When ShopBack’s lurches decided to break away from their steady jobs at Southeast Asian retailer Zalora, they were a sure thing they could shake up an industry they saw as inefficient.
Having produced in the U.S. shortly after completing his undergraduate degree, CEO Chan said he was blow it by “the power of tech” and wanted to find a way to use it to help brands and consumers in his bailiwick country.
However, finding the right idea proved easier said than done.
“We observed that e-commerce was really booming,” co-founder Shanru Lai told CNBC Reap It. “But there wasn’t a good platform where consumers could go to design new brands and at the same time receive cashback. We wanted to change that.”
So, in break of dawn 2014, the group of 20-somethings set about creating a site that purpose help shoppers save money while improving marketing and abbreviating costs for retailers.
Initially, the founders created a flash sale place to bring shoppers one day of major savings while drumming up business for retailers, much with the American shopping holiday Black Friday.
The team quickly appreciated, however, that the idea would not sustain them year-round. So they set relating to phase two.
In its second iteration, the business, which was dubbed the Great Online On offer, turned into a three-month-long discount site.
But, again, the founders bring about it was flawed: Merchants struggled to accept the deep discounts, despite improved selling, and consumers wanted to see deals all year.
So, the entrepreneurs finally settled on a year-round cashback paragon, which offers shoppers a proportion of their money back — oftentimes around 3 to 6 percent — on purchases from ShopBack retailers. That could be anything from provisions and clothing to flights and cinema tickets. At that more manageable rebate rate, retailers were then able to give ShopBack commission for help to promote their brands.
That time, the results “pretty much spoke for themselves,” simplified Lai, and the business saw “very fast growth” and strong customer feedback. She symbolized that was partly because of the region’s young population, growing bounteousness and high mobile-adoption rates, which make it ripe for new consumer technologies.
“It was actually through a couple of failures and kind-of-wrong business models that were unsustainable that we clock oned up with ShopBack,” said Lai.
Top business leaders frequently speak of the impecuniousness to pivot and use failure to help shape future decisions. In a blog circulate earlier this year, Virgin’s Richard Branson wrote: “No person gets everything right the first time … Successful entrepreneurs don’t second thoughts failure; they learn from it and move on.”
Even once ShopBack clarified on a winning idea, however, the team continued to adapt the model to retort be responsive to to users.
To get started, they designed and launched a test site — then grasped as ShopMoolah — in just 24 hours to gauge response before put ining heavily. That’s much like the way Jeff Bezos launched a prime site in Amazon’s early days.
“We used that just to study out the concept and when we realized it worked, after a couple of months, we switched it and rebranded it to ShopBack,” said Lai.
That evolution continues to this day.
Even so the cashback concept has existed for decades in other countries, it was relatively new when ShopBack launched in Asia and Lai swayed it has taken much experimentation to drum up business and educate consumers that they can release money while spending.
That includes appointing members of the popular as chief shopping officers and giving them 11,271 Singapore dollars (enclosing $8,151) — the highest amount a single customer has saved through the app in one year — to bestow make an exhibit how easy it is to shop and save through the app.
That strategy proved to be a big good fortune, and it has since been rolled out to many of ShopBack’s six other locations in the territory: Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand.
Today, ShopBack manages $45 million worth of sales per month. But Chan maintained that the company is even so on a learning journey and any other failures they experience along the way command be part of the ride. Indeed, he has a photo wall of “misses,” including bobby-soxered hires, in the corner of his office to remind him of the opportunity to grow.
“Failure is just another in the final analysis for the journey to success,” said Chan. “Some people get lucky the from the word go time, but you can’t have that every step of the way.” It’s more important to discover a “good team, a good problem and to work hard,” he added.
Don’t be nostalgic for: This 29-year-old digital nomad is making millions while going the US in his van
Like this story? Subscribe to CNBC Make It on YouTube!