I launched 5 startups in 2016. Here’s why, how, and what I learned.

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This year I launched five startups from nowhere. Here, I’ll tell you how it happened; how I ended up venture building before I knew what a venture builder was, how I manage to get through two lawsuits in the space of six months, and how I raised US$7 million without telling investors what they were investing in.

How I began

Towards the end of 2014, the Malaysian property market was looking as dead as a dodo, (not good for my property leasing company), so I started looking for something to keep myself busy.

My last tech venture had been back in 2010 when I co-founded and ran ThinkProperty.my which became Malaysia’s 2nd largest property website in no time. 18 months after launch we had gotten acquisition offers from both iProperty and PropertyGuru and sold for the then highest publicly announced amount paid for a website in Malaysia.

Part-time job site

In November 2014 I was chatting with a Canadian expat, Fazila, and she mentioned to me that there were no good part-time job sites in Malaysia. After a quick check, I agreed and thought I might as well leverage my experience in classifieds. However, I couldn’t find anyone to start this business with. I wanted to start lean to see if it worked, so it was not worth bringing in an ex-investment banking colleague from the UK. The easy option was a 19-year-old part-timer at my property development company, Daniel.

Daniel had impressed me despite only doing menial tasks as an intern because he worked with so much passion and he always worked for the team.

Key takeaway: whatever you do, even if it’s a basic job, do it well. You never know who you’ll impress.

On March 2015, we launched Scoot on a WordPress platform. It was a disaster of a launch; the site was terrible. Poor Daniel — he had put all his savings into this and it looked like he’d lose it all. I wasn’t too bothered, though.

For several months after that, Daniel struggled to build a good tech team, and everything essentially grinded to a halt.

Key takeaway: have an awesome vested techie on board.

I got increasingly involved and helped to sort out the mess while Daniel went from dreaming about being the next Elon Musk to wishing he’d done what he was supposed to do — become a pilot.

Payroll SaaS

In August 2015, a close friend of mine, Fawad, was about to leave Malaysia. He told me he had been thinking to start a payroll SaaS focusing on Malaysian businesses — a huge opportunity, as every employee in the country needed to have their payroll run. Fawad suggested that, because he couldn’t, I might as well do it.

At this time, Daniel was beginning to manage our jobs site well, so I thought why not. After going back and forth with Fawad, we finally agreed to do it as 50:50 partners. We would both put in US$ 75,000 to get going. The fact that Fawad was now highly vested because he had put down his own cash had greatly increased my confidence in the venture. Key players need to have skin in the game — the more the better. The business would later be called PayrollPanda.

Job site pivots

T-shirt crowd-buying Site

First lawsuit

Loyalty app

Fundraising round 1

Paperless company secretary

Time tracking software

T-shirt crowd-buying site shuts Down

Aircon servicing

Fundraising round 2

Job site relaunch

Second lawsuit

Payroll team strengthening

Hard work pays off

Iranian job site

Technology energy savings initiative

And that gets us to today