The panel of Tech In Asia’s Meetup Kuala Lumpur

A couple of weeks back, Tech in Asia played host to over 120 people for the first Meetup in Kuala Lumpur. Moderated by Hazel Hassan, VP of marketing and strategic partnership from Cradle, the discussion involved Marcus Tan, co-founder of Carousell; Chris Leong, co-founder and director of strategy at Soft Space; and Joon Chan, managing director of Easy Taxi Southeast Asia. Each brought their respective expansion stories and experiences to the table.

What made the discussion especially insightful was the fact that, given the respective industries they are in, each of these entrepreneurs had a different take on the subject at hand, which happily produced interesting moments of friendly debate and banter. To catch all these moments, though, you will have to watch the video below in its entirety. Here are the highlights:

• Sometimes pitching to local industry players is all but impossible. Leong found this out the hard way when Soft Space was repeatedly rejected by local Malaysian banks, as they were considered “too nascent”. So they went to Thailand instead, and nabbed their first client there: Kasikornbank.
• Localization is incredibly important for any startup looking to reach beyond its borders. Tan tried to dive into Indonesia’s market with their current English platform, and one of the team’s strategies was to reach out to local Instagram sellers and grab market share. As expected, they were faced with very poor adoption rates, and decided to take up Bahasa instead.
• When going to a new country, Chan believes finding good local ‘co-founders’ is essential. These people are necessary in quickly trying out what is currently in the market, testing the ground, and when the time comes, rapidly launching and iterating your product or service.
• Expanding to new markets is great, but how quickly should one do it? Tan’s take: keep a lookout for your startup’s culture. If communication starts to break down within the team, you are overgrowing. Chan takes a completely opposite tack when he says that there is never a right time to start growing – he advises startups to just go for it, even when it appears to be messy.
• One of the major tasks an expanding startup has to face is convincing locals that their ‘foreign’ product is better than local alternatives. Chan says that, if you have the money, overpay to provide a superior service than the rest – simple as that. For startups that have to watch the bottom line more closely, Tan suggests “out-caring” the other players by engineering for locals, and providing localized touchpoints.

Original article: 3 entrepreneurs give their take on the why and how of regional expansion