The below story is from our series of startups spotted at RTM Forum in Taipei. One such startup is iMarts, which presents powerful cross-border solution for all businesses. It’s a management tool for marketplaces around the globe which guides businesses in cross-border e-marketing, trade show communication and inbound visitor marketing with your own audience research data.
How did it all start
We started in November 2018. It started out as a solution to ease language barrier for travellers and to increase the sales of local SMEs, partially referring to the glocalization trend, along the way we discover other unsolved issues such as SMEs not able to generate proper descriptions and translations, and the needs of understanding foreign habits and preferences … so gradually we have evolved into more of a total solution SAAS company.
What is Muriel Kuan’s background
It’s the second start-up for her, the first was Fungogo, it was also relevant to the travel industry, an one-stop-shop travel planning tool & platform. As a serial entrepreneur, she is skilled in product development and business strategy, her experience in IT industry made it possible for her to foresee market trends to manage production system & marketing tactics. By observing closely into the greater Asia market, her approach of mobile internet solution favors data mining leveraging Software Architecture, ensuring effective monitoring and stewardship of AI outcomes.
Beyond hotel menus, what use-cases do you see for your product?
We already developed 5 templates which covers pretty much all types of business involved with traveling including, Hotels / Shop (all products possible) / Restaurants(menu) / POI (for Attractions) / Business intro (sort of like business card).
Can you talk more about your customer base – Example how many customers, what are you learnings from data-points i.e. how customers are using it.
We now have around 300 stores around the world using our service, and every point varies, but overall woman are likely to scan more and adopt to our usage, they also have longer staying times on each pageview.
What challenges do you see in adoption of iMarts
For business owners we approach, the entry barrier for them is lacking computer science skills and using advanced tools for marketing, so we have been fixing our interface and flows and at the same time cutting back steps for automation, it is another way around if we work with business who has already using advanced tech to manage such as POS, ERP, CRM,…but we wanted our service to be helpful to all who wish to grow or to catch up with globalization, and also if we are focusing on building an ecosystem, then no business should be left out.
Are you funded or bootstrapped?
We are pretty confident that we can breakeven in the near future and we have been self-supporting so far, the point of being fund for us, is a way of finding the local resource and global expansion partners rather than the capital.
