How a startup once hauled 10 kg of sand from a beach – because a customer asked

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The following is an excerpt from The Finishers: The Essential Guide for Founders in the Philippines. It describes the growing pains of HeyKuya, a startup that ceased operations in 2016. The excerpt is provided by the author, Ezra Ferraz. You can buy a copy here.

After meeting over coffee, Shahab Shabibi and Farouk Meralli, the co-founders of a new holdings company, Machine Ventures, reached a gentleman’s agreement with their friend Subir Lohani to form the SMS-based service HeyKuya. Shabibi would focus on operations as the CEO and sole founder of HeyKuya, while Farouk and Subir would help set it up and strategize as partners.

The branding of HeyKuya invoked the image of the friendly neighborhood vendor there to serve you, and that’s essentially what they planned the service to be, only on a much more ambitious and grander scale. Users would be able to text a central number to make any request for assistance, including everything from making reservations and booking tickets to hailing rides and delivering parcels, so long as it was legal.

A real person, a kuya,* would then respond to get the details needed to process your request. If you wanted pizza delivered, they would get your exact order and your address, for example, all in polite, friendly, and exemplary English or Filipino. On the back-end, the kuya would scramble to get whatever you needed done, done.

To say that Shahab, Farouk, and Subir had their work cut out for them would be an understatement. “It would be a real world version of a search engine. HeyKuya would be able to put things together in a way that Google or Siri could not,” Shahab said. “And to cover for all of those services, we would need a lot of expertise in many different verticals.” Even entrepreneurs in countries with much better infrastructure than the Philippines struggled to coordinate the talent and resources necessary to pulling off these types of personal butler services.

The much-needed motivation to address this logistical nightmare came in the fact that they were trying solve their own problem. All three of them were extremely busy professionals—Shahab was working around-the-clock to get Machine off the ground, Subir was the managing director of the Rocket Internet-backed Carmudi Indonesia; and Farouk was the CEO for his own mobile health startup mClinica—that understood the value of time.

Miscellaneous errands were merely inconveniences here and there, but when you added them up over the course of a week or a month, you get the dictionary definition of an opportunity cost: you lose out on all the other things you could have done.

Undaunted by the scale of the work ahead, the founding team moved fast to launch an early version of HeyKuya. You could say that it was their minimum viable product, but the term would imply some element of development. Startups are advised to build MVPs, after all. Yet Shahab did not write a line of code. Subir and Farouk, who focused on strategy once the company was set up, did not tell him to hire a work horse developer, either.

Instead, Shahab bought two smartphones, one for each of the major carriers in the Philippines, and pinged 100 of his closest friends, most of whom were expats, entrepreneurs, and Rocket Internet employees—people accustomed to a high level of service and not afraid to denounce companies when they fell short—to explain that HeyKuya was open for business.

He began taking requests just five days after conceiving of  HeyKuya. Such was the speed with which he wished to bring to Machine’s venture building (the company’s main tagline is, appropriately enough, “Transforming ideas into companies”, and a reflection of the firm’s core philosophy. “If you develop products based on your customer’s feedback, you’ll never be wrong,” he proclaimed.

Their first few requests challenged this thinking. In fact, they were not even really requests at all. Users asked about weather conditions or other inane details, apparently to gauge the service’s legitimacy.

Some even chided HeyKuya for romantic advice. “Hey kuya, there’s this girl I like, but when I told her how I feel, she told me she only likes me as a friend. What should I do? Sincerely, brokenhearted in Pasay”.

In these early days, Shahab manned the phones himself. It was founder as concierge, a guerrilla system that even Magic, the Silicon Valley startup to which HeyKuya could be most closely compared, had to contend with after receiving 17,000 texts in the span of 48 hours.4 In consideration of Magic’s unmanageable viral growth, HeyKuya’s 100-person closed beta was smart, prescient even.