How a XR hardware startup raised S$100K building immersive experiences

Who are you and what business did you start?

I'm a tech nerd turned business lead. I almost need challenges to feel like my life is going somewhere, hence I was pretty sure I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I love learning and I read a lot, I especially love absorbing counter-intuitive insights that reshape how I see the world.

Seamless was formed around a simple idea. Gaming made an entire generation physically unfit- today we have the technology to change this. What if gaming was just as fun, but healthier? That's what we want to build eventually. Our hardware is the enabler in making these experiences possible, but the core goal we strive for is to generate health benefits with social and interactive gaming.

What's your backstory?

This was a mix of two things- I personally love sports as I enjoy them, but I need to really force myself to work out. Based on what I see, this is common- even though people know they need to work out, and even want to, it becomes a chore for many. Why not fix this motivation problem with gamification?

The technology we had developed was well suited for this, repurposed from the original rehabilitation application it was designed for.

What has taken you from 0 to 100?

I think we're still waiting on this to be honest! I would not say we have perfect product market fit yet by any means. But a couple of highlights so far are definitely getting our first LOI (thanks to our CC!) and getting the unconditional funding offer from GRIP. But we don't intend to rest on these laurels just yet!

What led you to specialise in VR gaming and fitness gamification?

We were initially looking at the consumer space with a completely different product- a VR glove intend to make input more intuitive. But based on customer interviews (Thank you The Mom Test), we realised the pain for VR gamers was a lack of immersion and not input. They wanted feedback! We had actuator tech ready, and it just so happened we could redeploy it. We hacked together a prototype in two months, just before we pitched (pivoted hard mid March, with the pitch in June)

Obviously, the price points they we looking at meant that B2C to start of with would not have been much of a profitable business hence we decided to go B2B2C.

Take us through the process of ideating on the product, developing it, and focusing on the B2B2C and subsequently B2C market.

B2B2C enables us to do two things- 1) Develop and iterate on the product with consumer feedback and 2) Create awareness about the existence of our product without marketing overheads

The B2C strategy involves developing our own software (game) and market ecosystem and monetizing it, driven by the revenue of the B2B sales and fundraising to scale. We will need to grow our team to build this vision for sure, so we pushed this down the timeline.

What are your marketing strategies?

Currently focused on direct sales. We have considered using influencer marketing and Kickstarter as potential channels when we attempt to go B2C

What is one underrated thing that other founders in the Web3 space should start doing/using?

I think it is to understand that the Web3 community is small and that mainstream adoption will only happen when products have web3 elements integrated into them without people noticing. The value has to be in the offering itself, the blockchain is just a technology that enables these applications that were not possible before. Sorare is a project I follow who have done this incredibly well.

What were the biggest challenges you faced and how have you overcome them?

Product-Market fit for sure. Still working on it. Sometimes we do wonder if we are too early, and whether we should repurpose our tech to one of our backup ideas. We'll see ;)

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

We both love Notion! I use it for personal knowledge management as well as for our team hub. We both started using it after reading Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte.

Slack is super useful for comms, especially with integrations.

We are pulling most things into Notion now as there are a tonne of integrations available.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Currently looking to raise, mostly via grants. 100k is not a lot for a hardware startup which needs to also develop firmware to have any usable integrations. We are looking for a key hire- a software dev that can cover this for us.