Three years after its launch, Malaysia’s Socialwalk is finally finding its stride

“Take Aviato. That’s not a name that I found. It’s a name that found me. On a vision quest,” said Erlich Bachmann, the fictional owner of a startup incubator in the HBO hit Silicon Valley. This certainly elicited many laughs (including mine), but the truth is that many successful startups got their winning idea through events that ‘found them’.

Take Socialwalk, a Malaysia-based business matchmaking platform, for example. According to Socialwalk COO Eileen Feng, they didn’t start off providing business matching services. Instead, they were simply doing event registration back in 2009, and chanced upon the idea through one of their clients only three years later:

We were dealing with one of our conference organisers, who was connecting businesses and SMEs from around the world. They didn’t just want an event registration platform – they wanted some way to get people to know who they should meet up and speak with right before the conference. This would save them a lot of time that would be otherwise spent walking and roaming around randomly. That was when we first started putting our business matching idea into software.

Back then, event registration was an extremely hot industry, with big players such as Eventbrite dominating the scene. With so many players around, though, Socialwalk CEO and founder Tham Keng Yew says prices were driven down – it was profitable, but just barely. It was at that point of time in 2012 that Tham met Feng in a business conference in Kuala Lumpur, and together they decided to pivot.

“Business matching is not something we created – it’s been around for a long time,” Feng acknowledges, but adds that most of the competition they faced was in the form of ‘directories’ that listed who participants were at the respective events. “That was the most basic form of business matching, but we brought that to a further level with our platform,” she recalls.

Initially, they offered their services at conferences, but eventually Tham realized that trade shows were far more profitable. “Trade shows typically have attendances of 30,000 or so – conferences, just 3,000. Trade show organizers also have more money,” he explains, adding that most of the networking tools today are still focused solely on conferences, with trade show lacking similar options.

At that point of time, Singapore had comparably more trade shows than Malaysia did, most of which were larger and more international. “That was when I came into the picture – I knew some of the exhibition organizers in Singapore, and so we made the decision to bring this concept over,” Feng recalls.

As it turns out, they were able to get the third largest exhibition in Singapore, the International Furniture Fair, to take them on, which was a huge boost for their credibility. The event also brought about 15,000 users onto their platform, which was a fantastic start, according to Feng.

“That was really the turning point,” she says. “We let the international crowd try us out, and we got a lot of useful feedback from them, which was invaluable in letting us know what to focus on instead of providing everything and anything.”

A second pivot

With their idea validated, they began to spread their service to exhibitions in about six to seven countries regionally. Back then, they were charging exhibition organizers who wanted to add value for their exhibitors and visitors.

Therein lay the problem. These exhibition organizers saw Socialwalk’s service as just another ‘value-add’, and often asked the duo if they could give it to them for free, or charge them less for it:

Focusing on scale

The key to success

Next steps