Country: Singapore
Industry: IT services
Founded date: 2019
Tictag, co-founded by Jin Lee, Kevin Quah and Yihang Low, is a one-stop source for data from Asia. A startup in Singapore that has built an innovative, gamified, mobile-first platform for companies to harness crowdsourcing to collect, annotate and manage valuable image, text or audio data. With 99.97% accuracy, Tictag’s Truestag system helps companies investing in data, AI and machine learning to develop much better models with an emphasis on speed and scalability.
Together with their trusted team; Jin, Kevin and Yihang pave the way to Tictag’s success.
Tagging is for everyone!
During the Christmas season of 2020, Tictag held a data tagging event that lasted nearly 20 days. For their first project, they had to draw 40,000 bounding boxes and categorize them into their respective type. The event encouraged everyone to join. Prizes such as a gaming chair and an iPad were used to incentivize people to join. Finally, when they tabulated the results, they were surprised to realize that the winner of the grand prize was an old lady. Apparently, she was tagging during her kidney dialysis sessions at The National Kidney Foundation.
This is one of the qualities that sets Tictag apart - anyone with a mobile phone can tag. Those who stay at home and have a few hours to spare, up to the busy men and women working in their day jobs with a few minutes of free time. The gamification that is built into the app itself makes it easy for anyone to pick up the how-to’s of the app.
Finding the balance.
Before founding Tictag, Jin Lee was Head of Delivery for an AI startup where he had responsibility for several accounts. Managing projects concurrently up to 17 at a time. Yes, seventeen! The pressure to reach deadlines and deliver quality work for the approximately 3-4 million SGD total project portfolio was immense. As one can imagine, with that amount of projects, it would require day and night of intense work to pull it all off.
Before Jin could come to the realization of what this unhealthy way of work could do, his body got ahead and reminded him of how important taking a break is. Out of nowhere he had to be hospitalized for three days, resulting in a need for long term medication. This served as a wake up call for Jin, putting his well-being back to one of the top priorities again - where it should be. It was a reminder of one of the most common sayings, often the most disregarded one: ‘Health is wealth’.
From this experience, he has developed a healthier relationship with work besides managing the pace and keeping the balance between work and breaks; not only for himself but also his team. Taking care of oneself to take better care of business is definitely an exercise every founder would find favorable to practice.