Asim Qureshi Late Again for Physics Class

During 2022 LaunchPad launched 5 startups from nowhere. Here, I tell you how it happened, how I end up venture building before I know what a venture builder is, how I manage to get through two lawsuits in the space of 6 months, and how I raise US$7m without telling investors what they are investing in…

Malaysian Property Market Slowing…

Coming towards the end of 2014, the Malaysian property market is looking as dead as a dodo, not good for my property development company, so I start looking at something to keep me busy for the next few years. We are building some pretty hot houses, but I'm not waiting 5 years for the market to turn around.

My Last Tech Venture…

My last tech venture was back in 2010. I co-founded and ran ThinkProperty.my which became Malaysia's 2nd largest property website in no time. 18 months after launch we got acquisition offers from both iProperty and PropertyGuru. We sold for the then highest publicly announced amount paid for a website in Malaysia. The funny thing was that when we sold the condition I gave the then CEO of iProperty, Shaun Di Gregorio, that if he wanted to buy us I wasn't going to give him any information, as he was my competitor, so he'd have to buy us 'blind' or there was no deal. I had pushed the price to 20x the initial offer months earlier – and now told him that it's them or their competitor. He called back 2 hours later and the deal was on!

The other funny thing was once they bought the company, some guy from their side came to my office and asked me where the office staff were – I told them there weren't any – I remember the confused look on his face – the entire team worked from their homes around the world – it took him a while to get his head around that one!

Part-Time Job Site…

So, anyway, the LaunchPad story really starts in November 2014. I'm chatting with a Canadian expat, Fazila, who is constantly coming up with great ideas, and she mentions to me there's no good part-time job site in Malaysia. After a quick check, I agree, and I think I might as well leverage my experience in classifieds. But I can't find anyone to start this business with – I don't have enough time to do it myself as I don't want to be distracted from property (we had almost US$20m of property in our pipeline). I want to start lean, to see if it works, so it's not worth bringing in an ex investment banking colleague from the UK. The easy option is a 19 year old part-timer at my property development company, Daniel Joshua – he is young, he is foolish.

Daniel was hired a couple of years earlier on a squash court – I was walking by the courts one day – finally saw someone in Malaysia that might give me a good game (yes, I'm that good!) – told him I'd beat him – he told me he'd beat me – Daniel was a very cocky state-level player, after all. Since that challenge on court we have played nearly 500 matches – a very evenly-matched and bitter rivalry that runs to this day.

Anyway, Daniel had impressed me more off court than on it because he worked with so much passion – even when doing trivial stuff – and he always worked for the team.

Key takeaway: whatever you do, even if it's a basic job, do it well – you don't know who you'll impress.

I am thinking, we probably won't do that well as he is too inexperienced, but heck, we won't know if we don't try – we put in a few thousand US$ each and get cracking.

March 2015, we launched the job site, Scoot, on a WordPress platform. A disaster launch as the site was terrible. Poor Daniel – he has put all his savings into this and it looks like he'd lose it all pretty soon. Of course, I wasn't that bothered, except I did feel sorry for Daniel. For the several months Daniel struggles to build a good tech team and everything essentially grinds to a halt.

Key takeaway: have an awesome vested techie on board.

I get increasingly involved and help sort out the mess. Daniel goes from dreaming about being the next Elon Musk, to wishing he'd done what he was supposed to do – become a pilot.

Early days of Scoot. Daniel and I had our smiles wiped off our smug faces soon after launch.

Payroll SaaS…

August 2015, a close friend of mine, Fawad, a game developer from the UK and seasoned entrepreneur and one heck of a creative business mind, is about to leave Malaysia. He tells me he had been mulling over starting a payroll SaaS focusing on Malaysian businesses – a huge opportunity as every employee in the country needs to have their payroll run – and it's all going to move to the cloud. Both of us had struggled with our own payroll in Malaysia so I sniff an opportunity. Fawad suggests that given he can't do it, as he's flying off, I might as well. Daniel was beginning to manage Scoot well, so I think why not. Fawad asks me to give him 5% of the business as he's given me the idea and will advise me. I agree. As Fawad gives me the low down he is realising how big this will be if we execute right. An hour into explaining the plan he now wants 10% as he'd take on a hands on role. I agree. 20 minutes later he says he wants 20% but would become the CTO. I tell him I'll get back.

An hour later he calls me and says we should do it as 50:50 partners, we'll both put in US$75k to get going, he will manage the product development remotely, I'll do what's needed in Malaysia, and 50:50 partners we were. The fact that Fawad was now highly vested by putting in his own cash greatly increased my confidence in the venture – key players need to have skin in the game – the more the better. The business would later be called PayrollPanda.my.

Fawad and myself making plans. BTW Fawad recently won a Jiu Jitsu competition in Malaysia (crushing warriors nearly half his age). Impressive!

Job Site Pivots…

September 2015, after months of struggling with our Scoot programmers we pivot towards mainstream jobs as that's where there is an obvious gap – the pivot is slow as our tech team is useless. We fire the lot, and relaunch with a new team on a more stable and scalable platform – node.js – advice we get from guru Fawad – all of our websites across LaunchPad are now built on node.js.

T-Shirt Crowdbuying Site…

October 2015, I read about a T-shirt crowd-buying website, teespring.com, in the US, that was approaching unicorn. Think wow, we can do that, but for Asia. And I think, hey, this will be the third venture, so let's give these ventures a name and website – LaunchPad. Soon after getting the website set up, this German PhD student of disruptive technology from Melbourne University, Alex, sends me an email saying he wants to work at LaunchPad – he wants to do a startup and migrate to Asia. One Skype interview later, I give Alex an offer, and within a few weeks he is here. Alex looks at everything objectively – there is absolutely no emotion in any decision he's involved in – you cannot argue with the facts – and the facts always support Alex – not sure whether that's because of his academic background or because he's German. Probably both.

Around the same time a lawyer, David, also contacts me via the new website, and he wants his next thing after selling his business in China. David is a shrewd typical-Chinese businessman. But his mouth has a direct connection to his brain – he just blurts out whatever he thinks – and it lands him in a lot of shit – from racial issues, which Malaysians are very sensitive to, to sex, David is both dangerous and highly entertaining.

Anyway, these two guys would co-found Teeyoot, a T-shirt crowd-buying website to dominate Asia.

Omid, this nutcase programmer I'll talk more about later, gets the website up and running within months. We get off to a cracking start with sales going through the roof. It looks like global domination. I'm deciding the colour of my Lambo Huracan – probably yellow – with tinted windows. Alex picks a Ferrari – gives him some character as he's German – and David's getting an S-class – as he's a Chinaman.

Early days of Teeyoot. Truly exciting times. Myself, Farzan, David, Jaclyn, Farina, Muz, Athina, Anne, Yazmyn, Alex. Farzan has been the backbone in many of our startups.

First Lawsuit…

October 2015, we start a new advertising campaign "Don't use JobStreet, because everyone else is, use Scoot instead!". Comparative marketing like this is a no no in Asia, but we check and it seems to be legal, so Daniel and I think heck, let's do it. We get tons of sign-ups, business is suddenly looking good. A few weeks later we get a letter from lawyers – JobStreet are suing us! They really don't have a leg to stand on. But going to court is just not worth it for us. We play hardball, but Daniel and I shit ourselves because we become concerned they could, somehow, bring in defamation and that's really serious in Malaysia. Daniel is imagining himself in a prison cell serving a 10 year sentence. We begrudgingly apologise – they accept – phew – next battle.

Loyalty App…

November 2015, we're getting some applications from some incredible grads. One of them is a small Chinese Malaysian chap, Pei, Imperial College, London, and UCL grad and a straight A's student. One heck of a CV, but that's not what I like most about him – what I like most is that he shows a real passion for tech startups. I hire him but not sure what for. He plays around with some ideas for a few months, including taking on food delivery giant FoodPanda almost head on, essentially because he felt they were executing so badly. I refuse to back him on that one. Pei later convinces me that we should make an Asian version of Wahanda, a beauty booking site. Wireframes done, we agree on the name Pamperoo, even put it in a press release, then we read that Rocket Internet had some big success with the same model in South America, and are about to launch in Singapore, and would probably come to Malaysia soon. We drop the idea as fast as Ben Johnson on steroids. Small startups can do amazingly well against much bigger competitors but any competition is bad – and you don't have control on how well that competition will execute – best to find an easier route to success.

Me, Pei, Daniel, Farzan, David and Alex. At the time this snap was taken, David and Alex were feeling well pleased with their incredibly successful start to tech startups – plans to launch all over Asia soon

Pei then starts work on his own idea, Menyoo, which is supposed to be a restaurant menu on your phone, but while the idea seems great – the menu is dead, long live Menyoo – getting users to download the app and engage is just too expensive, so we morph into a loyalty app SaaS for retail that we rename as Mulah. The entire pivot is Pei's doing, not bad for a kid fresh out of uni.

Key takeaway: keep lean, keep pivoting, keep moving.

Mulah (Menyoo) team in between signing up cafe's. From bottom left clockwise, Khoo, Nick, Pei, Nicholas (also a co-founder), Stephanie, Hazel

November 2015, I am having a meeting with a VC from Singapore, and she mentions that she likes our venture builder model. I nod my head in agreement, but I am thinking "what's a venture builder?". Google it straight after – oh, LaunchPad is indeed a venture builder. That's cool because it's nice to know we're not the only ones doing it. I was initially concerned about starting more than one business at a time as I firmly believed in the power of focus – in fact my favourite business book is titled "Focus: the future of your company depends on it" by Al Ries, yet here I was as unfocused as you can get! But each venture, and more importantly, every venture builder was completely focused. As I was across several ventures my learning curve was on steroids – I'd be getting daily reports from each businesses – stepping in whenever there was trouble. That to me, together with our highly vested venture builders, and the way each venture gets support from centralised resources such as HR, accounts, and fundraising, are essentially the reasons why it all works.

Fundraising Round 1…

December 2015, I have a chat with two of my property investors – some old school business tycoons that can't tell their Google from their Facebook. I start going into the details of the ventures but they tell me to stop wasting their time and my breath – I am thinking my mouth always gets me into trouble and I've lost this investment – but they said they're investing – investing in me and not in the business – so they don't want the details. They agree to put in US$1m into the early stage ventures. Nice, because up to now it was pretty much all my money.

Key takeaway: just like these shrewd tycoons, don't focus your investment decision on the business plan – it will keep changing – focus on the guys you're investing in – you'll be riding with them the whole way.

January 2016, the teams are growing fast – we're around 30 staff now – and we launch, rather open, a new office near our first one.

Paperless Company Secretary…

February 2016, we decide to set up the first paperless company secretary service in Malaysia, CompanyHero, initially primarily to generate leads for PayrollPanda, but later we realise it could be a standalone business. After a few months we get all the legal approvals and launch the site. Two weeks later we close it down. We realise the company secretary space was too competitive, and we're best focusing our efforts on PayrollPanda.

Key takeaway: test the market with a dummy site to gauge demand before you do all the hard work leading to launch.

Time Tracking Software…

February 2016, Fawad realises that PayrollPanda would be a more powerful product with a strong time-tracking software built-in. But it could be a standalone business and instead of going for the Malaysian market, the world would be our oyster. With PayrollPanda's development team on a firm footing, it might be best he develop that. We initially call the product PunchinPanda, but then rename it to Jibble.io. Frankly, I don't understand why Jibble.io is so exciting to Fawad, but I have a lot of confidence in him so I back him more than the idea. I remain CEO of PayrollPanda and take most of Fawad's responsibilities, Fawad becomes CEO of Jibble.io. He still spends a few hours a week making sure PayrollPanda's tech is going well. Both companies have a great run to the time of writing.

T-Shirt Crowdbuying Site Shuts Down…

April 2016, Teeyoot, the site that had got off to a cracking start closes down. No Lambo, Ferrari or Mercedes S-class. Sad times. Basically we were making US$20k of sales per month very early on, but the T-shirts were sold at cost. When we raise the price to make them profitable, we just can't shift the damn T-shirts. We built this pretty amazing platform, spent US$250k really fast due to overconfidence, but our assumption on the price elasticity of T-shirt was just wrong. Painfully wrong.

Key takeaway: When importing B2C business models from the US, to, say, Malaysia, revenues will not be around 36 times smaller (which is how much smaller Malaysia's GDP is vs US), but an order beyond that smaller. A $1b US business could be a US$1m business once it makes it's way to Malaysia, and that might be too small to sustain or bother with. I think we're going to see a lot of tech businesses in Malaysia , some that are seriously funded, fail due to this oversight.

May 2016, Alex and David are shitting themselves as Teeyoot has failed – both of them have been successful in everything they've ever done – it's their first failure in life and they're both like fishes out of water. They need a new venture, if only to give them hope and prevent the onset of depression, but we're thin on ideas – David even suggests making some special selfie stick for Pokemon players. Did he really give up a career in law to sell selfie sticks? I actually asked him that, and he kind of gave me a blank look back, which I think meant "yes, if we make some money from it". Desperate times. And poor Alex, he's dropped out of his PhD from Melbourne Uni for this.

Key takeaway: a job is heaven compared to running a failing business.

Aircon Servicing…

But I have a new idea that I've been thinking about for a while and I run it past Alex and David. Servicing your aircon is a massive pain point in Malaysia and there isn't one large aircon servicing company in the world – no-one has systemised it – if we could we could become the Rentokil of aircon serving. They reluctantly agree to give it a go, and weeks later we have two desperate entrepreneurs – a PhD dropout and lawyer – going into houses cleaning up aircons (as they needed to understand the business) and then chasing aunties for non-payment. Some owners can't believe a white guy is cleaning their aircons, such a handsome one at that. We realise it's a great cashflow business, but scaling will have its challenges, and I think they didn't really have their heart in dealing with labourers. Alex and David tell me it's not going to work – I walk away thinking it's just not for them.

Key takeaway: business is brutal – your degree and law certificates don't mean anything over here.

Alex, barely dropped out of university and he's failed twice at business already. Surprisingly he doesn't accept a really great management consulting job offer but picks himself to try again – in his next venture he approaches it all with the skepticism of a investment grade bond analyst – and is set to do very well – I'll talk about that in a bit. David later gets a nice cushy job elsewhere for a fat salary – it's piss easy to get a job as an ex LaunchPad venture builder.

Key takeaway: Don't give up easily. Be an Alex.

Fundraising Round 2…

May 2016, I speak to my old school tycoon investors, I tell them that apart from Teeyoot, the startups are looking good. They ask a few questions and decide they want to give a further US$5m of funding, which is more than I wanted and a bit of a shocker – they liked and trusted me (I'd earned it over the years) and they liked tech. But their investment is mainly in the form of assets that are mostly in Malaysian property and now I need to liquidate them. To get some short term liquidity, I get some investment bankers to chip in, taking it up to US$6m – but do these guys want details or what.

Key takeaway: The bigger the investor, the less details they want.

Job Site Relaunch…

April 2016, after a painful few months we relaunch Scoot. But we again are still plagued with technical issues. We transition to a new team headed by this nutcase programmer Omid, who's based in Iran and moved over from Teeyoot, which failed, but he did a great job on. Omid works 18 hour days, 7 day weeks. He is impossible to work with and is fighting with everyone non-stop, somehow removing anyone from the company that doesn't bow down to him, but he's damn good, and passionate about his work. People are quitting left right and centre, Omid included, because of Omid's belligerence, but after each fight everyone cools down and makes up. Anyway, Omid sorts out the site with his Iranian buddies and our guy Farzan, and within months the site is pukka. Wow, finally our tech is helping us rather than killing us. He later becomes CTO of Scoot and gets a significant equity stake in the venture. Over the next month we get more sign-ups to the site than in our first year, and every month until time of writing things accelerate rapidly.

Key takeaway: There are no rules when hiring. Omid should have been fired weeks into his job, but he delivered. Managers must bring out the best in people and work around their weaknesses. Saying that, managers also need to be brutal with poor performers – fire them fast – one poor performer will lower standards and attract other poor performers.

Second Lawsuit…

April 2016, things beginning to look great at Scoot but we get this letter from Scoot Airlines' lawyers threatening to sue us and insisting we change our name. We play hard ball but they play harder – they are Singaporean, after all. We will very likely win given they don't have the trademark for the category under which we're trading, nor do they have any flights into or out of Malaysia, and also "scoot" is a common word, not just their brand. However, a fight in court will seriously distract us and take up cash. For the second time, we decide to give in to legal threats despite being confident we are in the right, and so we change the name. We didn't want to destroy the brand we had built and all of us were too stupid to think of making a very slight name change to "Skoot" until our lawyer Mr Gan, from Gan Partnership, suggested it. We felt like kissing him, and the name was changed – most of our users didn't even notice the difference. I think Scoot Airlines' lawyers messed up – an oversight on their part. Anyway, SkootJobs.com it was.

Key takeaway: big bullies tend to win.

Payroll Team Strengthening…

February 2016, a Dutch guy, Toine, had been trying to get me to invest in his startup, and one day he tells me he's no longer involved in the startup. I was a bit surprised as I thought it was making great traction. During our investor meetings I thought, wow, this guy is the one guy in the team that I would really like to work with and if I was to make an investment it wasn't so much in the business as it was him. But now, here he was, jobless! It was like I had my fishing rod in the water but the fish jumped out and landed itself in my basket. I offered Toine, while sipping a hot red berries tea at Coffee Bean, to come over to my office after the weekend and I'd pay him a daily fee – he could take days off without notice for interviews or whatever. No commitments either way. Next Monday, to my surprise, he turns up at our office and tries to make himself useful. A few months later he becomes a co-founder of PayrollPanda.

Dion, who we hired from KFIT, also soon joins PayrollPanda as a product manager. Suddenly the PayrollPanda team looks very solid.

Dion, centre, and Toine, right – the PayrollPanda dynamic duo.

Hard Work Pays Off…

June 2022 – over the next few months a lot of things started to fall into place. I could feel that we were reaping the rewards of our really hard chaotic work. Things were less stressful at SkootJobs which is now having a great run with 1,000 job seekers joining the site a day taking the total quickly past 150,000 – the site is really slick – and we're expecting to start charging within 3 months. Fights with Omid went from daily to weekly, and now it's approaching monthly, and by now Daniel wouldn't bother telling irrelevant details such as Omid quitting. We launched PayrollPanda which, at the time of writing, has not lost a paying customer thanks to some incredible customer support by Jessica (isn't that incredible for a product fresh out of beta?) and is comfortably the best Payroll SaaS in Malaysia with major improvements on the way. We launched Jibble.io, which is growing so fast that Fawad is having a hard time keeping his hair on. And Mulah (formerly Menyoo) successfully launched with paying customers, and growing exactly as per projections – we're going to hit the accelerator soon – we just need to hire a fairly large sales team.

Key takeaway: there is no substitution for hard work.

Iranian Job Site…

An Iranian guy, Mahmoud, joined us and I saw leadership potential in him – what I'm trying to say is he was the only Iranian that had the balls to stand up to Omid – and you can imagine the fireworks in the office during his time. Lucky Mahmoud worked from Malaysia, with Omid in Iran, else it really could have ended in bloodshed. So he headed a team to try a SkootJobs version in Iran, but soon after we realised it was distracting us from SkootJobs – Omid needed to update two sites instead of one and he was struggling despite his 18 hour days. We needed to focus. It was a tough decision halting that venture as the potential was there. We might kick it off again very soon.

Technology Energy Savings Initiative…

June 2016, this big Aussie guy, Clay, who had successfully co-founded and run the leading social media service for hospitals in Asia and Australia, walks into our office after seeing some press release we put out, looks around and says "I could work here, not seen a place like this in Malaysia", and decides he wants work with LaunchPad to launch his next venture. I was like heck, yes – although I told him I'd have to think about it to not show him my eagerness – I mean his track record was incredible and wasn't some fresh white guy in Asia. I later find out Clay was once Australia's karate champion, so I now make sure I have any disagreements with him over WhatsApp.

Tiffany, my personal assistant – not sure how I would have managed without her – she's been with me well before LaunchPad. And that's Clay bothering her.

Anyway, Clay came up with some cool ideas for the first few weeks – unlike most of the rest team, myself included, he wasn't looking to copy existing ideas from the US or Europe, but he was creative and original. I'd ask "which app from the US are we copying?" and he'd say "this is my own idea" after which there was usually a long uncomfortable silence as my next few follow up questions didn't apply.

Clay and myself after kicking ass (strictly in the business sense) in Thailand. I wonder whether Clay, Australia's ex karate champ, would beat Fawad if they went head to head, freestyle.

A few weeks into his stint with us Clay is driving new technology energy savings initiatives, rolling out across Malaysia and Singapore, under LaunchPad's Prospek Baru. Clay pulls in Alex as a co-founder. Alex knows how to crunch numbers and analyses incredibly thoroughly, and he's German, so suits this venture spot on. A great result.

And that gets us to today.

In all the mess described here we've spent US$1.5m doing the ventures, and a few senior investment bankers have put in their personal money at valuations that value the 5 businesses at US$8.5m, so that's a great indication of serious value add, pretty damn fast, but if we play our cards right it will be small change in terms of what we could add going forwards. The journey has hopefully just started…

The original article is published here.

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Source: https://launchpadstartups.wordpress.com/author/launchpadstartups/