Story of roiquant.com and advice for first-time founders

The affordable startup intelligence company Flipidea.co rebrands as roiquant.com to better position its brand in assisting founders in building strong competitive businesses and generating higher returns on investment.

"This is why our new brand name roiquant, a combination of two words “ROI and quant”, is derived to best align with our value proposition". (Paul Lee, co-founder & CEO of roiquant)

Paul Lee, co-founder & CEO of roiquant, talks about the origin of the brand name, what are the benefits of owning the domain roiquant.com, and what’s new and interesting in their future plans.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how roiquant got started?

With more than 80% of companies worldwide that would not survive up to 10 years, and after failing 4 business ventures in Beijing, I found a deep conviction in helping founders build strong competitive businesses generating a high return on investment.

Essentially, it was during my business postmortems and problem-market fit discovery process that I learned that there aren’t many startup intelligence powered by quant systems to serve founders and VCs at the early stage. In fact, almost none.

So I decided to build roiquant (roi-kwant) with my co-founder, who is also my wife, to offer affordable startup intelligence solutions to our customer segments.

How did you get the roiquant.com domain name? Was there an “aha” moment when you knew it is the one?

Yes, having a good brand name that is easy to pronounce, catchy, and associates with the business’ solutions offering is highly valuable.

When we were brainstorming for a suitable brand name, we kept referring back to our mission objectives and product differentiation for inspiration. We then realized that the brand name was staring back at us the whole time, which led us to combine the words ROI and quant.

Obviously, I searched online to check if roiquant.com was available and if anyone else is using the name. The moment I saw that the domain was available and the search engine was returning very limited results, I immediately purchased the domain.

What value do you think roiquant.com brings to the roiquant brand? Do you own any other domain names?

Definitely, it brings us tremendous value. Statistics showed that the .com is the number 1 domain extension and is “used as top-level domain by 53% of websites” on the entire Internet.

In fact, crazyegg published that “.com is still the best domain extension for most websites because it’s familiar and easy for people to remember due to its decades of trust under its belt”.

Moreover, roiquant is a created word where our unique keyword can easily appear on the first page of search engine results, compared to our old domain flipidea.co (redirected to roiquant.com), where some of our previous users would mistakenly visit flipidea.com.

What was the vision and purpose of your company when it first started, and how has roiquant evolved as a brand since?

Our vision to empower founders to innovate has not changed since our inception.

In building our startup intelligence, we need to gather lots of data to provide data-centric solutions and analytical insights for our customers. This is why we called ourselves Flipidea (flee-pee-dia) after we first launched our initial data products offering Data-as-a-Service.

Eventually, I decided to bundle our products together to offer a one-stop-shop solution since our customer journey begins from validating an intuitive idea to competitive market analysis to prototyping to smart fundraising to generating high ROI.

This is why we rebranded as roiquant to better identify ourselves with our solutions offering.

In your area of expertise, what are some of the bad brand naming recommendations you’ve heard?

One of the biggest debates is to use commonly used verbs to associate your solutions with your brand name. Personally, I think this is a tough balancing act of replacing the verb with your brand name in the business category or industry and optimizing the search engine results.

In this day and age, common keywords are becoming more expensive and saturated for search engine optimization and marketing.

If a catchy new word is coined as a brand name paired with great marketing strategies, it may offer valuable potential to cost-effectively dominate the search engine results with less competing keywords.

What do you do to make sure your marketing is effective?

As a business intelligence solution provider, we implement an evidence-based approach to our marketing strategies. Once we mapped out our buyer’s journey and designed our go-to-market strategy, we researched for the benchmarks to set our performance goals.

Apart from identifying our marketing KPIs, we deliberately craft our marketing narrative for our customer segments and target markets in order to clearly communicate our values, curate our resources, and build our global roiquant community.

What would your advice be to entrepreneurs who are just starting out?

Aspiring founders ought to invest their time in evidence-driven research to test their problem-market fit, analyze their competitive landscape, and speak with target users/customers for feedback before starting their business. This is to avoid competing in a highly saturated and competitive market that may result in costly failure.

Every aspiring founder also ought to grasp a good understanding on how to read financial statements and how business finance works. If first-time founders want to raise venture capital to kickstart their business, they need to understand the economics and mechanics of venture capital, and know that venture capital is not the only available financing solution in the market.

I also recommend that first-time founders plan their business exit strategy from the beginning in order to determine the kind of business they desire to build. In doing so, founders will be able to prudently design their fundraising strategy accordingly, should they decide to fundraise capital.

Imagine that having an exit strategy is as important as mapping a destination in a journey, regardless of a short or long one. With a clear end goal, founders can plan and prepare for an optimal journey. That said, the exit strategy formed at the early stage might change over the course of time, which is normal.

However, in the absence of an exit strategy, founders will then be unable to determine the kind of business they want to build and so lack clarity in their fundraising strategy. Imagine starting a journey without a destination, only to figure out when and where to stop along the way.

What is next for roiquant?

In our latest product updates, we announced that we are planning our first virtual preseed startup competition (powered by our roiquant solutions) in the Q4 2022, and we will be sharing more information in the coming month.

With our equity-free prize money, we aim to groom world-class founders by turning their ambitious dreams into impactful realities that make the world a better place and attract real potential preseed or seed investment from our partnering investors.

Additionally, we are preparing to fundraise our first seed investment from institutional investors in the coming months. So we look forward to engaging and building relationships with investors who find what we do aligned with their investment thesis.

Last thing, if some of our readers have more questions, where can they reach you online?

I can be reached at Twitter, Discord, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Our team also engages with our global roiquant community on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. For those who prefer email, can write to us as well.

About roiquant
roiquant's (roi-kwant) affordable decision support system offers founders actionable insights to reduce risk of business failure and build business defensibility. When founders want to build valuable and successful businesses, but don’t have sufficient knowledge and resources, roiquant solutions help founders gain competitive edge, so they can make data-informed decisions to innovate and generate high return on investment.

For more information about roiquant’s award-winning solutions, visit www.roiquant.com and join roiquant community on Discord.

Disclaimer: Any information, data and content on our business intelligence platform, web applications or websites are for general information use only. The information and analyses presented on our web applications and websites do not constitute any legal, business, investment or tax advice. Even though certain information are cited from third-party sources while believed to be reliable, roiquant has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for any given situation. References to any securities or charts or graphs and all materials provided in connection with roiquant’s web applications or websites are provided strictly on “AS IS” basis without any representations or warranties, express or implied, which should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, recommendations, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others.

Our proprietary data retrieval systems scan the Internet to automatically aggregate public information from news articles, websites, press releases, regulatory filings, and so on. Roiquant’s idea checker, tools, simulations, intelligence and algorithmic systems are powered by artificial intelligence and advanced analytics using our own proprietary data and synergised public data. Roiquant does not warrant the completeness or accuracy of data provided, so you would need to independently verify the information. Nevertheless, we encourage you to check the accuracy of our information before its use. We also gently advise that you obtain sufficient knowledge, market understanding, professional advice and experience to make your own evaluation of the merits and risks of any actions with the information.

Last edited on 3 November 2022. Originally interviewed and published by SmartBranding.