JT18 | Amrt Sagar On Launching A Business In An Unfamiliar Market

Discussion Topics: Amrt Sagar On Launching A Business In An Unfamiliar Market

• What to prepare while starting the business in an unfamiliar market
• How did market penetration happen
• Tips for finding Product-Market fit
• Lesson learned you can watch out for

Transcript: Amrt Sagar On Launching A Business In An Unfamiliar Market

Imagine you woke up one day and your manager asked you to take up an assignment in a new country. For some of us, that would be a dream, wouldn’t it? Ok, I mean the part about moving to a new country would be a dream. Manager being there when you woke up would be rather creepy! Probably a good thing you’re moving to a new country. But I digress. It’s a lot of young professionals’ dream to work in a new country. But what if it isn’t just any job. You are actually being sent to an unfamiliar country to be the first employee and set up the business from scratch. Would it feel exciting? Or scary? You don’t even speak the language! How’d you even do it? Today we’re chatting with Amrt Sagar, currently founder and CEO of Carzuno, who recalls for us his time launching Grab’s transport business in Myanmar a few years ago. It’s quite a story. But before we begin, a quick reminder to Follow or Subscribe so you don’t miss out on our great weekly content. Also, transcripts and resources related to the episode are all available on Crazytokmedia.com so head on over there for a summary. So with that said, Amrt, welcome to JobTok. It’s a pleasure to have you here with us today. Perhaps you could start off with a quick intro to yourself?

Thank you for having me on JobTok. I’m Amrt and I’m currently building a marketplace where we are looking to connect our subscriber and the partners and trying to marry agoda type of experience on the partner side and the Netflix type of experience on the subscriber side. Our goal is to introduce the consumers with a new way of accessing the Vagus without actually owning them to begin with. I’m originally from India as well but I’ve been in Singapore for the last 18 years and I did my undergraduate from Singapore management university and spent the first five years of my career at the investment bank. After that I went to a school in Barcelona for my MBA. During that time, I was introduced to the world of startups and did an internship with a startup in Thailand. But I basically kicked off my startup journey at Uberin 2014. I spent two years at Uber and when I leave Grab wanted me to come on board and help them launch in Myanmar. Which was the first new market in over two years. I’ve always been fascinated about Myanmar because my great-grandfather used to travel between India and Myanmar by boat. I’ve always been interested in the country and I did my pre MBA scholarship in 2012 as well. So when the opportunity came knocking at my door, I went in and with the learnings from Uber and strong support from the grab management and HQ in Singapore, I was relatively confident even before I stepped foot in Myanmar. So I started getting on the journey of building the business there.

Wow. That’s a lot of stuff, Amrt. We had met when you were back at Uber. So we’ve been connected for a while on this. And I’m really interested to know how was it to get started? Because like we mentioned earlier, this is a place where you might’ve been interested in visiting, but you don’t know the language and don’t really know the place. How did you get going?

I visited Myanmar in 2011 and I was very fascinated with the culture, places and the people being very humble, very eager to learn. I loved my experience. So, I kept a pretty open mind and we did learnings and reseach about Myanmar from Singapore before going there. I talked to Grab stakeholders, people, make phone calls and typically, building a business plan involves sizing up a market, mapping of stakeholders and then ideating on high-level strategies for launching the business. We looked at three main cities, Yangon – commercial city with about 5 millions people, Mandalay – a smaller one and Nay Pyi Daw – the capital city of Myanmar. Yangon had almost 70,000 leagal and semi-legal taxis in the market which made it the perfect place to launch a business like Grab. We also identified some potential partners like Telcos, banks, wallets, and corporates who could help us gain traction locally. We kicked off the launch in Myanmar with the first step – legal incorporation and opening a bank account. It look a bit of time and effort for local councils to understand Grab’s marketplace business model and it was important to do so because it helped us apply for the appropriate license and helped us position with government, corporate and other stakeholders in Myanmar accordingly. Meanwhile, with the help of Entreprise Singapore, we were introducing Grab’s vision to U Phyo Min Thein, Chief Minister of Yangon region goverment and Daw Nilar Kyaw, the traffic officer at the time. They loved the idea of Foreign Tech startup working with local taxis, and improve the life of people in Yangon. Next was opening the bank account, which was tedious because in Myanmar market, the regulations can be tricky. For example, most banks wanted the Grab management team to fly in person but eventually with the help of local partner’s growth hacks, we were able to get a bank account. The next part was finding a place for office and I chose to get a place right next to Shwedagon pagoda which located right in the center of the city and locals love to go there and pray often. We operated from the hotel near Shwedagon pagoda before the place was ready and we moved there and build that further over time. That’s how we embarked on the journey.

Pretty cool. One quick question. So how did you find that partner who actually was able to help you navigate these? Because I’m sure there could have been so many entities to work with.

I reached out to almost every big bank but after some time, one of the top three banks reached out to me and see if we want to talk and work together with them. Finding the key people is very important when you’re launching. Those are the collaborative growth hackers form the other side of the table who has escalated our business.

It’s interesting that the person proactively reached out and offered to help. So, you talked about how you set up and got the office. How do you now start growing the market or start the launching?

The first key ingredient for launching is founding a new team ranging from operation, marketing to customer service, etc. And I was lucky to have young, hungry folks in Myanmar who are rock stars and they were playing the beautiful music at the ceramony while I was like a conductor. It took a lot of errors and trials but we build the tolerance to ambiguity and common ground to be on. Secondly, we had to do a lot of marketing. Building the Grab band in the market with the right marketing message for our customers and the product-market fit for our drivers. With 70,000 taxis in the market, our customers had to haggle. When Grab came in with fixed fare, trained driver and decent cars right on their finger-tip, it drove the customer acquisition better. The journey with the drivers was a different story. In the beginning for the pioneer a hundred drivers, we gave them phones for data plans but later, we created handset financing program by partnering with Samsung and the bank. The drivers got the Samsung phone upfront and Grab detect from them every week and they loved it. We also attracted them by making daily payments with our partner bank whereas the competitors were making it differently. That helped us build the penetration and credibiliy with the drivers and we managed to build a great reputation in the market early on. Our partnership with Key partners like the bank, wallet, telcos also created a win-win opportunity for both Grab and the partners and it helped increase our market penetration since it drove value to the customers as well.

Yeah. I think a lot of good lessons here, I think the first point is to hire a great team. But beyond that, what you’re saying is you were able to tap into what the local audience wants both from the consumer side and from the driver’s side. That helped you get traction versus anyone else essentially. And then you topped it off with the halo effect of working with so many large, well-known companies. So then people don’t feel like this is some random fly by night operator. What else did you do? Because now you have set up an office, you have launched, but launching is not good enough. Startup needs to scale. How did you achieve that part of the equation?

I would say that it’s a journey. Finding the product-market fit took us from zero to one. Now, while scaling and building the business, Grab, customers and drivers and our partners needed to take the learnings and incorporate it into the product-market fit. For example, our initial message for our customers was about fixed fares but after 6 months, we learned that people have safety concerns in the city generally. So, we took that and changed our message to focus around trust and safety. That resonated with both drivers and customers well. Drivers also wanted to show that they are trust worthy and trained by working with Grab and customers loved that too. We also took feedbacks from our drivers and create win-win situation with them. We did appreciation ceremonies for the top drivers every quarter. We used some of the cars for branding and compensated them. Basically, we tried to create more values for our drivers and drivers loved working with Grab because of that unique cobbaborative approach in the market.

Sounds like you did a lot of things which were in response to the market itself like constantly trying for ideas and then seeing what actually fits. And it’s incidental that some of those ideas actually grew into a sub-business of their own in the future.

I would say we had business plan, initial structure, support of the regional marketing team, etc and I really loved that we created the best outcome for the company by taking strong inputs from the local ground and taking structures from the regional side. I think beng very social minded, and focused on creating a positive social impact locally helped us create positive values on both the customers and drivers in Myanmar.

This sounds great. Effectively, we’ve learned about how you got started, how the first steps were taken. And then now with the trust and safety with the corrupers that are around carsn and the increased visibility that is happening. This is how the business essentially got off the ground. And I mean, the rest is essentially history. I think Grab continues to operate everything. It’s a market that is now part of the normal Grab family. And it’s something that you set up a pretty, pretty long time back.

I think that’s the awesome part of it. Once you set up the ecosystem that is self-sustaining and have good people on board, they take it to the next level and keep on generating values and growing the business further. I’m lucky to be a small part of that journey early on and Grab in Myanmar will go on and chieve greater heights as well.

Thanks a lot for sharing all this with us, Amrt. Before we close, If you had to do it again, what are some of the lessons that you could use now and for people who might be launching a new service new market, how should they go about it?

First learning I’m going to keep is hiring good people, fast. Hiring good people is tough but if you hire good people, it will make your life a lot more easier. In every market, like in Singapore as well, hiring good people is tough but I would get started on the process early. With Carzuno looking to launch in Thailand over the next few months, I started hiring process by building the candicate pipeline and talking to people on the ground because I knew it is going to take time. Secondly, I would have done more research, talk to a lot more people and get deeper insights. When we launched Grab bike in Mandalay at the end of 2017, it was winter and cold unlike Yangon. So, customers would avoid taking bike in the mornings and evenings. It was not the right condition to launch. The Grab Myanmar team launched TokToks earlier than bikes in Mandaly and it was a good move. These are the learning I would take with me and incorporate early onto the decision making.

Perfect. I’m sure you’re applying these great learning to your own startup right now and best of luck for Carzuno as well. If I may summarize the points you made, one is to focus on hiring a great team as fast as possible. The second is to understand the ground realities, do your research and too add my understanding from what you said, you need to understand what works locally versus bringing ideas from elsewhere. The last was around building local networks and partnerships and relationships, which actually not only support your setup and growth, but could actually work as a halo effect and make people take you more seriously because you are associated with somebody that they know and respect. So, these would be my takeaways from the conversation and I really appreciate you being here. And thanks also to everyone listening to this episode. You’ll find the show notes at crazytok.media. And also if you are interested in looking at Carzuno, we will leave a link on our website as well. So you can have a look at what interesting things they’re doing.