How he went from selling on eBay to building a POS system for retailers

Wai Hong Fong, co-founder of StoreHub

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Wai Hong Fong is the co-founder of StoreHub, a cloud-based store management system for SMEs. StoreHub combines iPad point of sales (POS), inventory, and customer-relationship management with enterprise features in a user-friendly UI.

Fong shares how he found his way to ecommerce and some insights on the industry’s future.

How did you become an entrepreneur?

I was very geeky growing up. In college, I wanted to take law as a major and computer science as a double degree, but I didn’t make the cut for law. I also didn’t want to be a programmer for the rest of my life, so I ended up studying media and communications, history, and philosophy instead. This was at Melbourne University.

I thought I’d do PR or marketing for an IT company fresh out of university. However, my uncle was running a retail business, and he told me, “Why don’t you just come out and help me put up a few things on eBay?” So I did, and one thing led to another.

We ended up running an ecommerce business for the next five years. We grew that from about US$20,000 of stock to about US$5 million of revenue in about four years. That was my first business.

What was the next thing you worked on?

I exited that company in 2012 and I decided to learn Mandarin in China (I am natively Chinese but I could not speak Mandarin). At 26, I moved to Shanghai, did some work for the Chinese government, and traveled around China.

In one of my travels, I met a friend who was running a chain of lingerie retail stores, and he had just implemented a POS. He was trying to use systems to manage the business better, but it was really bad. Systems are built for people, not people for systems. So I said, “Hey, you need to fix this.”

That was when I started philosophizing about the future of retail. I think one day we may not have ecommerce and brick-and-mortar stores, but just commerce. But where do we start? How can we help people digitize, systemize, manage, and grow their business through insights, analytics, and data? That’s how the idea for StoreHub started.

I met my co-founder in Shanghai who just left Microsoft at that time. We started StoreHub in just one of my apartments.

Tell us more about StoreHub.

The core essence of StoreHub is that we want to be the hub of the store, connecting them with consumers and suppliers and providing them with tools and channels. We also want to bring the “Apple store effect” into stores.

We started out with the iPad POS, which we built ourselves. We saw this trend in the US where iPads and POS systems were taking off. And we recognized that POS is the most basic thing for every retailer before they get involved with a CRM system, a complex inventory management system, or even an ecommerce site.

So, we literally help retailers set up their iPad POS. After that, we start helping them with inventory management, customer management, and ecommerce.

What is your revenue model?

What trends do you see taking place in Southeast Asia’s ecommerce space in the next five or 10 years?

You were a part of the Alibaba eFounders Fellowship. What are some takeaways you’d like to share?