SHAH ALAM: The Selangor Information Technology and E-Commerce Council (SITEC) organised the seventh Startup Selangor sharing session entitled Operations Management on the 8th of December, 2015, from 7:30pm to 9.30pm, at the Selangor Digital Creative Centre, i-City.
Soh Yien Yee, the Co-Founder of Square.my, and Puvanendren M. Maniam, Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Bemalas/Belazee, were invited to share their experiences on starting a business and operating a company. Around 58 participants joined the sharing session.
Soh started to do business online since she was a college student. After she met Luqman bin Adris, they co-founded Square.my, an all-in-one social e-Commerce platform for online sellers to open a webstore that is integrated with Facebook, Blogger, Twitter and other social channels that offers centralised stock management systems, sales reports and multi-channel store fronts with marketing tools powered by social media platforms.
She pointed out that social media is good for marketing, but is not systematic. Thus, Square.my is designed to help small and medium enterprises start businesses online easily, as it integrates with major payment gateways using credit cards and online banking. It also helps online sellers to save time and costs in managing their online business. In addition, all stores are mobile and tablet friendly with mobile applications.
“My company consists of seven people. Most of them are technology experts, and I am in-charge of human resource, finance and other tasks. We always have discussions about our company and platform, trying our best to serve clients.”
Maniam asserted that some of the world’s biggest companies are on-demand startups such as UBER (valuation: $60 billion), Airbnb (valuation: $25.5 billion) and Grabtaxi (valuation: $1.7 billion). Cheap and easy access allows them to scale and dominate their market quickly.
“On-demand startups have one thing in common — we are platforms. We are disrupting the norm. For example, there are more UBER cars than taxis in New York.”
He mentioned that Belazee is the only on-demand concierge in the region. They build a network for everything by funneling their demands via vertical channels, and creating demands through advanced analytics.
“In terms of operations management, Belazee has developed different networks or systems. For instance, we have Hub and Operation to scale across countries. We use messaging to connect with merchants and customers. We have tracking abilities because we have multi-country logistics networks.”
To date, Belazee has 40 employees, and 100K registered users. They have 900 merchants, and have received more than 450K requests from 5 countries.
