Entrepreneurs backing Entrepreneurs: A Conversation with Araya Hutasuwan

Recently in Bangkok, The CFO of Snapcart, (Indonesia's top market research company), Araya Hutasuwan spoke to me about discussing all things entrepreneurship, investment and business in these emerging markets. The organiser's of the event are Top Venture Capitalists, Monk's Hill Venture which concentrates specifically on post-seed stage technology startups in South East Asia.

The main focus of the discussion was centred around startup culture, evolving as entrepreneurs and growing in new, dynamic and innovative directions.

Araya: At the moment Snapcart has around 130 people and expanding all the time across many countries. We are very E-commerce centred. We are growing rapidly with really good foundations, everything is changing and challenging at the same time.

Amarit: When we started our companies it was discussed in a cafe between my brother and I and an investor. Now we have over 40 members of staff and over 50 at Techsauce. We have opened up in different locations across Thailand and have a global expansion in mind.

Araya: We have to think about KPI’s and the career paths of each person in the company which is received once a month, so we are growing together as a team. We make sure that when we are regrouping that the managers and subordinates are all in harmony and understand the structure of the business.

Amarit: Within our team, we try to regroup every 3 - 6 months and see how we are growing and expanding. One of our biggest discoveries is that people don’t know where we are headed and the management team is crucial to really unify and understand everyone grows together.

We are the first generation that start businesses with people who will not necessarily grow into managers or where you want them to be so its this mentality of you either go up or go out because someone will take your place quickly at a startup. Continuing to fail is something you need to remember is ok. It’s going to happen - everyone needs coaching and help within the framework of the startup to enable it to grow and be successful. (Amarit, CEO/ Co-founder of HUBBA Thailand)

Araya: It’s very hard hiring people: you really focus on building a product as an entrepreneur, but you need to make sure you are focusing on people that are in your company too. People who will put real effort into the startup. We have a rigorous screening program in order to match their skills with the correct position within the company. We compare our salaries to the rest of the market and depending on market shares.

Amarit: We are trying to not only get honest feedback, we want to get everyone’s constructive criticism to redesign the points that aren’t getting addressed in order to make it the best company possible. The idea is every time you think of startups you think it will develop so quickly, but you have to be able to run before you can walk. When you expand so quickly you end up with a large HR, everything is a mess and a lot is broken within the structure of this 'successful company'. What we actually did was to find out what was going on in every part of the company at all times with clear lines of communication and redesign at all times. It's paperless and a more digital approach to fixing internal problems within a company.

Araya: Teach new skills to everyone in order for them to sell the products right away - we have learnt a lot expanding into a country that we are not from like Singapore or the Philippines. The structure of the company has to become implemented in order to be successful in hiring people.

Tech in Business:

Araya: we have in detailed tech which allows us to have weekly meetings and tools to use to help us to collaborate across the world for product management. The tool/ app is very structured. We operate across countries such a hong kong and Singapore expanding all the time. These tech apps make it very manageable and much less stressful.

More information on the speakers below:

Araya Hutasuwan

Araya is the Co-Founder and Chief Finance Officer at Snapcart. Snapcart provides real-time offline shopper and consumer insights for brands. Through its receipt-scanning cashback mobile application, Snapcart collects billions of data points at an individual shopper level, an unprecedented level of data granularity in the market research industry.

For more information, visit www.snapcart.global.