After shutting down Sold.sg, founder soldiers on with website that rents and sells art

Art Loft founders (from left): Alexandra Eu, Michelle Chan, Qiuyan Tian

Success in the startup world is elusive even to the very best. This is certainly true for Soldgers, a Singapore startup in the penny auction business that shut down late last year. It was known as Sold.sg among its users.

The company had a legitimate shot: it managed to hit US$2 million in annual revenue. But it had one problem. Despite expanding to Malaysia and then the Philippines, it wasn’t growing fast enough.

“We were somewhat plateauing,” says Qiuyan Tian, who founded Soldgers in 2010. “We were in the Valley of Death where we weren’t getting enough growth to attract series A funding.”

While the company raised US$700,000 from private investors and was making money, it wasn’t profitable. The expansion to the Philippines didn’t work as great as she hoped, and online marketing was getting more expensive – the company wasn’t receiving as much return-on-investments as before, perhaps due to “consumer fatigue”.

The team had also spent too much time on their site revamp – nine months to be exact – and the impact was not what they expected when it rolled out in 2011. Tian adds:

We didn’t really practice lean startup principles. We made too many changes to it, because we wanted it to be perfect. We could’ve been more decisive.

She also felt the company might have over-hired. She planned her hiring based on future needs, but the revenue part did not catch up. At the company’s peak headcount, it had 14 full-time employees.

Instead, she felt keeping a lean team by maximizing each employee and giving salary raises should’ve been the way to go. She says, “We could’ve done simple things like minimizing time wasted surfing Facebook. The right time to hire is when your employees tell you they can’t handle the workload anymore.”

Letting go is the hardest part

By 2013, Soldgers was running out of time and money. A quick and sudden decision had to be made to shut down their penny auction sites.

Other factors came into play. The co-founders wanted to focus on different areas. Tian’s brother, one of the partners, left the startup world as he was getting married and needed a stable job.

Not selling for pennies