Photo from YoungUpstarts.com
Just this week was the launch of Angel’s Gate, Asia’s first business reality TV series. The first episode debuted on Singapore prime time television last Monday, and will run for two months.
Comprising eight episodes, Angel’s Gate features 24 aspiring entrepreneurs elevator pitching four of the region’s top investors.
The investors and judges are Patrick Grove, Co-founder and CEO of Catcha Group, William Klippgen, Founder and Managing Director of Tigris Capital, Ken Mandel, Managing Director of Buddy Media Asia Pacific, and Karan Singh Thakral, Executive Director of the Thakral Group of Companies.
At stake is of course potential funding, a top-line connection to moneyed and experienced business mentors, and visibility to the general public. All in all worth fighting for if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur.
Angel’s Gate episode 1, available on YouTube
I won’t dwell much on the show itself, which is similar to other reality shows like Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank, as this has been covered by local entrepreneurship blogs YoungUpstarts and SgEntrepreneurs.
But I do want to talk about what intrigued me about the project: The crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and social ideas behind Angel’s Gate.
Beyond the TV show itself, Angel’s Gate uses crowdsourcing to find and distill the best and most popular entrepreneurship ideas. What a brilliant idea to get new content. This, alone, makes it a little different from being a straight up clone of other reality shows in this vein.
Besides the crowdsourcing aspect, the public can also fund the projects if they so wish.
I’m not entirely sold on the crowdfunding aspect — I think the numbers are a little high for micro-payments from the public to make a difference. Other successful crowdfunding sites like KickStarter, RocketHub and IndieGoGo tend to be good for smaller indie projects, which unfortunately might not make for good business reality TV.
Angel’s Gate’s website: Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and start-up social community in one
That aside though, I’ve saved what I like best about the Angel’s Gate site for last: The social aspect of it.
Need volunteers for beta-testing? Have positions open for hiring? Want to spread the work to the community and to your friends? You can do all of this on the site.
Whilst the TV show is what actually makes money for Angel’s Gate, I feel the site has potential if it is not just a marketing vehicle for the show and a one-off marketing campaign.
If it is run with a longer view to things, and there is actually some community work behind the site, it can serve those in the start-up space well: Entrepreneurs, job-seekers, and investors. And this will be a different, albeit related, business model to the TV show.
In my day job I get to see a wide variety of digital campaigns that are less than sterling. Angel’s Gate seems interesting, and not a me-too exercise. Plus it serves to promote the start-up space, which we need more of here in Singapore.
So two thumbs up from me.
