ShopBack founders open up about what helped their startup grow

Photo credit: Alberto Resco.

Within a year, ShopBack leaped from 300 orders in Singapore to 140,000 monthly orders across four countries in Asia. How did the startup grow?

Henry and Joel are two of the startup’s founders who went all in to make the business a reality. Upon leaving their roles at Zalora, they hastily assembled their ideas into a presentation to secure their first round of private funding. It only took 4 months to launch the website from the time they started working on it. At the time, they only had 10 merchants on their platform. One year later, the app has gained 500 merchants in Singapore.

Here are some insights from its founders.

Customer complaints are a source of validation

Looking back, the founders attributed their rapid growth to their obsessive and meticulous attention to their customers. “Both an order and complaint is a customer validation,” Joel said. “[It’s] just that one is positive and one is negative. If they bother to complain about the website, it means they want to use it.”

With feedback rolling in mercilessly from users about all kinds of issues (e.g. the app’s slow loading time) and customers venting relentlessly about their confusion with the app, the founders had to take the comments in stride to improve and iterate until the user experience gradually became more intuitive.

According to Joel, “Everything looks dramatically different today than last year, and we hope to look back on what we have next year and see the same progress.”

A brand lasts longer than your sales

How did they raise awareness for their startup? After all, this restless quest for user growth keeps many founders awake at night. Again, it came down to serenading those who mattered most: their customers. Henry acknowledged Carousell saying, “That’s one thing our neighbor Carousell does very well. The key is word-of-mouth, branding, how well your product is built, and how satisfied your customers are. And when they are satisfied, they are your biggest investor.”

Joel underscored the importance of nourishing a brand saying, “If you have sales but no brand, then you are earning in the short-term. However, if you have no sales yet but you have a brand, it can only go up. When we tried to increase our sales, we thought, ‘How can we increase the brand?’ Sales come and go, but the brand is more eternal.”

“Branding is about emotions,” he said. “When people see your brand and they are happy, you are on to something.”

Making tough decisions with your gut, but measuring the results

How did the entrepreneurs handle tricky decisions based on their gut and how did they manage conflicting suggestions within the team? “You can go with your gut, just measure the results,” Henry explained. “We try different ideas, but we always do a small test first to track the metrics. If it does well, we continue. If it does not go well, we stop. It’s never personal when we choose one idea over another; it’s about making the best decision as a company.”

“One person, one problem”

The best recruiting advice these founders received was not to practice “double-hats.” This meant adhering to the idea of “one person, one problem.” The founders spent considerable time ruminating over how to achieve their targets, but what mattered most were the people who were trying to meet these targets.

“Each person is in charge of one point,” Henry said. “He has his problem and I have my problem. There is no duplicate, making every single person in this company important because no one else is going to do what you’re doing. As long as we get better each day or week, everyone is purposefully moving the whole ShopBack machinery forward.”

These points can range from recruiting employees in the Philippines to fussing over technical details such as getting more people to see their emails. Targets are broken into actionable, measurable goals so that the sum, when added up, will be improvement.