This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Daphne Tay, the founder of Singapore-based AI startup Bluente. Tay was a consultant at Bain & Company for five years. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Bluente started in 2021. We raised our first round for a language learning product — very similar to Duolingo, but focused on the business side of things.
Over time, that didn’t work out. Clients just want it done for them instead of learning the language.
We pivoted and focused 100% on what we have raised today: Blu Translate, our flagship AI-powered document translation platform.
We translate any file, and the unique thing is that we keep the format exactly the same. That worked out much better.
At Bain, I had been doing exactly what our clients do now: copying and pasting text from translation tools, fixing formatting, and losing hours that should have been spent on actual consulting work.
What Bain taught me
I always think back to one of my first few projects when I was at Bain.
This was a yearlong digital transformation project with an agriculture company around 2016 or 2017. Back then, they didn’t have in-house tech people — today they have engineers, product designers, all of that.
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We were working on automating their warehouse. One of my team members was drawing out the app on slides, and I said, “Hey, I think there’s a better way to do this.”
Figma wasn’t around yet, but there were other prototyping tools. I tried one of them and we built our first clickable prototype. We could iterate on that with the client and automate the warehouse in a very MVP manner. That was my first dabble into product building.
A lot of that has applied to how I build Bluente — how to think about product design, how to build a minimum viable product.
At Bain, we dealt with many established Fortune 500 companies. There’s a lot to learn about building a solid marketing and sales team.
What I had to learn from scratch
The biggest thing I had to learn was sales. At Bain, we learned a lot about influencing people — how to create analytical work that could influence a client in a certain direction. But you’re never actively selling until you get to partner level.
When I first started Bluente, one of my advisors told me: “If you don’t go out and sell the company, no one will.”
People may buy and believe in you, but that alone doesn’t create a repeatable motion.
Over time, we’ve cracked the playbook on how to sell to multinational companies, law firms, and different client segments.
It’s about putting the brand out there, sharing what your product does, and helping your clients solve the problem.
Coming from a corporate background, I also had to learn functions we usually take for granted, like HR, payroll, and finance. Through my first fundraising experience, I also learned a lot about shareholders’ agreements — how to protect both the company and myself.
I also had to rethink what an MVP looks like. As consultants, we like to pack a lot in and say, “That’s possible.” But it’s really about distilling it down to what truly moved the needle and launching.
When we launched our first product — the language-learning app — we had five different features that we wanted to push out: flashcards, practice questions, case studies, speech-to-text, and so on.
In hindsight, customers just wanted the flashcard function. We should have launched with that and built on top of that instead of waiting two months to build all five functions and then pushing them out.
Small team
I never saw founding a company as taking a huge risk. It’s more about building something sustainable and making sure you’re always making progress. Every little bit adds up over time.
The scariest moment came last year, when one of our colleagues was hit by a car on the way to work. That was pretty scary because we were like, “Oh shit, what do we do?” It was my first time sitting in an ambulance.
The incident brought us closer together, knowing how to handle these situations when they hit.
Having a good team makes it possible. I’m very thankful for the six individuals who have brought us to this point. They all have very good founder mentalities — they really drive things for clients — and I’m grateful for that.
Do you have a story to share about building a business in Asia? Contact this reporter at [email protected].
