The Malaysian startup was taken to the unicorn state for key practices – Wired PR Lifestyle Story

When Carsome as announced The first Malaysian-based unicorn In July 2021, the local startup community was thrilled with the success. It seemed to have a domino effect, as Malaysia soon found another 2 unicorns in edotco, a tele-infrastructure services company, and AirAsia Digital, the digital arm of the budget airline.

In one Wild Digital SEA 2021 the conference was invited by Carsome co-founder and CEO Eric Cheng to talk about the startup’s journey and what led him to join the unicorn club.

Partner Manager 500 global, Khailee Ng also agreed that Carsom was able to gain investor confidence while maintaining some value propositions.

It starts with being obsessed with fixing customer pain points

The advice is as old as time: the entrepreneur needs to know what points customers are suffering from. Then, solutions must be built around these problems in a way that meets and satisfies customer expectations.

Eric shared that Carsome had started mostly because he wanted to reduce the friction involved in buying and selling used cars in Malaysia. It was a tedious process that required the customer and dealer to be on site to assess and inspect the car.

Challenges also arose when a customer had little knowledge of how to measure the value of a used car. And even if a customer has gained enough confidence to shop, the car can work differently when they are actually driving.

With a lot of mistrust in the process, Eric tried to solve these problems with technology and data.

As one of the pioneers in the Malaysian industry, Carsom had to build its big data sets to analyze and determine the right price for a car based on its age, construction, brand, model and color. Although it took a lot of time and effort, having a strong data base ensured customer transparency, which helped a lot as the company expanded overseas.

Therefore, when a company believes that it is offering a product that is what its customers want, along with good service, it can help optimize data-driven processes as the volume grows.

But even with today’s solutions, Eric feels they still don’t do enough. There are many more challenges to meet to satisfy customers, and being obsessed with resolving these pain points means that the Carsome team has their eyes and ears open to what is happening and is developing solutions to these problems.

It affects not only your customers, but also your people

Khaile noted that of the 21 SEA companies backed by 500 Global, 6 of them are unicorns, including Carsome. Some of the similarities shared by these unicorns include the use of data-based systems and the priority of ESG measurements, among others.

You know: ESG is an assessment of a company’s collective awareness of social and environmental factors. Environmental criteria take into account a company’s energy use, waste, pollution, conservation of natural resources, and animal treatment. Social criteria examines how it manages relationships with employees, suppliers, customers, and the communities in which it operates. It deals with corporate governance, executive salaries, audits, internal controls, and shareholder rights.

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Eric shared that one of Carsome’s core beliefs is in building a positive company culture. One thing that connects a group of 2,500 people is sharing their belief in providing good services to their customers. For example, the team is committed to maintaining Carsom’s high promotion net score (NPS).

Simply put, NPS is a measure of customer loyalty and satisfaction taken from asking customers who can recommend your product or service to others on a 0-10 scale.

For a beneficial outcome, companies must first help their internal teams. They don’t have to show the front they want to satisfy customers and keep them happy, first and foremost without making sure their employees are protected and content.

It’s a similar value to the luxury coworking space that Colony advocates, with CEO Timothy Tiah once telling the Vulcan Post, “Our belief is that if we take care of our employees, our employees will take care of our customers and our customers will take care of our shareholders.”

In doing so, employees will need to understand their purpose in the company, and leaders should help them well along the way. Once this is resolved, teams can work more effectively together to achieve a shared vision.

Give more than you take

By prioritizing the company’s internal culture, entrepreneurs who want to help their employees will find ways to add value. It’s something we’ve seen writing about startups, such as about an entrepreneur who started out only to maintain a new business for its employees from a failed company.

The return is also a sentiment shared by Carsome’s executives, who noticed that the car trading industry was stalled in the locks because customers didn’t want to buy so many cars.

With the extension available, Eric decided it would be beneficial to train the company’s staff Carsome Academy. Launched in 2021, the organization is now a training center that provides technical education and guaranteed career opportunities to Malaysian youth.

The course is fully reimbursed after a graduate locates Carsomen and the duration is successful. Student loans are also available there for students who want to advance their studies.

This represents a value proposition presented by the company that seeks to benefit the surrounding communities while economically building their brand and gaining customers. It is also a more tangible long-term return effort compared to one-off CSR efforts for branding and marketing purposes. Like I said, show it, don’t say it.

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These were the three main methods that Carsom used to build a sustainable business, and the shared ones are likely to resonate with many other entrepreneurs who have built solutions with a passion for solving customer problems.

After all, many would agree that creating a sustainable startup is not about getting high ratings and recognition through awards or the like, but about having a positive impact on the lives of customers while benefiting and growing one’s team.

Having a unicorn is a validation that shows that what is done in the market is important, but in the beginning it was never a goal, to be a unicorn. We see it as something that would come our way, but for us it’s basically more important how we continue to fix it the way we see it in the market.

Eric Cheng, co-founder and CEO of Carsome.

• Take a look at the Carsome deal deal we’ve worked on in more detail here.
• You can read more about what we’ve written about Wild Digital SEA here.

Notable Image Credit: Eric Cheng, co-founder and CEO of Carsome