BentoTile at the Singapore AI Youth Festival

BentoTile was just an idea at the back of my Apple note of SaaS ideas. This week, we launched it at an event with over 600 participants. We recently concluded the Singapore AI Youth Festival, where BentoTile was showcased as one of 10 emerging young startups in Singapore.

The SAIA A.I Festival brought together over 600 participants consisting of business leaders, working professionals and students, and we were given an opportunity to pitch and showcase in person with a booth and an opportunity to share on stage. Watching people try BentoTile at our booth for the first time, seeing where they got confused, and hearing what they wished it could do did more than what any friend or family member ever could, as it showed us exactly what to fix next.

As for the speech, I did not have a lot of practice beforehand as we only had 2 days to prepare for the event, so naturally I was nervous, but once I started explaining why we built BentoTile and who it is for, it started to flow naturally. We even made our first few sales, which was an encouraging milestone. Being young founders, we also attracted quite a bit of interest as many wondered why we were not in school (it was a Monday), which definitely aided our overall impact at the event.

What stuck with me most was how much of this came down to taking risks: putting BentoTile in public, pitching to strangers, and asking people to actually use (and pay for) something we built. It has been an amazing journey thus far with my 2 incredibly dedicated co-founders, Ryusei N. (Developer) and Benjamin Koh (Marketing and Growth), and we have a lot planned ahead for BentoTile. A big thank you to the Singapore AI Association for organising, Glax Low for the opportunity and meticulously orchestrating the entire event, and the many amazing people I had the privilege of connecting with, such as Joey Tang, and other great startups running adjacent to us.