What it’s like watching my brother’s unglamorous startup journey from the sidelines

My brother is an entrepreneur. He has always been an outlier in the family and is constantly keen to find something that he wants to improve. Because of that, our parents – and even our extended family – have ridiculed him. But that hasn’t stopped him from building his company GoFreightz, which specializes in cloud-based freight forwarding solutions.

While it may look cool, running a startup is not at all glamorous. I don’t think anyone will ever truly understand the journey of a founder who embarks on this lonely path, where losing everything is highly probably and can happen in an instant.

I say this with utmost respect to all the founders who are in the same boat as my brother. As he once said, “You are either going for a highway or a ‘graveyard way’ with entrepreneurship.” I didn’t get it at first. I wondered why he would put himself through so much stress when life itself was already difficult.

From my view, the mental and physical stress he had to go through was unbearable. He didn’t have a huge bank balance, his future was uncertain, and most of all, he wasn’t sure whether he had actually captured the right time to showcase his solution.

GoFreightz’s service was not well understood. Possible investors asked hard questions about how the company was different from its more established competitors. While companies had signed up for the platform, it wasn’t used as frequently as the founders had hoped for.

But my brother and his teammates persevered. They invested in providing training for their customers and reached out to them to get feedback.

But I also acknowledge that the other difficult part of his journey was the lack of support from the people that were closest to him – be it our family members or even his best friends. Even though I’m permanently located in the UK, I do come back to Malaysia from time to time.

In one instance, I remembered seeing my brother come back from a day of presenting and pitching to investors. I could see it in his eyes – he was full of uncertainty as to whether he had done well enough to earn the much-needed investment. Amid all the stress, some of our family members remarked that he should just stop running the startup and asked him to sell the company to someone or anyone.

In another instance, he received a phone call. One of his friends had decided to quit GoFreightz, as he couldn’t withstand the pressure or stress and wasn’t willing to continue to invest his time in the startup. His friend felt that the whole journey was taking way too long.

I thought, ‘Finally, he could get a break.’ Then, Covid-19 hit.

My brother was crushed, frustrated. I could see he was trying hard to keep his composure. Meanwhile, I thought the whole thing was just wrong. He went out and sat outside of the gate by our rented condominium. I followed along. I didn’t know what to say. Words at that point would have meant nothing. All I did was sit next to him while he had his head down, and I hoped for the next day to come where tomorrow, as they say, would be a better day.

I left Malaysia once more, but I’d catch up with my brother on Facebook. He would share updates about his work, and I would listen. With time, things got better. GoFreightz was finally getting the recognition it needed to create buzz in the logistics industry.

I thought, “Finally, he could get a break.” Then, Covid-19 hit. Globally, it was a disaster since the structure of the economy as we know it had stalled. With the team, my brother reset the company’s strategy to survival mode. They did everything they could to make sure that the services GoFreightz provided would remain robust and that existing clients would stay happy despite the gloom and doom.

But at the end of the day, the team knew it would be insufficient. They needed to find a last-minute idea to pivot. What they found was a seed of opportunity: the medical device industry. It’s commonly known that the sector is highly regulated, and for all the shipments made, it’s important that shipping companies complied with the local law and complete the required documentation.