largest business case competition.

- At 500 Startups, iLead December 2012

- Startup Weekend Singapore March 2012

I’m always interested in opportunities and new projects. I like to think that I am strong in strategizing, getting things started, keeping everyone on track, user experience, content curation, community management, and a bit of everything else. I always have time to listen and find out about cool and new things, so feel free to email me at jackyyapp [at] gmail [dot] com.

You can also find me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.