https://welcome.splashup.co/
Entrepreneurial journey told by two students
Story written by Lingyun Joanna Wang
“My name is Nathalie Rafeh, I am the co-founder and CEO of a B2B company Splashup. It is a personalized product discovery platform that provides retailers with a powerful way to find the right customer with the right product at the right time and gives low-cost brand awareness so as to ultimately increase online retailers businesses conversion rates in order to help them increase sales. To me, entrepreneurship is just amazing, because it’s the perfect place for people to bring their visions and something that they strongly believe into reality, which I think other avenues will not allow you to have the flexibility to do so as freely as possible. This is also my intention of being an entrepreneur a sit allows me to really inspire other people along the way and bring them on my journey, which I think, is definitely a privilege. Although entrepreneurs are risk takers and it is a combination of risk, creativity, problem solving and autonomy, which sounds a little bit scary, but it’s super fun and exciting at the same time. My entrepreneurship begins while I was a uni student and morphed over the years into technology, growth management, consulting and business ownership. The reason why my business partner and I established Splashupis because we recognized that E- commerce industry is changing rapidly, faster than ever, and artificial intelligence is definitely the leader that changing the nature of online businesses in the most powerful way. In particular, we also realized that the nature of e-commerce industry is advertisement incentive, this means that every online businesses who want to get visibility always has to pay for advertising all the time, which is not really fair on businesses especially for small lor new startup online businesses because they’re not competing based on merit, they’re competing based on who has more money to spend and invest. Therefore we wanted to help both our customers (online retail businesses) by providing them with equal visibility online and our users which are the shoppers by make their shopping experience more efficient. As a startup, there are still long way to go, with the funding from Commonwealth Bank, it will definitely bring our business model to a next level. Our short term business goal at the moment is to ship the product in this quarter and then in Q12022, we’re planning to corporate with some larger retailers in different industries.”
Story written by Kaiyang Xu
“I’ve always just been really drawn to helping people, uncovering solutions for different problems, and really being that support system, or part of the creative process of bringing a solution to life,” Nathalie Rafeh, co-founder and CEO of Splashup says. “I think that entrepreneurship is a perfect combination of risk, creativity, problem solving, and economy, things that I personally resonate with. I decided to take this path, and I’m on it for the long haul. It’s a privilege, its high risk and its very scary, but at the same time every day is fun. Entrepreneurship is just beautiful, because it’s the perfect place to bring something to life that you believe in strongly. Other avenues will not allow you to have the flexibility to soar freely. My goal is to inspire other people along the way and bring them on my journey. Initially, when we started, we wanted to help small businesses have visibility online, and we realised that for everyone to get visibility, they have to pay for advertising all the time. That’s not really fair on businesses, because they’re not competing based on merit, they’re competing based on who has more money to spend. At Splashup, we wanted to create a platform that provides equal visibility to everyone, while really giving people this interactive way to find things without having to go and search for them all the time. Important key characteristics for being an entrepreneur include adaptability and resourcefulness. Over time we started talking to users and retailers, and we realised that there’s a much more interesting way to turbocharge the consumer experience on top of ecommerce websites. We provide a user experience that is very engaging and very intuitive for their shoppers, to ultimately help them convert consumers to a sale using session-based recommendations, and a UX-driven recommendation that’s powered by AI. The biggest learning, or maybe the biggest advice I can give you is to sign up to anything and everything. If you’re scared, figure it out later, because these conversations you may really open up doors for you in very interesting ways. You may not always have the right answers, and you need to be okay with knowing that you’re wrong; you have to you have to cut your losses. For an entrepreneur, getting out of your comfort zone is very important.”