We started Ohmyhome in Singapore in 2016, with a goal to establish a one-stop Property solution. Since then, we have expanded to Malaysia and, later this year, our third market. While every startup faces unique challenges in attempting to expand, a common denominator for success has been early investment into building technology that will eventually serve us when the time calls for it.
Whether you’re developing an app, integrating e-payment options, or trying to build a website for your company, the sooner you make a conscious investment into integrating tech to your everyday business and its operations, the earlier you will see dividends.
This is especially so when it comes to expanding into Southeast Asia which looks to add 50 million new middle-class consumers by 2022 and is set to become the fourth-largest market in the world by 2030. It is only possible to serve all of this population growth with the deployment of technology.
Moreover, the growth of these areas is focused on its tech sector with the region’s digital economy projected to reach US$300 billion by 2025.
Here are some of the key reasons how we have benefited from our technology. Hopefully, it can help you too.
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Automation and a lean Workforce
Repetitive, menial tasks are inevitable in any operation but the tedium and effort expended to complete them need not be. Business Process Automation (BPA) has been on the rise and it is not hard to see why. By automating administrative tasks as much as possible, your staff will be freed up to do higher-value work that brings more value to your company and more value to themselves on a personal level, keeping them more engaged in their jobs.
Salespeople are able to meet clients who have been pre-filtered to match the salesperson’s personality, expertise and knowledge, allowing them to know the customer even before meeting them, saving time in potential missteps. Customer relations can respond quickly to enquiries and focus on building relationships.
On a fundamental level, automation also means equipping your staff with the skills and mindset to spot inefficiencies and address them with technological solutions. To that end, we provide training for staff in simple automation tools like creating and utilising macros in excel.
Our staff have created macros to automatically scrape information from forms and organise them into databases, and when the solution is more complex they are able to communicate effectively with our tech team on what improvements can be made because of their training. Minimising mundane tasks makes your staff more efficient, improves morale, and saves cost.
This is especially important for startups expanding to new markets. Not only does automation let you hit the ground running in a new market, BPA solutions often also allow you to keep track of progress on different tasks without having to be physically present. This proved to be invaluable when we had to make a quick engineering decision affecting our overseas office that required re-scheduling of work for multiple teams.
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Using Trello, we were easily able to assess which tasks could be moved and adjust various task deadlines easily. When you’re managing a regional tech team, Trello makes adjustments like this seamless. Managing multiple offices across different countries is a tall order but it can be made simpler through automation.
Information drives results
Information is powerful. In the case of expanding to new markets, it is indispensable. Before embarking on a new product feature or deciding on the next market, it is crucial that startups gather and analyse data sets to assist in crafting market entry strategies to avoid costly mistakes.
Getting started on data analytics early also means that you can proactively alter your strategy, business model and decision making skillsets based on the results you are monitoring.
While people can debate about the interpretation of data, in the current business landscape data analytics is fundamental in ensuring that you have what you need to make informed decisions. Otherwise you are flying blind and working on hunches.
An added benefit of investing early in tech as a startup expanding to new markets is being able to decide where to base your tech team. For instance, while Singapore has ready access to a skilled workforce, it can be expensive to host your tech team here and for small startups, this cost might be prohibitive.
Many companies, instead, have remote teams in Malaysia, Indonesia, India, or the Philippines where manpower costs can be up to 40 per cent lower.
In our business, our data analysis has enabled us to match buyers to sellers even before the viewing of a property. This allows us to consistently be the fastest transacting platform since our launch.
Adaptability
The pandemic has underscored just how vulnerable businesses can be to major disruptions. Companies struggle to cope with the new reality of business because of their lack of a digital presence and infrastructure.
On the other hand, companies that have integrated tech into their core operations were better able to adapt. For instance, our business continuity plan depends heavily on tech solutions which our team were already experienced in using.
As the world slowly begins to move forward from the pandemic, it is likely that many business practices will be irrevocably changed. We have already observed how quickly a service such as Zoom can become ubiquitous because it fulfilled a need for video conferencing at scale and made it easy to host and share meetings.
Investing early in tech allows you to see opportunities to fill gaps in the market such as Zoom did in an already saturated market with established players such as Skype and Google. Or at the very least, it means having the capacity to quickly adopt new technologies and integrate them into your operations.
Scaling up
One thing you hear a lot about expanding to new markets in Southeast Asia is how important localising your product is. That often means enabling features or services that are region-specific which in turn necessitates that your tech solutions are flexible and robust enough to accommodate these changes.
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Early investment in tech coupled with a strong vision for the future means you are more likely to make the right tech decisions for the long term and avoid mistakes that limit your growth. Overhauling your code architecture is a time-consuming and labour-intensive endeavour that slows down progress on new feature development and improvements to your app but might be necessary if the structure is untenable in the long run.
Speaking from experience, this was a hard lesson to learn. When we were preparing to launch Ohmyhome, like many startups, we were under intense pressure to launch quickly which forced us to make choices that we eventually realised was limiting our growth. In the short term, making quick fixes to avoid making services unavailable seemed sensible.
However, with each new addition and hotfix, we built an increasingly unstable house of cards. Ultimately, we made the difficult decision to put new developments on hold to revamp our code architecture with a sustainable foundation.
The above is a non-exhaustive list of the ways that early investment in tech will help your startup when expanding to new markets. In todays’ world, whatever your business might be, investing early in tech is one of the most advantageous moves you can make as one builds towards sustainable success.
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