Home 30under30 2017 Daniel Liang, 2017 Anthill 30under30 Winner

Daniel Liang, 2017 Anthill 30under30 Winner

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What is the 30under30?

30under30 is an Anthill initiative launched in early 2008 to encourage and promote entrepreneurship among young Australians.

Each year, we invite our readers to nominate young Australian entrepreneurs deserving of recognition for their outstanding entrepreneurial endeavours. More.

Daniel Liang, NSW (b. 1995)

Name: Daniel Liang
Age: 22
Known for: Qnect

At 17, Daniel co-founded Empire Entertainment in 2015 with Ryan Chen selling events with over 2000 tickets each. He realized that his friends their friends only bought event tickets, when knowing friends actually bought ‑ 500 people could click “Attending” on Facebook, but no‑one cared.

In 2016, they also discovered in that Australia alone, the untapped 2,000 society teams collected payments and info using different tools for ticketing/memberships/selling merchandise – collecting cash in tins at lunchhalls/Eventbrite/bank‑transfer/Google‑Forms, giving way for Qnect.

Qnect is fundamentally a new way to grow your organisation’s memberbase, communicate, collect payments to: save time‑switching between over seven apps, save money, sell more via social payments and payment channels.

Daniel and Ryan have developed the fastest growing marketplace and payments platform for university organisations and students across the world, selling $6,000,000 USD worth of tickets, organisation memberships and merchandise, and dominantly covering major market share across Australian universities with 400 organisations (and recently Hong Kong).

They also told Anthill about their biggest marketing effort so far. “Never done before, our goal was to host the largest uni party ever ‑ with each ticket sold we get a new user on Qnect. To do this, we combined 18 university societies across Sydney, booked out the Argyle venue, and blasted promotions. As a result, we sold $30,000 worth of tickets, 1000+ students and 18 new organisations.”

“Qnect has 180,000 active users buying memberships, merchandise & tickets producing a gross revenue of $6 million within 16 months.”

A road bump Qnect experienced and needed to overcome, a few months ago, was a data leak on it’s growing user base. “This caused backlash and large media. People have suggested to shut down and rebrand,” Daniel remarked, “As a startup in this situation, you have two choices: shut down or continue. We choose to continue, learn from this and grow‑ we believe it’s part of our fast growth, our story, our learning ‑ we know the largest companies ‑ Facebook, Yahoo! and Dropbox even get hacked, and bounce back even harder.”

 

Anthill asks: Have you ever been lucky, punk?

I represented UNSW and Australia with my team in the Hong Kong PolyU Global Start Up Challenge 2015 competing with 161 teams. Luckily, we came 1st place ‑ where the head of the Angel Network in Hong Kong saw us, and we had follow on conversations from there. Rest is history. Actually, the real luck occurred when we were offered a spot to make our entry application ‑ we considered not to ‑ this was at 4am ‑ luckily, the inspiration gods were on our side and we did.

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