Good morning. Happy Father’s Day! My parents started a hardware and construction supply business back in 1992. Ever since, they’ve been determining when to purchase supply for the goods they sell by eyeballing the shelves and warehouse. They never really know how much they have left or even where some products are stored — and this goes for thousands of products! Imagine how much money they are losing from wasting products and storage costs! Luckily, we came across a startup that may just have the answer, and they were featured today….

—Tobias Bautista

Startup Spotlight

🤩 Oboda: Pushing Filipino SMEs Forward (ft. 28-year old CEO Einer Lim)

Yes! oboda is, in fact, our favorite Filipino dish’s name backwards!

Einer is the CEO and Co-founder (1 of 4 founders) of Adobo Super Software Inc. (ASS for short) or oboda. They are a startup that aims to build a business suite of products for supply chain management, such as Inventory Management, Order Management, Purchase Orders, Accounting, and Analytics. Our clients mostly consist of wholesalers and distributors and a few retailers from different industries ranging from steel, poultry, alcoholic beverages, and transportation. They aim to provide a user-friendly end-to-end cloud-based system that can be used by Small-to-medium Enterprises all the way to Enterprise level companies.

↗ What problem does your startup solve?

We found an opportunity to serve SMEs, especially Filipino-Chinese run businesses. Majority of these businesses were started by parents or grandparents of the current generation of children. As 2nd or 3rd generation kids ourselves, we understand the struggles of older traditional businesses who are still on paper based operations or are using legacy 1990s software. We started with one of my Co-founder’s family business whose brother owns a buttons and ribbons business in Divisoria. They had trouble keeping track of the inventory count of the items in their warehouse since there were multiple floors, shelves and tens of thousands of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs). We built an inventory management system that helped them keep track of their items based on location. Soon after we were able to gain the trust of several other clients who became our early adopters and from there we expanded the product suite to cover other areas such as sales and purchasing.

📈 How are you working on growing the company?

From the beginning when we came together to build the product, we already decided that we were gonna bootstrap — no funding besides our own money. We all agreed there’s more value in gaining a meaningful network, advice, and experience from other market leaders or industry specialists rather than looking for funding. Our line of business requires being able to understand a variety of processes and problems across multiple industries and therefore we felt that we would benefit more from having the right networks and resources. As we gain more clients we have been hiring part-time developers and designers to help us manage the platform such as building new client requests and designing better user friendly interfaces. We also hired a few part-time Quality assurance testers to ensure our product remains stable as we continuously pump out new features.

Startup Community

🚀 No Better Time than Now

by Tobias Bautista

Do you wanna meet fellow startup founders or gain inspiration for your startup aspirations? You’re in luck! Google Cloud Philippines is hosting a two-day Startup Connect event on June 27 and 28.

The first day features Google Cloud, how startups can utilize Google’s Cloud infrastructure and Generative AI Capabilities to reduce cost and scale.

The second day is for those thinking green! If you’re a startup looking to fundraise, you’ll have the opportunity to speed date with 18 or more Venture Capitals (VCs), including Manila Angel Investors Network Inc. and Kickstart Ventures.

Plus, they will be sharing how you can unlock and apply for our Google Cloud for Startups Program that offers up to $200,000 USD (11.7 Million Pesos) for startups! (up to $350,000 USD or 20.5 Million Pesos for AI startups)

Games

🎯 Fun Brain Teasers

• Wordle: guess the random five letter word

• Connections: match four words of the same category

• Strands: word search but it depends on the category

Referral

Enjoying Araw Araw? Share the sunshine by sending out the link below!

Feedback

Got feedback/concerns with Araw Araw? Help us make your days brighter ☀ by sending us feedback through the form below!

Feedback form here: https://forms.gle/nZ8LnDmsLiTWrp3X9