Beyond Water is a portable drink/music app that aim to provide a platform for musician to share music and make connections.
Beyond Water is one of the finalists in the HI Hub Incubator Program. Cheong Chun Li, founder, tells us more about the business.
What product or service does Beyond Water offer?
We are offering a beverage and music app as a two-in one product.
How did you come up with the idea for this business?
My co-founder, Bowie Ma, is a musician at The Juilliard School. She is a professional musician with a lot of experiences in the music industry. She noticed that there are problems within current music platforms where not many musicians are getting seen, and amateur musicians don’t get offered much at all. We hope to create a solution to solve this problem, by optimizing it with a beverage product. We think that beverage and music should be closely related; there is no product in the market like this, that offers drink and music at the same time, helping musicians to make connections and share their music in another way.
Why did you decide to participate in the HI Hub Incubator program?
I decided to participate in the HI Hub Incubator program because I want to use my creativity to produce a product by myself. I hope this product can benefit a certain group or people and solve a problem that exists in society.
What do you enjoy most about creating your own startup business?
I enjoy the whole process! It takes up a lot of time, but it has helped me learn more and know more about how to streamline all my ideas into one solution. Additionally, I am doing what I want to do; I never thought that my idea could turn into a project that might actually come true one day. I love when problems occur, because every time I solve them, they make our team and product get better.
What advice would you give to someone contemplating founding a startup?
I would say: do not be afraid to just start…you never know what might happen in the future. Do not eliminate any possibility for yourself.
What is something you learned through this process that you wish you’d known before you created your startup?
Generating an idea is challenging. Although we have an idea in mind, sometimes different ideas come up that might lead us in a different direction. Being organized with information and ideas is also challenging; sometimes my teammates and I have a really good conversation about our project, but the notes that we wrote down are not organized enough to understand what we wrote afterwards.
What does the future of your startup look like in an ideal world?
We hope that everyone will know about our app, and we hope to gain more than ten million users. Our aim is to encourage musicians from all around the world to upload their music on our platform so that people can listen to music from all different kinds of musicians and discover a broader variety of music.
Have you worked with any alumni or mentors on this project? If so, who and what was that experience like?
We have worked with four mentors so far. One in particular is the former Vice President of Avis Car Rental, who we felt inspired by because he pointed out our problems directly. He visualized our product development and told us what difficulties we might face and offered us advice. We were able to improve based off his comments.