Carblicity
Carblicity (combination of the words “car” and “publicity”) is a crowdsourced private car advertising platform providing advertising services to SMEs and clients in Singapore. The Carblicity platform also allows drivers who own or rent cars to earn side revenue by pasting advertisement stickers on their vehicles and bringing them on the road.
In the realm of transit advertising with buses and taxis as their main competition, Carblicity appeals to SMEs due to their ability to offer budget flexibility as well as quick response and execution time – most remarkably having executed a 100-car campaign in just 2 weeks. From campaign crafting to advertisement design, sticker production and installation as well as managing the fleet of drivers, Carblicity presents an end-to-end solution for their clients.
Since their launch in 2017, they have had enormous growth with more than 2,000 registered drivers and 1,500 cars launched on the roads for 16 different brands, with more in the pipeline. Collaborations with industry players such as Grab and GoGoVan have allowed them to expand their fleet to include advertising on private hire vehicles, vans, buses and taxis.
How It All Started
Carblicity is not co-founder Alvin Boey’s (Class of 2008, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering) first startup experience, having started an automotive workshop in 2009 and running it for about 7 years till 2015. Armed with the experience in the automotive industry, he then got together with his cousin (and co-founder) Endru Chen – who had experience in interactive media and is also no stranger to starting up – to create Carblicity later that year. Carblicity came at the right time as the co-founders decided to ride the sharing economy trend of crowdsourcing and peer-to-peer rental.
Carblicity & NTUitive
Alvin was introduced to NTUitive through a mutual contact at a time when he had the idea for Carblicity but needed help with funding. NTUitive then helped with grant application to get Carblicity off the ground.
“To a startup, every dollar and cent counts. We are thankful for NTUitive’s help to get things going with the first ever grant we received which we then used to develop our platform’s backend system. Especially with a lean team like ours, automation is of crucial importance. ”
Since then, Carblicity has made full use of NTUitive’s incubation services such as legal clinics for advice on fundraising, consultation with business mentors to guide the team through every stage of the business cycle, access to industry exhibitions and events providing brand exposure to potential clients and investors, as well as participation in NTUitive’s signature events such as MakanNight! (monthly sharing and networking sessions) and Startup Homecoming, the annual event celebrating the successes of startups incubated by NTUitive.
What’s Next?
Having been running in bootstrap mode since conception, Carblicity is now at the seed fundraising stage as they look towards expanding the team as well as going regional to countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.
The team is also hard at work in developing a new technology that would provide clients with more accurate metrics for exposure, a useful tool to measure Return on Investment.
”At the end of the day, we believe in making Out-Of-Home and transit advertising accessible to everyone,” Alvin shared at the end of our chat.
Visit carblicity.com for more information.
