FbStart Success Stories, Asia Pacific

This year we kicked off the FbStart World Tour, an event series across 20 cities to meet with mobile developers around the world. We've held events in London, New York, and Mexico City, and over the past couple of weeks we met with startups and developers across Asia, holding events in Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei, Bangalore, and Gurgaon.

Since we launched the FbStart program in 2014, we've distributed benefits worth $50 million to developers in Asia Pacific, providing them with free tools and services to build, grow, and monetize their apps. You can read more about our investment in Asia Pacific developers and their success here.

In Asia alone, we have more than 1,000 members in the FbStart program. Some examples of apps growing with FbStart include:

Carousell

Singapore-based Carousell is a lifestyle marketplace app that makes selling as simple as taking photos and allows anyone to create a free listing to sell their items in just 30 seconds. Since it launched in 2012, Carousell has grown to have more than 8 million listings and millions of items successfully transacted across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Taiwan.

Through FbStart, Carousell's team was able to run and test marketing campaigns with their Facebook Mobile App Ad credit. The quality of users acquired and cost targets have exceeded expectations with the help of Lookalikes from Custom Audiences of their top buyers and sellers. They also used FbStart's partner benefits, including Transifex to scale to multiple countries and languages and Mobile Action to improve their app store optimization. Additionally, Carousell uses Facebook Platform products such as Facebook Login, Social Plugins, and Facebook Analytics for Apps.

Cardback

Delhi-based app Cardback helps cardholders and wallet users identify their best ways to pay and maximize their rewards and savings for every transaction they make. It is a payment recommendation platform that helps credit, debit, prepaid cardholders and mobile wallet users make smarter payment decisions.

As a member of FbStart Cardback has used Facebook ad credits to increase the number of people installing their app by 5x in the past six months, now with 50 percent of people coming to their app through Facebook ads.

Cardback also uses Facebook Login, which now accounts for 60 percent of signups on iOS and Windows. Through Facebook Analytics for Apps they are also able to better understand their customers and make more informed decisions based on user engagement, demographic information and retention patterns.

Samosa

Samosa, based in Hyderabad, offers a curated collection of clips from popular movies that people can share with their friends, including punchlines, proverbs, love proposals, witty responses, funny expressions and song clips. FbStart's free tools and services helped the team focus their time and effort on building their app, rather than spending precious time searching and deciding which services to use to fulfill their needs.

With Parse, Samosa was able to quickly iterate on their app. As an Android-first company, they were able to ship more than 10 different versions of the user interface in the span of just a month by relying on a Parse-powered backend. Samosa also uses Facebook Login to sign up customers, and they integrated with Messenger to bring their collection of clips to even more conversations.

Apply to join

To join the FbStart program, developers can visit our website and apply today.