[Executive Edge] An idea and a dream

Ezra Ferraz

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

Entrepreneur Valenice Balace shares how she, her sister and a friend started online dating site Peekawoo

When you speak to Valenice Balace, she does not strike you as a typical CEO in the Philippines. Balace is warm and friendly, and she punctuates most of her remarks with a gentle laugh. I was not surprised to find out later on that she cooks for growing number of employees on an almost daily basis, nor that she is an avid do-it-yourselfer who sells her crafts and creations at local fairs.

Her demeanor is perhaps rooted in the company that she leads. Peekawoo, a portfolio company of Kickstart, is a part of the new wave of tech companies that seeks to revitalize technopreneurship in the Philippines.

Balace and her company seem to be excelling at just that, having recently surpassed 15,000 users. That’s a small stadium of users from all over the world, including Cambodia, Indonesia, and the United States, all eager to meet like-minded people, through the convenient web interface and application. Peekawoo earns when a user asks out another user with their Globe credits or buys stickers for them.

The story behind Peekawoo

With this kind of traction, it’s easy to forget that Peekawoo began as any company does: with an idea and a dream. In the case of Peekawoo, it began with Valenice Balace. In August of 2012, the then 25-year-old entrepreneur got the idea of a dating site with the dream of making it the premiere one in the Philippines and a competitive one in the global marketplace.

Balace and her best friends were single at the time and found the traditional options for dating lacking. They would go out to popular nightspots, such as Skye, as well as try out special-interest organizations, such as Junior Chamber International. These proved inefficient for meeting and getting to know new people, much less potential partners.

After trying out the clubbing and club scene, Balace and her friends realized they wanted to go on “legitimate dates.” They tried Match.com as well as other dating sites, but these, too, proved fruitless. The users on there would chat with them briefly and then suddenly make a bold move, such as invite themselves over to their place.

Balace pondered, “Why did dating have to be so hard?” In her view, you should be able to meet new people, get to know them, and if there seems to be no potential, you should be able to move on. After all, young professionals, like her – she was a project manager for websites and applications – were busy.

Balace wanted to bridge the extremes of real-world dating and online dating. Dating for people like her ought to be low-pressure, as is the case with meeting people in groups or in bars, and efficient, as is the case with meeting people through dating websites. The startup that eventually came to be known as Peekawoo sought to achieve this middle ground.

In Balace’s words: “I wanted to create a fun, friendly, and wholesome environment where the more traditional crowd can go in search of that ‘spark.’” Balace followed up on this ideal with a skeletal website, which you could say itself sparked. The fifty to eighty beta users she invited from her immediate social circle all raved about the site.

The early challenges

Valenice Balace, CEO of Peekawoo, a portfolio company of Kickstart

Of course, having some friends praise your beta site is quite different from having thousands of people using it to meet complete strangers. This would present an especially daunting task because her target demographic – single millennials aged 19 to 29 who wanted to meet new people – grew up with the Internet. In other words, they would be unforgiving of a website that was not up to snuff.

To get to the fully functional site that it is now, Balace and her co-founding team – she was soon joined by her younger sister, Belle Balace, as well as Mara Ang – had to overcome many of the challenges startups typically face. And it’s important to pause here to recognize that, yes, her executive team began and continues to consist of all women, which comes with it, its own set of unique challenges.

One of the earliest issues related to funding. Balace initially self-funded the project out of her own monthly paycheck. She said, “This was really a commitment. I was at the age where I was earning enough and I had to decide to either invest or to save. I chose invest, of course, but it was not that easy.”

Part of the problem was that Balace felt that much of her money was going to waste. With a developer charging her upwards of 60k and a designer charging her upwards of 40k, you would expect efficient work. But it took them more than six months to get the first version of the site up and running, spurring Balace to wonder whether she should keep up with the piling costs or just stop.

Luckily, she soon got funded by Kickstart, but the challenges did not end there. She first had to make the difficult decision to quit her full-time job and pursue Peekawoo full-time. This was not easy, given that she loved her job and that it represented a path into a secure, well-paid future. Peekawoo, on the other hand, was at this point still more or less a dream on a piece of paper.

With the support of Kickstart, she took the leap into entrepreneurship. She said, “I decided to build something for myself while I was young. I didn’t know exactly how to do it, but the possibilities seemed compelling. This began my sleepless nights thinking of my company, our employees, their futures, our users, their wants, and the endless trial-and-error it takes to figure these things out.”

Despite these stresses, Balace still makes it a point to encourage other young Filipinos to consider the path of entrepreneurship, such as when she drops by her alma mater – De La Salle – College of Saint Benilde – to speak to students. This is one of her most passionate advocacies, given that she hails from a family of entrepreneurs – no one in her family holds a single corporate job.

The future

If the story of Balace and Peekawoo can tell us anything, it’s that there is no magic moment when everything in your company just gels. As an entrepreneur in a startup, even one backed by an incubator like Globe and getting significant traction in the form of new users, you are always facing new challenges, and sometimes, even old ones.

For example, Balace and her team continued to have a hard time finding the right technical talent for Peekawoo. They went through several developers, and each time one didn’t work out, Balace had to make the difficult decision to fire them. Even though they weren’t producing results, Balace said that “it was the hardest thing that I had to do.”

Even the smallest detail can present its own unique set of challenges. The Peekawoo landing page, for instance, has undergone five major overhauls in as many months. The changes were spurred on by the data that Balace pours over – she wants to use it to create the landing page that will most effectively convert visitors to users.

By the end of May 2014, Balace aims to have 100,000 users, as well as launch their iPhone application. To many, these may sound like lofty goals, but Balace has the same disposition as all the other successful other entrepreneurs I’ve met in the Philippines. As surely as obstacles will come, Balace will just as surely be there to overcome them, inspired as she is by the infinitely fruitful wellspring of an idea and a dream. – Rappler.com


Rappler business columnist Ezra Ferraz graduated from UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California, where he taught writing for 3 years. He now consults full-time for educational companies in the United States. He brings you Philippine business leaders, their insights, and their secrets via Executive Edge. Follow him on Twitter: @EzraFerraz



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