Common Edge’s Open Startup initiative aims to bring external collaborators to make startup making more effective and profitable. It’s like having a curated crowd building a startup.
Why? Startups require diverse skills. And in Sri Lanka – where great people are doing their own thing – its often hard to find co-founders and engineers to commit full-time on building a startup. By opening up the startup-making process, it may be possible to build something amazing and profitable by having a small crowd working on it on a part-time or on-demand basis.
The Open Startup model can be applied to the following conditions:
- a rough prototype or digital product exists, but it has stalled.
- a great idea exists and there is a need energy and expertise to execute.
- an investor or a corporation has an idea and is willing to invest to make it happen.
Let’s make this a little more real.
Over the past two or so years, Common Edge has loosely validated and built a couple of platforms with the aim of them becoming stand-alone startups.
The Call – Do you want to get involved? We want to open these startups for others to get involved and help execute them. And there’s equity that can be shared (based on a vesting basis). Here’s a couple of open startup projects to kick things off.
Project 1: Everything Movies – www.movies.lk
We spoke to a lot of movie-goers and they wanted to a quick way to find out what was showing where and book it. We also knew that movie-goers wanted to read more about films and actors, and know what was coming soon.
Our aim was to create a super platform for booking movie tickets, and reading about movie culture and eventually for watching movies through. We have built a prototype and that needs expanding. We experimented with a news sub-domain in Sinhala (see http://news.movies.lk) and there was great feedback. And we have a highly brandable name – movies.lk.
For movies.lk to get to the next level it needs:
- leaders with management expertise and contacts to make movies.lk dominate the movie ticket booking sector.
- engineers who can improve the existing platform and add new geo-location features, and connect to existing booking APIs, etc…
- content and digital marketing team to drive a content strategy and ensure movies.lk is the go-to platform for anyone wanting to find out more about movies or make bookings.
Movies.lk is an open startup. We are happy to share equity (on a vested basis) for the right people who want to get involved. With the right combination of experts from the crowd, we can make movies.lk the go-to platform for everything movies.
Project 2: Everything Office Space – www.officespace.lk
We made an assumption that as Sri Lanka becomes more of a hub for global business, the need for office space will increase and that there would be a need for a one-stop platform that featured all types of office spaces, from co-working to whole floors and warehouses.
The aim with www.officespace.lk was to initially be a marketplace for buying or renting officespace, and then to evolve it to become a platform that could offer other services that businesses would require (from cleaning to stationary to insurance).
We also see a future in Sri Lanka where the paperless contracts and leases will become more common, and this is something the OfficeSpace platform could also feature.
Right now, www.officespace.lk is a marketplace – and phase one is probably to become the ‘ikman of officespaces’ – where it is the go-to platform for anyone who wants to look for officespaces and for landlords who want to offer spaces to businesses.
OfficeSpace will require a small team with individuals who have experience in property / real-estate to drive the phase one business model. As described above, the objective of phase one is to own the space. After that – monetising strategies can be put in place and further features and offerings can be implemented.
More information?
If you want to discuss either of the above two open startup projects, please send a message to Sam via WhatsApp on +94776965358 or email via sam@edge.lk