Mark Koh, Co-Founder & CEO of Supahands Dotcom
Lapses in efficiency and productivity are a recurring problem, regardless of country. So, my co-founder, Susian Yeap, and I created a solution to solve a global issue of rising costs, where more people were seeking additional income streams to support themselves. What we do at Supahands is creating an opportunity for people to work from home or their own workspace to generate additional income. We take large projects from companies and business across the globe, and break them down through our platform into micro tasks, so that different people can work on them at their own time across South-East Asia.
Supahands was never meant to be a Malaysia-only business. I built it with a global mindset and, to do that, I have a global team to bring different thoughts, processes and experiences to the table. Our clients are also based around the world. While the focus areas are Malaysia, Singapore and Australia, we’re looking to expand to the United States and European market very soon. Besides that, we have about 2,000 talents, or SupaAgents, across South-East Asia. We’ve got people in Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and, soon, Thailand. This creates a multilingual, multicultural platform, where companies and businesses connect as large teams of a particular nationality or skill set.
The technology that we use is something that we’ve developed internally. We spent the last two years building the technology around the algorithm we have to route the work to the right person at the right time. We’re also focusing on automating various aspects of our working procedures as this can help us become a lot more efficient as a business. We do micro pivots on a daily basis to adapt to the changes in technology that’s happening around us. So, when we see things happening in the market, we are able to take opportunities quickly, while maintaining an agile and nimble structure.
I’m taking it one step at a time because of payment and scaling issues, so we’ve decided to focus on this particular market. If you can look after South-East Asia – which is a very diverse region – you should be able to take care of the world. That being said, business has been growing quite quickly and fairly recently, especially since the technology has become more mature and we’ve been getting funding from different parties.
We’re currently building a client-facing, self-service portal to access our 2,000-strong workforce directly. This will allow them to interact without having to go through layers of back-and-forth discussions, and be able to set up processes and get work done even faster than ever before. We’re also actively looking to expand our reach to more companies overseas and growing our business in Singapore, Australia and the US right now. We also want to continue to grow our remote workforce throughout South-East Asia. The goal is to have SupaAgents from every single ASEAN nation.
Mark Koh was a nominee for the EY Emerging Entrepreneur Of The Year 2017 Malaysia.
