In early March, 11 companies were chosen to receive an investment of RM250,000 (US$61,844) each to grow their business regionally from Scale Up Malaysia and Quest Ventures.
ScaleUp Malaysia’s Cohort 2 key partner, Quest Ventures is a regional venture capital firm based out of Singapore that counts Temasek as one of their key investors. With more than 50 investments under their belt, Quest Ventures’ investments boast regional powerhouses like Carousell, 99.co and Carro.
Head’s Up will be interviewing all 11 chosen startups to discuss further on the challenges they face as a startup to grow regionally and how the investment will impact their journey moving forward.
First in the list is Quadby, a platform for students to find like-minded peers and communities.
“We almost had to shut down during the pandemic in April 2020, having only three months of runway left,” Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Hubert Lee tells Head’s Up.
In the face of the pandemic, the platform’s co-founders decided to forfeit their salaries for five months to slightly extend their runway and channel the funds into their team.
Despite all done, half of the key personnel left, leaving only three of the co-founders in the company. “We knew we had to do something and to overcome this, we sold printed t-shirts and managed to sell 102 pieces. We also went ‘lean’ and chose to invest time into what matters most, user growth and business development,” Hubert shares.
The platform soon secured contracts from Grab, Lazada and two other undisclosed clients.
Resilience also paid off when Quadby decided to participate in accelerator programmes run by Sunway iLabs and Scale Up. The team made it into their investee portfolios.
According to Hubert, the #QuestToScale programme dives deep into the steps and how-tos of building a highly scalable yet sustainable company, one he calls a “Pegasus company”. Each coach assigned to the startup is armed with relevant track records, and has ‘been there, done that’.
“It’s a really unique, intensive experience that matures founders. On a scale of 1-10, I would say this is an 11/10 a must-join programme,” Hubert highlights.
The entire accelerator programme was hosted virtually on Zoom and mentorships were done via Google Meets.
“The journey has been nothing but one of the most fulfilling in our lives, we’ve learned so much. We were definitely looking forward to being in the #QuestToScale programme and while we’re usually confident, we also have to be realistic that we’re up against 19 other companies way more prominent in size and traction than us,” he says.
Quadby is looking to invest significant funds into user-acquisition via marketing the platform on Gen-Z first platforms like TikTok, and on product-development. Additional funds from the investment will also go into key-hiring to grow their community engagement team.
“We’re also aware that we’re a young team and we need lots of guidance and mentoring. Besides the monetary investment, the constant advice and mentoring from partners at Quest and ScaleUp is one of the biggest opportunities we have!”
Going Regional And The Challenges That Awaits
“Right now Malaysia, Singapore and Philippines holds the biggest potential for us to market our products.”
With an aim to grow their presence regionally, Hubert is aware the journey in achieving his goals will not be without its own set of struggles. “Localisation, language barriers, mindsets and suppression will definitely be challenges I foresee in growing regionally,” he shares.
“It would take time to learn each country’s culture and setting up. And that is what makes the region (SEA) such a beautiful and interesting market,” he adds.
The challenge of facing language barrier did not escape him even in Malaysia, Hubert says. “As an English-first company, we’re able to resonate with the urban market but we found that the rural market mostly speaks in Malay and doesn’t resonate well with us and not to mention the more Chinese market with primarily Chinese-speaking audiences gives the same kind of challenges.”
He also raises the issue of perspectives and mindsets. Locals tend to resort to overseas-built platforms, believing that the international factor makes it more ‘reliable’ and ‘superior’.
His challenges do not just end there. One issue that he predicts will grow to be a regional problem is suppression. “As a platform that proudly empowers an unfiltered and unbiased environment for students to voice out, we’ve faced suppressions by university managements when we chose to launch at certain universities.
“They’ve even issued official ‘restriction notices’ discouraging students from using Quadby in the university.”