Shake to Win: How Serial Entrepreneur Emily Cheung is Using Technology to Connect Cultures around the World
“I am a vivid traveller, I have travelled to over 52 countries and 220 cities, and I love the cultural diversity globally.” Today’s woman dreamer, Hong Kong based serial entrepreneur Emily Cheung, is on a mission to use technology for good. She is the founder of Shake to Win, a travel technology platform connecting authentic places and cultural experiences around the world. Most recently, she is also the co-founder of Appreciator.io, an experiential platform collaborating with art institutions and brands for heritage preservation, through NFT creation, digital art, immersive experiences and more. A creator at heart, Emily reflects on her journey in starting multiple ventures, balancing it all, and shares her top 10 tips for every female entrepreneur. She writes, “Don't be afraid of failure; failure is where you can rise again with your innovation.” We are excited to share her story on Women Who Win!
1. Tell us your story. You are passionate about technology and using "tech for good". What inspired your interest in technology, and what have you learned on your journey as a woman in tech?
Hello everyone, this is Emily Cheung from Hong Kong, a serial entrepreneur focused on Artech and travel tech for more than eight years. I co-founded a creative digital agency www.createcdigital.com, found a travel tech startup www.shaketowin.net and recently co-founded a web3 Artech focus startup, www.appreciator.io. I always believe in tech for good and should leave no one behind. A good technology platform should lower the barrier for everyone to participate in the growing digital economy driven by the young Millenials and Gen-Z. Technology has been changing daily, and I am glad to be part of the transformation and innovation force in the world. Our mission is to connect global businesses in art, travel and tech to embrace the changes and innovate to build a sustainable revenue model faster, more affordable and more fun. SGDs are always crucial in my mind. I am glad that apart from doing business with our global partners, we partner with over ten universities across Europe and Latam to facilitate understanding of the digital transformation process via our cultural ambassador program. We are the finalist in the UNWTO Rural tourism tech competition in 2021. During my woman in tech entrepreneurial journey, I learned that staying humble, embracing the cultural difference among teams, always doing things with gratitude and love, and starting with your passion is crucial to making things happen. You may encounter millions of downtime moments, believe you can always help others to succeed and never give up your faith are essential for me.
2. Tell us more about your journey as the founder of Shake to Win, which is facilitating cultural connectivity. What inspired you to launch the venture? What was the need you saw? How do you aim to innovate on how we preserve culture and heritage?
As many people know from my previous media interview, I am a vivid traveller, I have travelled to over 52 countries and 220 cities, and I love the cultural diversity globally. I always have been keen on connecting culture since I was a teenager. Shake to Win started over coffee with my two technical programmers from Shanghai in 2017. They asked why they couldn't find the places I visited while travelling. And why there were no Chinese stickers on the window spots that could help them better understand the story behind the store rather than just providing basic information by using Wechat to scan the QR code on the stickers.
Then I said, why don't we create one? Immediately we built the MVP (a SaaS eForm for local vendors to input information with their languages & an H5 mini-program on WeChat for Chinese users (255B USD Outbound tourism market size) to use and started pitching the businesses we wanted to focus on helping, which are :
Museums, art and cultural institutions or spots
local family-run businesses for generations and local people-run businesses with lifestyle and culture, e.g. cafes, tattoo shops etc.
Sustainable tourism activities (e.g. collecting trash via diving)
In 3 weeks, we finished the prototype, and I started sending emails to the places I had visited before (I recorded some of them). Then no reply, and then I started cold-calling and made a research list of the target museums and vendors I had visited before or planned to visit. Over 4000+ emails were sent out in one week, and there were three replies from Amsterdam's local owners (Blue boat, Henri Willig Cheese Farms & Shops, and Ripley's Believe it or Not museum); they asked me for a meeting in a week. I was so excited, so I packed the materials, ready the tech platform to show them, booked a ticket, and flew from Shanghai to Amsterdam. Eventually, I put up 60 stickers in Amsterdam and some small villages in Holland during the two weeks business trip. The pilot partners appreciate what we do. Thus, they referred us to more partners contact. I spent eight months on the road in 1.5 years, put up 800 stickers door-to-door with passion and gratitude in Europe after that trip, and completed 600K USD angel round fund-raising...
During the 8-month adventure of door-to-door pitches, I discovered the beauty and more of local businesses, especially in the rural areas, and they lack tools to help me to the approached Chinese market. Some of them couldn't find a Chinese translation for their paper brochure. And young Chinese generation is significantly advanced on mobile, discussing building a Chinese mobile page and embedding it in the Chinese social media ecosystem - WeChat and further promoting it on Chinese social media and integrating Alipay and WeChat pay with affordable prices (most of them can't afford to hire a Chinese agency to do that), it seems impossible to most of our clients.
I saw the power of connectivity of culture via travel, and I talked to over 100 investors in 2018 about my mission - connecting culture and preserving culture by leveraging technology for young Chinese cultural seekers. We can be the first cultural-tech platform to help local vendors with a unique story to tell and build visibility, promoting via social networks and converting via Chinese payment. Of course, most investors are not interested in investing in cultural and heritage connectivities and preservation because it couldn't drive short-term returns in dollars. I am glad that we managed to find four angel investors who believe in our mission and support us in building the SaaS products and continuing the market expansion in 2019,2020. Then we all know COVID hit. While we started to convert subscription payments, the world stopped, and another story began about how we pivoted our businesses and have been through these two tough years...
3. You have had many leadership roles and started many ventures. How do you balance it all?
That's a great question. First, you must establish your habit of marking things down with a deadline and seriously working on studying, observing, researching, and validating your ideas with people in the market of your target and focus field. People can have many ideas every day, but to execute them, in reality, is vital, and then to learn, learn from failure, rebuild your strategy, and stay focused while you are on something important. When you build a venture, you think of the synergy between different ventures in the long term. It is not about balance but synergising your time among the things you do, setting clear goals and learning fast, adapting faster, innovating and thinking out of the box.
4. What is your top tip for rising women entrepreneurs?
Do what you love and love what you do, do it with your true passion.
Accept your imperfection and forgive yourself if sometimes you have no power to change the situation. Take a deep breath, pivot, and continue achieving results towards the mission.
Always be grateful for all the people you meet and be thankful for all your experiences. What doesn't kill you always makes you stronger.
Build your habit - read, learn, exercise, be mindful and spend time with family, stop thinking and relax sometimes. You are a human, not a machine.
Smile and stay positive always; things can be resolved over a glass of whiskey. If one doesn't work, take two.
Stay curious about the world, travel if you can, explore your possibilities, and make friends.
Find many brilliant mentors who believe in your mission and can coach you with their experience, actively approach them and learn from them.
Don't be afraid of failure; failure is where you can rise again with your innovation.
Be actively sharing what you do with your network, gather feedback, listen to people carefully and thank them for their honest feedback.
Appreciate your team and yourself because appreciation can make things great.
5. As the platform for women dreamers, what is your next big dream?
You know what? I don't know what exactly is big or small. I would love to continue to connect and preserve human art, heritage and our unique culture with new technology applications, e.g. blockchain web3, travel SaaS, NFTs, Metaverse etc.
Building proof-of-concept showcases to inspire the world just like what we just did our exclusive collaborations with Van Gogh Site Foundations and 15 local dutch collaborators to launch the first fund-raising phygital collectables for Vincent Van Gogh, foundation certified is super impactful and meaningful in life. Now we are excited to know our social experiment results, and Van Gogh would smile at our actions to innovate how people get to know him and preserve his heritage through our innovation and creativity.
Our vision of our startups - empowering every creative mind and artistic soul to enjoy and appreciate the beauty of cultural diversity daily. If we could know more about cultural diversity, we could better creatively preserve them and create a more sustainable economic ecosystem and business modellings. When people can appreciate others, we may have less social issues, and world peace sounds like something I have been working towards over the year. And as a Woman in tech, and a momtrepreneur, I would be very proud to contribute to this vital mission with our actions.
Thank you Emily for sharing your story with us! We are excited to have you in our global women’s network!
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