Conceptualization
We conceptualized Urbandine in Sri Lanka. After about 7 to 9 months of iteration, we realized the Sri Lankan market didn't fit what we were building and the problems we were trying to solve, especially in terms of reaching a wider audience, and our ambition drove us to look for markets which we could potentially scale in.
We traveled to Singapore in May of 2018 and explored the market to see whether it would be a good fit for Urbandine. We met with restaurant owners and micro-VCs to understand the investment landscape, and we found a few similar companies had already raised their seed round of funding and were operational during our time there. We also realized that Singapore was a rather small but still a brilliant country to start in.
Both Bhagya, my business partner, and I consider ourselves global citizens. We've traveled extensively across the world with our families as well as individually. When we felt that Singapore was too small, we started exploring Europe because I had studied in the UK and Bhagya had also traveled extensively throughout Europe. We started researching the Netherlands, Germany and other countries that we could potentially enter with our immigration situation because, frankly, the Sri Lankan passport is pretty bad. So we had to make sure that we would be able to secure some form of immigration acceptance, and after doing some research we realized that the Netherlands startup visa was a good fit for us.
We were business partners and friends. And when we individually explored Europe, we realized that the Netherlands would be a good fit for what we were building. Because whenever we walked around in Amsterdam, and looked at restaurants we’d always see a “Help Wanted” sign that on the side of the entry door — this indicated to us that there was a labor problem in the Netherlands that needed addressing.
Specifically, we were looking to understand if there was a startup visa for the countries we wanted to enter because growing up in Sri Lanka and traveling as much as we did, it was always governed by visas. It’s so hard to travel because you need to get a visa for every single country. Even when I did, I managed to travel overland in Africa through 10 different countries from South Africa to Djibouti by Landcruiser. And even then, managing the visa process was so hard, but we were fortunate to get through it.
Finding A Facilitator
Before immigrating however, we needed to find a facilitator. The facilitator takes care of the paperwork and ensures that the founders and the startup are on the right track to setting up shop. They basically need to give a guarantee to the Immigration Department of the Netherlands that they’ve met this individual or this company and these founders are sound individuals who they can guarantee will try their best within a year to grow their startup. The facilitator also makes sure the founders are comfortable, have accommodation, are settled in financially and tax-wise, and make sure that they are incorporated in the Netherlands in terms of the company and in terms of their own personal holding companies. They're also advised but not required to help the company with their first hiring, or their first few hires as well as opening an office or finding an office where they can work out of.
Having the facilitator's support helped us move faster because they gave us access to a network. They helped us quickly incorporate and launch our business by taking care of legal affairs, tax affairs and made sure we did all the things right. The second primary benefit we gained from the facilitators network was with regards to growing our business — it was vital for sales as it helped us connect with the right people to start getting our products out in front of customers.
Working with Facilitators
I first went to the Netherlands in December 2018 and started meeting with facilitators. My goal was to find a facilitator who would facilitate our entry into the Netherlands as a startup led by myself and my co-founder. We met with a few and eventually got selected to StartUp bootcamp in Amsterdam for one of their e-commerce programs, however we turned them down due to the need to give up equity to an accelerator and an open offer from YES!Delft.
We were in a bit of an interesting situation. YES!Delft and the Hague Business Agency had co-facilitated our entry. YES!Delft provided the business acumen and the hand-holding necessary to come to The Netherlands and actually grow a startup. On the other hand, the Hague Business Agency just handled the entry side of things initially. The Hague Business Agency, facilitated our entry into the Hague market. And they did that with the help of YES!Delft, because when we joined, we got selected for the AI and Blockchain Validation Lab in February the previous year. So due to that, we managed to secure this startup visa facilitator, the Hague Business Agency, as their first startup to facilitate. And since then it's been great getting into the Netherlands and moving forward on the startup journey.
The Visa Process
We had to go to the Netherlands to meet with facilitators. There are other ways where you can apply for programs remotely and if you get accepted to the program, you can travel to the Netherlands and then get a startup visa. However, the thing is, coming from a developing country, it still takes time to get even a tourist or visitor's visa and there's a lot of red tape in the way.
Bhagya and I both have Sri Lankan passports, and the ranking of the Sri Lankan passport has been depreciating like crazy because a lot of Sri Lankan travel to other countries for asylum — they just wanted to get out of Sri Lanka because it was a part of a 30-year war and life was presented less opportunity for a lot of people.
Generally speaking, in order to go to the Netherlands, you should have a short-term visa, called the MVV. Have the short-term visa with you so that you can stay in the Netherlands for at least 3 months, and then you can switch from the short-term visa to an actual Startup visa. Then, basically, you can stay in the Netherlands for a year. And after that, you can switch from a Startup visa to a 2-year Self-Employment visa. And the facilitator makes that process fairly straightforward.
The facilitator, through that year of getting to know you, needs to guarantee that the startup has done what it's being requested to do or that they've done enough to move to a self-employment visa. Meaning that they would need to meet certain requirements for the facilitator to write a letter to the Immigration Department and state that the startup has been backed by them and that the startup founder, myself for instance, is eligible for the minimum number of points to get a self-employment visa. The point system for the self-employment visa isn't based solely on your performance in the prior year. Your other credentials are also factored in.
It wasn't too difficult, all things considered. The primary qualifier is just the fact that you are able to build an innovative startup that could potentially make a difference in the country. And if your startup is moving forward and getting investment, then it makes sense for that facilitator to finance the bridge from the startup visa to the self-employment visa.
Thoughts on the Process
From my point of view, being with a facilitator is going to help you for a year or even more, sort of like an incubator. And if you’re a legitimate startup founder, you will want to take some time to understand who is the best facilitator for your startup, whether it's for industry advice, or whether it has to do with location, or networking.
There's a lot of different factors and, in my opinion, a founder shouldn’t travel too much, but rather give the facilitator peace of mind with face-to-face interaction. Otherwise building your startup will be a hard thing to do. The good thing about the startup visa program is that the money you need to have for the first year, which is around 15,000 to 16,000 euros in the Netherlands, I believe, is minimum wage. And the amount of money that you need to prove that you have in your bank account doesn't necessarily need to be an account in the Netherlands. The money can be in Sri Lanka or whatever your country of origin is, and then you need to be able to transfer that money accordingly. But even just for proving purposes, the money can be in any other country. So, that's a good thing that the Dutch Immigration Authority allows.
Other than that, I believe it all comes down to your ambition. If I had thought because of my experience dealing with visas over the years that there's no chance I'm going to be able to come to the Netherlands on a startup visa, I would have never considered scaling Urbandine to Europe. It was my ambition which drove me to speak with different stakeholders to understand what the limitations are and then move forward and make it happen.
How we Found a Facilitator
So what I did was find a list of startup facilitators in the Netherlands through their enterprise agency, the RVO, website, which has a startup section on their website.
While the Netherlands is not a massive place, it has a large number of cities with facilitators throughout big cities like Amsterdam. I reached out to them by email and said, "Hey, we have a startup pitch to re-conceptualize. We are looking to move to the Netherlands. Is it possible to meet you?" So then, a startup scout took a video call with us while we were still in Sri Lanka. And the next stage was to potentially come and meet them in the Netherlands. So, we met with the ones who we had spoken with and scheduled meetings in the Netherlands. And from there it was basically the process of getting to know each other.
In terms of YES!Delft, we actually attended one of their info sessions. They have a process where you have to first go through a startup scout and then the startup scout invites you to an info session where you get to meet with other startups. It’s also an opportunity to join the rest of the startup community for Friday drinks. Next, you go through the startup visa process with them. But that also means you need to join a program like we did with the Validation Lab. Other than that, it was very straightforward and they supported us very well.
These days all the facilitator information is online. I was able to do everything while I was in Sri Lanka, in terms of conceptualization, but I still knew that we needed to try our best to get to the Netherlands. So I got to the Netherlands and met these different individuals.
Founder Background
I have a Master's of Science in Management from Cranfield, the key lessons that I've learned from my graduate studies that help me in my day-to-day life as a CEO and founder of this company were a lot of soft skills, which helped with confidence, managing people under pressure, working with teams, exploring and handling project management which really helped with conceptualizing, creating, and running a company.
But obviously that's just the initial part, then comes the next stage where you need to start growing and expanding. That's when things get really interesting. When it's dictated by the team itself and having a tight-knit family. It's like a very big family. And maybe now, because of COVID-19, things will change when it comes to office culture. But overall, for me, it was the conditions that gave me the ability to take things forward and grow stronger.
The Language Barrier
When you go to a different country as a founder, you need to know one thing: you need to be able to sell effectively on your own. No one else is going to sell for you. Not your family, not your friends, no one is going to be around. So if you can't sell effectively on your own, it's going to be very hard. Even if you're a technical founder, you need to be able to sell. It's just a must.
And then it gets trickier, because even though the Netherlands has one of the highest English as a second language speaking rates in the world, it’s still predominantly a Dutch-speaking country. You’re going to find language issues with certain types of people who you sell to or who you work with. And that’s something we took a year to learn and figure out because our founding team isn’t made up of Dutch-speaking individuals. So we rely a lot on our team to work with us and to communicate well with our customers, because many of our customers prefer speaking and engaging in Dutch.
If by chance someone had told us a year ago, "You know, it's going to be quite hard for you to sell because your customers are going to be speaking Dutch. They’re going to find it difficult to understand you," I would have tried my best to go to England or some other country for a startup visa. It was a game changer we had to learn the hard way.
Our facilitator from the Hague Business Agency, was able to come with us and introduce us to different restaurants and help us with our validation. So it was great to have this gentleman take time out of his day and take us to certain restaurants or beach clubs and allow us to speak to the owners. And to know that the problems we were trying to solve were at the top of the list of the problems the restauranteur was trying to solve was great for validation.
Product Development
We did a technology proof of concept in Sri Lanka. And then we moved to the Netherlands. It was us exploring a market as business individuals because we, both the founders, aren’t coders. We’re business guys rather than tech guys.
So that being said, we had to rely on a different team to build the product after we conceptualized the product. We helped with the design and architecture, the UI and UX and all that. But the main thing which needed to be done was to make sure we found the right market to sell the product in, and that's what we were working on. So even without a product, we were still going to restaurants to be validated. The solution was being validated by our meetings with restaurant owners and stakeholders, and different types of suppliers.
My business partner Bhagya has been working in the food tech space for six years. So he has extensive experience working with restaurants and building tech platforms for restaurants. Whilst working with his previous startup, he has reviewed over 350 restaurants in Asia. In general, we wanted to pursue the idea of contactless ordering and payments because we were fed up of waiting for waiters, and that's what sparked the idea.
The Pivot
But when we came to the Netherlands and started speaking to the restaurant owners, we realized that they didn't want us to get rid of their waiters; they've always liked the waiters. They said the waiters were a good part of the dining experience at these restaurants. So basically, we were able to understand that we needed to change our proposition from reducing costs through automation, with labor being one of the highest costs, and instead help to improve revenue. And that's where we pivoted towards focusing on drinks and snacks — selling high-margin items in order to increase revenue at these locations.
The Netherlands has a very strong beach culture. People would sit at beach beds, but they didn’t want to have to walk to the nearest restaurant or beach club to get a beer or some lunch. As people looked to simply relax by the beach, they just wanted to be able to get the food and drinks delivered to them. So we were able to figure out that this was the biggest problem in the beach bed market, and solve that over the summer of 2019 in the Hague.
Trade Shows
In the Netherlands, Horeca means house, hotels, restaurants and catering. That's the general term for hospitality here in Europe. Before we were able to handle merchant payments as restauranteurs were not comfortable doing business with an unknown party that they didn't trust, hence we started exploring different trade shows in the Netherlands to improve our brand image.
We started visiting them with the help of the facilitators. Because we were an interactive platform, we wanted to be able to interact with these attendees who would become our actual customers, i.e. the attendees of these trade shows are restaurant owners or waiters or managers. We wanted them to be able to order from the vendors of the trade show itself while attending. So you would have different lounge areas and then you would have the QR code in these lounge areas and an attendee could order items from the different vendors that were there. And waiters in the area would receive the order and then dispatch that order to the customer.
Horecava was a 4-day event with 70,000 people, and we officially launched Urbandine at Horecava in January 2020. We weren’t the official sponsors or anything like that, but we were able to provide automated ordering for attendees who were walking through and wanted to just relax and sit in the lounge area of the Innovation Lab of Horecava.
The Product
Urbandine is an in-restaurant or on-premise platform, which helps restaurants get back on their feet right now during COVID-19 because they need to maintain contactless engagement. Urbandine takes away the need for having a physical menu, having waiters handle orders, and having waiters handle payments, so that the waiters can actually focus more time on hospitality, which is what they want to do and what customers want the waiters to do. Behind the scenes, in the kitchen we also streamline the receiving of orders and manages that through tablets as well as printers. We are basically an add-on to the existing system of the restaurant itself.
Remember the beach delivery I mentioned earlier? It's not a delivery to a random place on the beach. Each beach bed would be its own ordering point with a QR code and some instructions. Then the waiters know where those individuals are because they know that the beach bed is #14, and beach bed #14 has ordered a set of two beers, for example.
So prior to the crisis, focus was on high-margin items, which the restaurants would then be able to make more profit on. For example, drinks and snacks are the high-margin items in the Netherlands. Restaurateurs have a saying that ‘drinks bring money and food takes money’. So that's why they were very interested in improving their ability to increase revenue through high-margin items or, frankly, to allow customers to order another round of beer without waiting for it. And now due to COVID-19 we've pivoted focus on the total menu and total automation of the restaurants themselves.
Parting Note
We're often asked how we immigrated all the way from Sri Lanka and started a company in the Netherlands. The catch is that people like us don't actively look and believe that it’s possible. Ambitious founders should understand it is very possible regardless of how difficult it might seem. It would be a game-changer for any potential founder, even during times like these to understand that they can make anything happen if they work hard, smart, and believe in themselves.
