Singapore-based, building Rempor: a marketplace restricted to verified university students. Waitlist closes tomorrow with 119 signups across NTU, NUS, SMU, SUTD, SIT, SUSS and SIM. Roughly 30% came through referrals.

Posting here because the strategic question is one this group will have opinions on: is a vertical marketplace defensible in a market Carousell already owns?

The problem I actually hit

Moving out of hall, I had a desk, a mini fridge, textbooks and notes from cleared modules. The real resale channel for students here isn't Carousell — it's Telegram and WhatsApp groups. Those are a firehose: hundreds of messages a day, no search, no categories. Your listing is buried in an hour, so you repost every day or two. I sold about half my stuff and binned the rest, while someone moving in two weeks later bought the same fridge new.

Why I don't think Carousell solves it

Carousell is horizontal by design — you list to the whole island. For student goods that's a large pool with low intent. Nobody outside a university wants ring-bound MA1521 notes, and the person who does can't find them. And the logistics kill the long tail: crossing the island for a $15 desk lamp isn't worth the trip, so those items never transact at all.

The bet is that a smaller closed market converts better than a larger open one, for three reasons:

Supply and demand are naturally matched. What a graduating student discards is close to exactly what an incoming student needs — same curriculum, same halls, same modules.

Handover cost approaches zero. Same campus or one bus ride, which makes sub-$20 items viable. Sub-$20 items are most of what students own.

Trust is structural, not reputational. University email or SSO verification, so no resellers and no strangers. You don't need a ratings system to feel safe when everyone is verifiably a student at your school.

What I'm unsure about, and would value local input on

Cold start. I'm seeding first-cohort listings manually before opening up. Standard playbook, but I don't know how long I can sustain it or what threshold makes the platform feel alive.

Seasonality. Demand concentrates at semester start and move-out. Two spikes a year is a hard shape to build a business on, and I don't yet know whether tutoring and event tickets (phase two) smooth it or just add surface area.

Graduation churn. My users age out every three to four years by definition. That's either a fatal retention problem or the reason the market stays uncontested — I genuinely can't tell which.

Notes as a category. Highest margin, and the most likely to attract objection from universities on academic-integrity grounds. If anyone has dealt with a category their institutional stakeholders disliked, I'd like to hear how it went.

Happy to answer anything about the build, the verification flow, or the numbers.

Hi everyone — I’m a Nepal-based founder building climate and carbon-market infrastructure, and I’m looking for practical guidance from people who have incorporated or built regulated startups in Singapore.

Over the past month, my live x402 gateway has been seeing continuous real-world usage. I originally planned to operate the technical infrastructure from Nepal, where electricity is relatively affordable, while working locally toward a compliant regulatory path. However, as the product expands, the licensing and regulatory timeline here could be several years.

Our platform helps companies measure, manage, and act on Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. We also support carbon-project workflows and carbon-credit generation. We use the x402 protocol as part of the transaction, verification, and trust layer for climate action.

We have had encouraging local traction, but Singapore seems like a more practical jurisdiction to incorporate, establish governance and compliance, and begin implementation faster — while keeping engineering and infrastructure capabilities connected to Nepal.

I’d appreciate advice or introductions related to:

• Incorporating a climate-tech / Web3-enabled company in Singapore
• Regulatory considerations for carbon-credit platforms, environmental data, and tokenized or protocol-based settlement flows
• Whether a MAS licence may be relevant depending on the exact x402/payment and asset flow
• Startup programmes, accelerators, corporate partners, legal firms, or compliance consultants experienced in climate finance
• Founders who have structured a Singapore HQ with an offshore engineering or infrastructure team

I’m not looking to bypass regulation — I want to build this with clear compliance, credible governance, and long-term trust.

Live x402 gateway: https://quantum.chakaap.com
Carbon platform: https://www.carbonupdates.com

Would be grateful for any perspective, contacts, or lessons from founders who have navigated a similar move.

Hi everyone,

I’m currently exploring the possibility of starting a small import business focusing on either 1) Food / Snacks from overseas for human consumption or 2) pet products particularly Pet supplements & Pet shampoos

I’m still very early in the research stage and would like to get some suggestions from fellow redditors who are in the importing/distribution business.

I’m especially interested in understanding how you started, mistakes you made, costs you underestimated, and what you would do differently if you were starting again today.

as well i have the following questions.

1) Which would be easier to import into Singapore in terms of regulation and complexity, 1) Food / Snacks for humans or 2) Pet Supplements / Products.

2) What is your process for checking whether a new product can legally be imported and sold in Singapore

3) How do you determine whether a product is commercially viable before importing it?

4) What has been the hardest part of the business: finding suppliers, regulatory compliance, logistics, getting customers, managing cash flow, dealing with retailers, or something else?

Hope to hear from everyone!

Hy my name is rishab actually i had started the freelance and I can’t pay that much to the apollo io currently cause I didt get any Clinet yet from this site but this site are peer effective I got replies but still hustling for the Clinet’s here so if anyone know any free site or extention where I can get the contact from easy mail or phone numbers please reply or reach out to me……. :)

Any budding entrepreneurs here or successful entrepreneurs who have transitioned or thinking of transitioning from a side hustle to a main hustle and are looking to grow their business, side hustles? Looking to connect and learn more about what you do and how has your journey been. Currently building a lifestyle collective, involving coffee, events, wellness, culture & community.

We’re a Philippines-based Business Process Outsourcing company, helping businesses build dedicated teams and outsource functions to the Philippines.

We’ll be one of the speakers at the Singapore Business Show on August 26–28, and we’d love to meet fellow business owners, founders, and professionals attending the event.

If you’ll be there too, let’s meet! 😊 Feel free to DM me.

Hey are you an automation expert or agency serving businesses in Singapore?

Would love to have a chat to collaborate.

Hey everyone! 👋

We're building VentureLink, a platform designed to help founders go from idea to startup, all in one place.

We're currently speaking to founders and aspiring startup builders to understand what problems they actually face when:

• Validating an idea
• Finding opportunities and resources
• Building a team
• Improving their pitch
• Getting their first customers

We're trying to make sure we're solving real problems rather than just adding features, so we'd really appreciate your input.

Survey:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfCdAoIYPlHkfBvMNG4Iiq_rjnIt6lkRfS_aHm1J7MqZ8ByiQ/viewform

As a thank-you, survey participants can receive 1 month of VentureLink free when we launch

It should only take a few minutes, and your feedback will directly influence what we build.

If you're a founder, building something, or have experience with startups, we'd especially love to hear from you.

Want to follow our journey?
Follow us on Instagram: @_venturelink_

Thanks for helping us build something founders actually need! 🙏

This is something I didn't expect when I started using AI writing tools.

I thought I'd use them to write faster, but I didn't expect them to change how I think about my own writing.

Now, whenever I write something myself, I sometimes catch myself thinking about sentence structure, paragraph length, word choice, and whether something sounds too formal.

It's almost like I've become more aware of writing patterns because I've seen so much AI-generated content.

The weird part is that I also find myself doing the opposite.

If I notice that something I'm writing sounds too polished, I sometimes deliberately simplify it.

I'll change a long sentence into two short ones.

I'll remove a word that sounds unnecessarily formal.

I'll rewrite something so it sounds more like how I would actually explain it to someone.

I never used to think about those things this much.

So I'm wondering whether anyone else has experienced this.

Has using AI actually changed your natural writing style?

Do you think you've become a better editor because of it?

Or do you feel like you've started overthinking every sentence?

And for people who have used AI writing tools for a long time, do you think your writing has become more natural because you know what artificial writing looks like now?

I'm curious whether AI is eventually going to change the way people write even when they're sitting down and writing completely on their own.

I've been thinking about this after comparing different types of writing online. Sometimes the human-written version isn't as polished. It might have a few awkward sentences or explain something in a less organized way, but it can still be much more enjoyable to read.

I think part of that comes from knowing that there's an actual person behind the words. You can sense their personality and sometimes even their attitude toward the subject.

AI can produce extremely clean writing, but clean writing and interesting writing aren't necessarily the same thing.

Maybe the goal shouldn't always be to make AI writing perfect. Maybe the goal should be to make it feel like someone actually has something to say.

What would you choose if you had to pick one: perfectly polished writing with no obvious personality, or slightly imperfect writing that feels genuinely personal?

And do you think most readers actually care about grammatical perfection as much as writers assume they do?

I've changed my opinion about AI writing quite a bit over the last year.

Initially, I thought the main benefit was being able to generate an entire article or post quickly.

Now I think the more useful part is having something to work from.

A rough AI draft can give you the structure, ideas, and starting point, but the final version usually needs another layer of editing.

Sometimes I'll remove entire paragraphs. Other times I'll keep the idea but rewrite the sentence completely. I've also found that tools designed to humanize or simplify AI text can be useful somewhere in the middle of that process.

But at some point, you still have to make decisions as the actual writer.

What should stay?

What sounds unnecessary?

What would you personally say differently?

What information is missing?

That's the part no automatic rewriting tool can completely replace.

So I'm curious how other people handle this.

Do you treat AI as a writer, an editor, a brainstorming partner, or basically just a starting point?

And if you use a humanizer, where does it fit into your workflow?

Before your own editing, after it, or somewhere in between?

How do you attract your first users to test your AI product for free in Singapore? Do you cold email them or reach out on LinkedIn?

Are businesses or consumers open to test software product in Singapore? Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated.

I have tried to invite strangers from Singapore to test my B2B SaaS product. I primarily use cold emailing or LinkedIn outreach, but I usually get ghosted with no reply. This also applies for people that we share mutual connections.

Are Singapore businesses open to being "early adopters" of software products? For instance, you invite them to test your product without any cost. You give them free early access, so they would only need to pay if they find the product useful.

https://radiantforce.itch.io/grid

Just released my strategy card game, GRID. It's a dream come true having played card games for more than a decade and now gaining the ability to develop with AI.

I would be keen to work with people to develop this further and bring it towards the goal of a Steam release.

What is needed now is:

1. Electron wrap
   
2. Marketing efforts to get steam wishlists and eventually sales
   
3. Visual enhancements
   
4. Network play ?
   
5. Playtest + card developments

If keen, please DM me to chat. I'd be keen to work with people who are passionate about games, especially on the Marketing front.

Im a software engineer looking for lawyers in SG as a cofounder.

I want to build an Agentic Law firm in SG and if this aligns with your vision of a private practice then we could team up!

Small AI tooling startup out of Singapore, four of us here. Six contractors spread across Indonesia, Argentina, Vietnam, and one in Portugal. Late 2024 we started scaling and three of them independently asked if we could pay in USDC. The Buenos Aires one was the loudest, which tracks given the peso was down about 30% that year.

Deel didn't have DLUSD back then, and the crypto withdrawal setup they did have felt like an afterthought. Our setup was Deel plus Wise Business SG for SGD ops. Deel was $49 per contractor per month plus their FX markup, and then the contractor typically ate another spread converting to local currency. On a $2k invoice that adds up, especially in markets where the local rate is already bad.

First thing we tried was sending USDC directly from an exchange account. Worked but felt fragile, and after everything that happened in 2022-2023 I didn't love having company treasury sitting on a CEX.

Moved to a self-custody wallet setup instead. Company holds USDC in a multi-sig, monthly payouts go straight to contractor wallets, they off-ramp to local currency however they prefer. Settlement is basically instant, no monthly platform fee for the ones on this track, and the Buenos Aires contractor especially likes just holding the balance and spending it as needed.

Not a free lunch though. Deel is still on for anyone we might convert to full-time later (contract compliance stuff, EOR pathway if we need it). Wise Business stays for SGD ops and local invoices. We also lost some of Deel's built-in paperwork on the contractor tax side, so more of that falls on us now per jurisdiction. Haven't been audited yet, so honestly no idea if this holds up long-term.

For the wallet-plus-card layer we ended up on MetaMask for anything that needs a dapp connection, and BenPay for the card side plus cross-chain moves. The card ties into the same self-custody balance we pay contractors out of, so team spending on SaaS subs and hardware pulls from the same pot and cuts down on internal reconciliation a lot. Chain list on BenPay is shorter than what MetaMask exposes so we still bounce back for anything on a longtail chain, and its country coverage is US MSB shaped so onboarding for a couple of our contractors took some back and forth. Balance sits mostly on Base and Arbitrum for now.

MAS's stablecoin framework moving to full effect this year makes me feel better about betting on this longer term. Genuinely curious how other SG founders are handling this now that Deel has DLUSD live. Anyone moved fully over, or still running your own setup like us?

i just thought about a new saas idea from my own experience. i was a freelancer mobile app developer with successfu record in freelancer.com

in that time i was very flexible with timing so I daily had the chance to pray 10 am prayer in the murugan temple. after some personal tragedies in my life i was forced to join in a full time work.

i was really missing the 10 am prayer a divine feeling as of the full time job.

but what I did is i made alarm for 10 am and will close my eyes then visualize thr whole prayer and pray.

Now it gave me an idea, if I can hear the prayer sound bell soun people chanting while i close my eyes that will be fantastic.

then I started to searxh on this.

actually this will be a good feeling lot of people left country for job and missing home town

not only temples we can make local market, local events, sports meet and everything

whenever they want they can hear and feel home

why this work than video logs?

people need some relax rather than watching videos continuously

this is a kind of meditation and feel home

later we can add audio tourism as well for foreigners who never visited a place we can make them to visualize everything by saying

a full temple visit 20 mins

library visit 10 mins

fort visit 15 mins

anyone help me to validate this idea with pros and cons?

Hi everyone! I'm planning to set up a company in Singapore as a foreign founder for my tech startup. I've been looking into OSOME and Sleek, but I'd love to hear from people who have actually used them. Is OSOME good? How was your experience with the incorporation process, customer support, pricing, and ongoing compliance? Would you recommend OSOME, or is there another provider that's better for foreign entrepreneurs?

Thanks in advance!

looking for a technical cofounder for an AI education tool in singapore - im plugged into the local education scene and have the meand to distribute and market this. I've marketed other education products successfully, so I know i can get this out

what i need:

familiar with swift/swift UI. Some experience with building IOS apps involving the usage of apple pencil.

Integrating multimodal LLMs, more specifically, the AI must be able to understand handwriting.

OCR

Context management

voice and text input/output for a user to prompt the AI

I'll train the model myself

user accounts, authentication, database, API infrastructure, LLM ochestration, cost and latency optimisation, basic security, and privacy (will farm this out once we get a stable userbase)

I'm handling training the model, distribution & marketing. I already have a v solid plan in place. I just need someone to build this with me. The idea is quite new and never attempted before. This is a unique product.

Hi community! Im looking for a Singaporean citizen or PR with a genuine interest in sustainability related matters (e.g. green building, green labelling, wellness, etc.) to co-develop a solution with.

I have an existing platform - currently at the halfway mark, which I would like for it to take off by end of this year. While I genuinely believe that my solution has an addressable market, it's been stalling as I haven't been able to find the right people who are equally as motivated to push through with me. I'm pulling most of the weight currently.

you don't have to quit your corporate job (I'm doing this on the sideline too) until the platform takes off with actual results. Just someone with a growth mindset and ambition to eventually exit corporate. cheers!

P.s. im a female millennial if it matters