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Currently running a Startup Digital Marketing agency that Focuses on Helping Small Businesses Digitalise their Business processes.

We build e-commerce sites that focus on conversion and retaining customer loyalty digitally.

We realise that many businesses in Malaysia that are making over RM50,000 or even over RM100,000 still use WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger as their sales channels—this requires a human to serve the prospect/customer and is a waste of resources and money.

Simply put, there are actually a lot of businesses that aren’t aware of the benefits of e-commerce.

This year is our first year, and we’re focusing on trying to proof the concept, and so far we have built over 20 e-commerce stores and have worked with over 40 brands/businesses (consulting, running, and strategising paid ads for them).

We are not competing with big agencies, we have our own market. We have made over RM100,000 revenue in our first six months and we started this business with zero capital.

Since we are also marketers, we know how to build sites that are marketing tool-friendly like SEO, SEM, Facebook ads, and email. We would like to know on how to grow our agency and how investors currently view this gap.

– Azahin

Hi Azahin,

First and foremost, congratulations on running it lean and gaining some revenues and traction without coming up with any capital. Personally, I highly encourage founders to not depend on external capital when thinking of any

businesses

to start.

Making it sustainable should be a priority for startups and founders should only set their sights on external capital when they need to scale.

On your question on how to grow your agency: grow your clients and go deep to produce

solutions

that address their pain points. In our region, messaging commerce—some call it conversational commerce—is a big thing and it works for many.

Reasons for this can be plenty, ranging to pure familiarity, to some who have been jaded or had bad experiences spending money building their own e-commerce platforms. Many expected immediate results when the fact is driving traffic to any new e-commerce site requires money, patience and resources.

So one way to think about it is how can you make it easier and better for them?

As for investors, different investors have different mandates and focus areas. Some may want technology to scale and in your case, it is tough to scale as it is quite human-resource intensive along with lots of on-ground customer engagement. You may want to look at how you can automate things.

That being said, there are some strategic investors who may want to extend their footprint to your market, but whatever it is, focus on doing your business well and continue to build customer loyalty while attracting new ones.

A big question that you will have to address is how do you differentiate your startup from the hundreds of digital marketing

agencies

in the market? What are the factors that make you stand out? By identifying this crucial point, you would be able to gain more market share and investors.

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