For this month’s startup feature, we will be interviewing Charlotte, CEO of KUMO. KUMO recently won the Partner Start-Up Award 2015 and in this interview, we will be learning more about Charlotte and her experiences at KUMO.
Hi Charlotte, what’s your current role in KUMO, and how did your past experiences take you here?
CEO. Before KUMO we started Success Outsourcing to enable companies to succeed in Asia by establishing their set ups in Singapore, The Gateway to AsiaTM. We travelled half way across the world to Israel to educate startups about the advantages of getting started in a country with the infrastructure like Singapore. The journey has been a fulfilling and rewarding path. We have matured and grown a lot as an organization over a short period of time.
Which 3 words would describe you best?
Tenacious, resilient, enthusiastic
How did you come up with the idea? And what problem is KUMO trying to solve?
We identified a gap in the market that is neglected. KUMO is Bringing Enterprise to SMEsTM. We are giving companies the capabilities to operate efficiently without an IT department. We cut through the fat that weighs companies down and enable business owners to focus on running their business without worrying about hardware and IT personnel.
How long did KUMO take to finish development? (before the product could meet the market)
Since the inception of KUMO Enterprise Integration Platform (EIP), it took us 8 months to finish the development of KUMO 1.0. We launched the product and have achieved great successes so far with KUMO 1.0. As a proof of concept, KUMO has proved it has a market.
What are your preferred platforms/tools?
Our preferred platform is Microsoft Azure. We are hoping KUMO is the new sexy for Azure.
Have you gotten any interesting feedback from users of the app?
We have achieved great feedback from our users for KUMO. We are very impressed that our clients have been able to comprehend our vision behind KUMO and how much they appreciate the values it brings to the table.
How do you keep yourself motivated, especially during the low times?
We keep ourselves motivated, especially during the low times by knowing “WHY” we are doing what we are doing. Believing in the fact that KUMO is the cutting edge technology and the future gets us charging forward to our end goals.
If you could go back in time when you first started, what would you have done differently?
Nothing. We would have done nothing differently. Everything happened for a reason. It should happen in the order that it already has. We are very pleased with where we are and our progress as an organization.
What’s next for you?
We have been very fortunate to receive the great support from Microsoft BizSpark and BizSpark Residency Program. We are hoping to give back to the program in any ways we can. We are working diligently to get our existing clients to KUMO 2.0. KUMO 3.0 is in the pipeline. We would like to establish KUMO Developer Community for those who are ASP.NET developers using MVC in Singapore. Whether you are fresh graduates or experienced, as long as you would like to spend a couple of hours a day to explore new technologies or brush up your skills, we would like to welcome you to our community. Reach out to us to learn more details of our Developer Community.
What’s one advice you would give to budding entrepreneurs?
I’d like to give my advice through mining gold story.
“During the gold rush in the United States, a lot of people jumped on the wagon heading to the gold mines with ambitions to strike it rich. Many had sacrificed everything they had. They dug and they dug and they dug until they thought they could not dig anymore and gave up because they thought there was no gold. Little did they know they were inches away from a mountain of gold behind them. All they need to do was to scratch the surface a little bit more and they would have become rich beyond their means of comprehension.”
Moral of the story: Build up the courage and resilience to see things through.
How has it been like working with SMEs?
It has been a great experience to work with SMEs. We have been establishing a close knit relationship with our SME customer base. To them we are their family. To us they are our KUMO family members.
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