In the ever-evolving world of startups and e-commerce, access to capital is critical for growth. But as Percy Hung, CEO and co-founder of Choco Up, explained traditional financing can often fall short for modern, asset-light businesses. In this episode of Scaling Today, Percy shares his journey with Choco Up, from its initial stages as a growth financing solution for e-commerce brands to its current role in helping businesses scale across Asia.
Here is the transcript of our conversation:
Yuying Deng:
Welcome to Scaling Today, the podcast where we explore the future of work and also the possibilities of scaling globally as well. Today we have a fascinating episode lined up for you. Our guest is Percy Hung, who is the CEO and co-founder of Choco Up. Choco Up is a leading company in growth capital financing for e-commerce brands and also startups as well.
I have a lot of admiration for Percy. I've known Percy for like five, six years by now, and Percy has always struck me as someone who's very entrepreneurial. Actually, prior to founding Choco Up, he has also founded a D2C brand and a cloud kitchen brand as well. So I'm very excited about this episode.
When I met Percy a couple of years back, Choco Up, I think, was only in a single country at that point in time. But now I just learned from him that it's in four countries around the region. So welcome to the show, Percy. Would you like to say a few words to our audience?
Percy Hung:
How are you? Thanks for having me on your show. It's always good to connect with other entrepreneurs, to do sharing and to learn from each other. I think this is what makes the startup community, and this is what keeps us going. It's not one way, it's not just about me sharing, but also I feel like I can learn a lot from you and the audience as well.
Yuying Deng:
I definitely learned a lot from you, bro. Okay, so basically to kick things off, Percy, I know you have a very interesting background. You grew up between Hong Kong and Singapore, and actually just now when I was looking at your LinkedIn profile, I saw that you actually went to RI, which I wasn't aware of. So can you tell us a bit more about your background and how you actually got started with Choco Up?
Percy Hung:
Okay, so Choco actually, we are trying to break into the space where banks can serve. There are a lot of businesses where banks, financial institutes, or VCs can provide certain types of funding or solutions to help a company to grow. Because every institute or every organization, they have their own mandate, whether it's equity investment, venture debt, whether they need to have a very stringent credit policy.
But business is very dynamic and fluid. You need different kinds of capital in different situations. At the same time, in today's business world, a lot of businesses are digital, a lot of businesses are asset-light. This is very counter to traditional types of financing where you need some asset back, you need something that has collateral, you need a form of guarantee for someone.
The more you have a property, or if you have a factory, if you have a lot of machinery, those are the traditional types of financing where FIs or other types of lenders will look at. For Choco, because I was a D2C founder myself in the day, and I did a cloud kitchen and also brick and mortar online and offline, it's considered asset-light and it's very difficult to scale. We make mistakes in business, and when you make mistakes and then you put yourself in a cash-tight position, you don't have a second chance.
I feel like what Choco Up originally, when we first started, it's to give an alternative, another option for business owners and founders to grow and scale. At the same time, if we make certain mistakes, business decisions along the way, we'll have another option or have another second chance to grow the business.
Yuying Deng:
I see. So is it fair to say that Choco Up was actually born of your own experience, previously having asset-light kind of businesses and then finding it difficult to scale, you know, just because you didn't have stores or like real estate that you could put in as a guarantee to the bank?
Percy Hung:
Yes, definitely. I'll give just a bit of background. For the D2C brand, it's a dress shirt brand. We ordered a wrong color way for large quantity because minimum order quantity, you want a cheaper product, then you need to order more. And then it couldn't sell, then you have that stock, and then it affected the cash flow. Then we start doing ads, spending more on ads, and then it's a vicious cycle. Then one thing leads to another and it puts a business in a very difficult position.
However, if we have access to some quicker form of money, we can pivot a little bit, learn obviously through mistakes. Every business owner, I believe, you grow because you learn through your mistakes. But if you only have one shot and you have not enough capital to turn around, I think that's how this kind of started.
Also, this is more of a tougher situation, but there are a lot of other situations. For example, the cloud kitchen concept that we have, we wanted to push out more brands, we want to go offline, we need to have capex, we want to grow from one place to another across region. We needed more capital just for growth, and for growth is to drive your top line. Your target audience becomes a bit broader, you need a bit more extra startup capital to do that. Hence, it was also very difficult for us. When business is good, when you want to go borrow money, it's also difficult.
Yuying Deng:
Even when business is good? So even when your top line is like growing well, the banks would still refuse to lend?
Percy Hung:
I mean, it depends. Normally e-commerce, digital business, or FBS, banks or financial institutes consider them a little high risk, volatile.
Percy Hung:
And at the same time, equity investors, PEs, VCs, family offices, if you're not at a scale of 20, 30, 50 chain stores, they're probably not going to look at it because the bar of entry to do F&B or just retail fashion or shops like that is pretty low. And I get it, it's normal. It's not anyone's fault that these business owners can't get funding. It's just how business is.
Yuying Deng:
Okay. I mean, we'll definitely talk a bit more. I'm really interested to also find out how Choco is helping companies' regional expansion as well because we spoke about that previously. But let's go into the other questions first. So I see that you now have teams in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Australia, Malaysia and Australia being, I think, the two most recent countries that you're in, right? So what inspired you to go with this kind of geographically distributed team setup and what are the benefits, if any, that you're seeing with this kind of approach?
Percy Hung:
I can talk an hour, two hours, or a whole day about this. I'll just keep it short. Actually, we have expanded into 15 countries before at one point of time. We're helping companies in 15 different countries and regions. However, we realize we're spreading ourselves too thin. When you go into a new country, it's a lot tougher than we expected in terms of the language, the business behavior, consumer behavior, legality, different laws, licensing.
We thought we do well in one country, we make some money and you can just go into a second country and then a region. And then the second region does well, then you think, "Hey, this model works, it should just be able to copy and paste into all the different countries." It wasn't the case. We did have some setbacks, and it was a very good learning lesson for us. Don't try to run before you know how to walk.
If it works now, it might not work half a year later. You have to have a very open mind to constantly pivot and be aware of changes around you. For example, late 2018, 2019, early 2020, 2021, the VC funding scene or PE, it's very vibrant, everyone booming at that point. Everyone could get money easily from even the biggest brand names. But in 2022, just within three to six months, things just changed drastically. Hence, we cannot predict, it's very hard to predict what will happen next.
I think being agile and having the abundance mindset, so in our company we preach abundance mindset. Don't blame the circumstances, don't blame your teammate, don't blame the customer. Look inwards and see how we can make it happen. And that will translate into scaling. So we scale too fast and then we figure, "Hey, we don't have the local know-how, local knowledge." So we focus on just Singapore and Hong Kong first. These two areas are where we're quite familiar with, we have a lot of support, the legal system, we have loyal customers, repeating customers.
We're building our base out of these two regions and then we pick - we did a lot of research. So instead of going into another 10 countries, we pick two more that we feel more comfortable with, and that is Australia and Malaysia. Malaysia being proximity to Singapore, the language, and also we have a lot of Malaysian teammates.
Yuying Deng:
Localization is so important. And you mean Malaysian teammates who are working here and who were working for you at the point in time in Singapore?
Percy Hung:
That's right. And having local know-how is very, very important. That's why a lot of foreign companies or startups, they raise hundreds of millions of dollars, they come to Asia, they come to Southeast Asia, they think they're attacking one country but it's actually not, it's multiple countries.
Yuying Deng:
Very different from each other.
Percy Hung:
Very different from each other. We made the same mistake. And that's when we realize, "Hey, each country we definitely need to go deeper into, we need to integrate into the ecosystem and not just having very superficial touch points." We need to have local team, local muscles in order to understand. Because we are - a lot of people think that we're just a financing company, but we're more of a data - we leverage on data and we use automation to make financing easier for customers.
In fact, more than 50% - we have around 50 team members right now. I'd say around half of our team members are from Tech and Product. So they're actually building the product that you're using to automate and integrate.
I'll give you a simple example. If you're selling shirts or water bottles on your own Shopify store or Shopee, Lazada, Amazon, it's a self-serve motion for this seller to go onto the Choco Up website, sign up, integrate into all the shops. It's a one-step process. Just key in your password, give access, we can run your data, your sales data, your refund, your average order value, your average customer value. And then at the same time you have financial data, which also helps you on the revenue financing side.
So we get all this data, we run it into our own credit modeling system. And this is just a first part of how we scale. And eventually, we're trying to help a million asset-light businesses in the whole region to scale. So that's our mission.
Yuying Deng:
And would you be willing to say which country is next after Hong Kong, after Malaysia and Australia?
Percy Hung:
I mean, it's full of potential. The whole Southeast Asia is full of potential. Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia, and even Philippines is full of potential. But whether we have the resource capability, local know-how going into these regions, we probably look at a local partner to do it together. For example, Funding Societies, they changed their name in Indonesia. They look for a local partner. I think that's a smart way of doing it. We're B2B, we don't need to have our brand name logo everywhere, in every bus station. Our ultimate goal is still to help more businesses, SMEs, asset-light businesses to grow.
Yuying Deng:
Okay, fantastic Percy. I've learned a lot from you. I actually made the same mistake as well where we were spreading ourselves a bit too thin between all the different markets. So Percy, a question about HR, or rather like about culture and leadership. If you're leading a company that's growing also with a distributed team as well, it does come with its own set of challenges. So I've experienced that myself with SOFL, but for you, what are some of the biggest obstacles that you faced and how have you overcome them?
Percy Hung:
Great question. It comes with a lot of emotion, a lot of bittersweet, but also now I feel like it's a good time to talk about this as well. The biggest challenge is communication across different teams. Everyone speaks English, but everyone's definition of the same word could be different. And when you're doing it through Slack, Zoom, it's different from being in the same room. The human touch - I mean, we're a tech company, we should be very, very efficient. However, I realize the communication when we're sitting in the same office in the same room versus across different offices, there's still a gap.
Culturally, it's not very big, but I can notice, and everyone notices as well. So one thing that we try to do is the leadership team has to be very, very aware and mindful about communication gaps between their teams and the wider team. And we fly our team leaders across for important meetings.
Yuying Deng:
So you actually fly them across from country to country?
Percy Hung:
At the beginning of this year, we flew the whole leadership team into Hong Kong. There's 12 of us and we flew in for a workshop, just alignment of this year's goals. So next year will probably be in Singapore, and then the year after hopefully we can rotate.
Yuying Deng:
So this is the kind of strategic team retreat that you do on an annual basis?
Percy Hung:
It's not a retreat, it's straight out planning, like work. We plan, we did a lot of work beforehand before we even started meeting. So having face time regularly is important. And hiring - before, when you expand to different countries, we just hire quickly. And onboarding someone that doesn't have a culture fit or mismatch, I mean, it's not just for us but for the candidate, for the members as well. It's draining in terms of time, resource for both sides.
So what we have learned is we started interviewing - we take a longer time to understand, to chat. We onboarded recently a fairly senior product person and we got our business team to talk to him, we got our credit team to talk to him, we obviously have a product team, we have our tech team, with our compliance team. So it's more about understanding each other. The culture fit is important obviously, but at the same time the domain knowledge because he'll be leading. So that took a while, and when we have buy-in from the wider team, then we said okay, let's do it.
Yuying Deng:
Interesting. And do you find that it's people of a certain kind of age or maturity or background that might do better with this kind of requirement to work with team members in another country?
Percy Hung:
Yes, definitely. Obviously for entry, let's say a more junior position, we won't be going through such a deep dive or like the process because we want to make sure that we are right fit for the candidate as well. Hiring wrong, onboarding a wrong person just drains everyone else and it's an expensive lesson in terms of not just money but in terms of time.
Yuying Deng:
Got it. And Percy, how would you describe Choco Up's company culture and how do you make sure that this is consistent and cohesive across the four different countries that you're in?
Percy Hung:
Okay, I have two things to share here. One is Choco Up and another one is experience from ENT, another entrepreneur group where you and I were part of. The first one is in Choco, we go through cycles. We've been through a few cycles of so-called finding out who we are, who we were, and who we want to be. It's not like first day I try to build culture and then one year later you don't just set it down and say everybody this is what the culture is.
We had in the middle, like three, four years ago, three years ago, we had a team of probably like eight to 10 team members left together because we were not the right fit for them as well. It was a big matter. I mean, that was a very good learning lesson for us as well. We used to be more sales-driven because as a startup, if you have no sales, don't even talk funding. So we were a bit more sales-driven and when you're sales-driven, your culture, the team that you hire is a bit different.
And then now we're more tech and product driven. We even have an MSG team - Marketing, Success and Growth team. That department doesn't generate revenue directly, but we're spending a lot of resource on that because that will help us indirectly generate a lot of revenue from our core business.
Yuying Deng:
Could you explain a bit about what the MSG team does? I haven't heard this term before.
Percy Hung:
Okay, so now from like five years ago, we were really sales-driven. It bred different kind of culture. It was okay, it was useful for the time, but we need to scale, we need to grow to a different level. We want all our team members to grow 10x internally as well. When they graduate from Choco Up, they go. So and then we pivoted into a more product and process and tech-driven company, meaning all the processes, everyone has buy-in. It's more process-driven because to scale you need integration, you need tech, you need data, you need a lot of other things.
So when we pivoted to that, I think people feel a little more like we're really trying to scale a business and not just trying to make the dollar and cents. Making the dollar and cents is very important for investors, for us, for the team members, because we have ESOPs, we need the valuation to go up. So that's important, but the whole mindset changed and the turnover rate decreased by quite a lot.
Yuying Deng:
Interesting. That affected your retention?
Percy Hung:
It did. Because when you're a product-driven company and everyone is quite open about which process could help us scale, which process, why are we doing this - we're helping, if we don't scale, you're only going to help a handful of people, merchants. But now people really believe, our team members really believe that we're making an impact to the ecosystem, to the society around us. But you know, because we're still at the end of the day, we're still a financing company, whether we're leveraging on data, we're doing the old…
Percy Hung:
Whether we're leveraging on data, we're doing the old school way or we're really fully automated for a certain type of deal sizes, it's still money related. And when it's money related, being an Asian in the Asian context, there's still a certain type of stigma that is attached to it. And when you finance someone or some company, normally the lender and the borrower, they're on opposite sides. There's a bit of conflict of interest between both sides. Hence our Merchant Success and Growth team come in to educate them that hey, we're on the same side.
Yuying Deng:
To educate the customers you mean? That you're all on the same side to help?
Percy Hung:
By helping them is also educating. For example, we have so many D2C brand owners or retail owners where there's so much data, tons of data where they don't know how to analyze them. And some of them don't even have time to read their financials. We come in, we help them analyze their data, we help them clean up their financials, have their forecast. If we look at certain costs where we feel like hey, if we refer to someone else you can save 1% here, 2% there, whether it's a payment gateway or whether it's a supplier. And when they want to expand, and we feel like hey, because we have a lot of data points from industry players, if we feel like a product can sell from Singapore to Taiwan or to Hong Kong or Malaysia, we can help you with the whole process from incorporation to setting up a bank account to finding fulfillment logistics.
Yuying Deng:
Interesting, it's almost like a holistic kind of service.
Percy Hung:
Yeah, sure. On like the first thought, a lot of investors would say hey, but that's not scalable. But that's okay, we can't think too far ahead. For at least for me, if you can help this company, the retention and the customer acquisition cost will significantly drop and the bad debt situation or the NPL will significantly drop. This is to ring-fence our business. And I don't quite agree with it not being able to scale because critical mass, we have enough data points, this will be a modular, like a plug and play kind of thing. It's like a network kind of ecosystem, right? So you get an e-partner, maybe you get an IT partner like us, you just plug in your people and the companies can just scale across the region. It's just about plugging into the partnership.
Yuying Deng:
That's right. But that's very interesting and I don't believe I see other companies doing such things as well.
Percy Hung:
We learn it through the hard way because if a company is not doing well, the first course of action if you just issue legal letters and stuff, you know the repercussion. I mean, of course when someone borrows money, it's the responsibility to repay. This is supposed to be the way. However, when a business is always going up and down, and when they're going through difficulties, is there other ways to recuperate this capital instead of just going through legal action? Of course, you know, if it's fraud, if it's intentional, there's no doubt we have to do what we need to do. But if we understand if it's just a nature of a business cycle, this is where MSG comes in and says hey, let us help you. Maybe this is just a low season for you, or maybe we can tweak a little bit here and there to help you to drive your top line.
Yuying Deng:
Interesting. I would love to see how that actually works in action. Okay, so Percy, I think we've been talking about high-level things - culture, the company's mission and so on. So I'd like to talk a bit more about the nitty-gritty stuff. Right now you have team members in four different countries, all quite far apart from each other, especially Australia. So I believe that onboarding your team members can be challenging. What's your process for actually bringing new people on board? How do you handle things like IT support and equipment for everyone? And then also at the same time, when people leave as well, how do you handle that in a secure manner?
Percy Hung:
So this is something where I believe you and one of our team members has spoken about. Because when we first started, we're still doing it quite manually. And now at 50 people, we realize, and four different regions, we realize we can't do it quite manually. This is not the DNA of what a fast-growing tech company should be. And we're looking for ways to make it more efficient instead of every time someone comes aboard, our HR has to do everything from scratch. It's consuming her time too. She should be, we should be empowering her to be spending her time on higher return ROI kind of recruiting, the right people, and so on. So this is something where I feel like we have to speak to you more to pick your brain.
Yuying Deng:
Okay, happy to.
Percy Hung:
Because at this stage, we're still of course, because every office has its own needs. For example, our Taiwan is mostly backend, engineers. In Hong Kong, we have our credit team and a lot of HR admin. And then Singapore, it's a lot of client-facing partnerships and account managers. So the function is a bit different. And Malaysia is a bit of tech and partnership. So we're still trying to figure out what is the most effective way because the onboarding package, you have to learn about different teams, not just the hardware but also the software in terms of knowledge, culture, all the different types of teams and people.
Yuying Deng:
I think that's the part where I find it a bit challenging to get everyone in sync and aligned. Are we at a scale where we can have culture people to hire them? We're not at that level yet. That's why I think leveraging on certain tools and third-party options like yours, I think that should be at least for the short to midterm for us.
Percy Hung:
Yep, and it definitely looks like you're going to scale to other countries as well. You just mentioned Taiwan, so actually you guys are in five countries, not just four.
Yuying Deng:
We don't have business operations in Taiwan, so it's just like people, team members there.
Percy Hung:
Okay, got it.
Yuying Deng:
I mean, Taiwan's a fantastic place to have team members in. I love visiting Taiwan. So one of the things I did want to check with you, Percy, it's something that we are thinking about ourselves as well, and that is like revenue-based financing and regional expansion. I know that you guys offer revenue-based financing and I think that the last time we spoke, some of the big e-commerce names are actually using you guys to expand regionally, right? Whether it's team-wise or whether it's business-wise around the region. So can you tell me a bit more about the benefits of using revenue-based financing for expansion as opposed to the more traditional method, which is probably equity for startups at least, or like cash, which is for maybe SMEs?
Percy Hung:
Okay, again, there's no right or wrong in terms of which type of financing. It really depends on your business needs, whether you're in your business nature. If you're a startup, really deep tech startup, or if you are a retail brand that wants to grow, or if you're just a brick and mortar coffee chain, you require different types of funding. So it depends on the need.
I'll share from our own experience. Our biggest target audience is e-commerce. E-commerce consists of 60%, 60-70% of our clients. And then we have some that are digital business or tech startups, and then we have some traditional retailers, and then we have some special cases where we look at it individually.
So the bulk of our business, our clients, we have digital footprints where we can tap in online or offline. If it's online, it's easy through your Amazon store, Shopify store, Shopee, Lazada, WooCommerce, Magento, all this. And then we tap into your Xero accounts, your QuickBooks, your Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, and we can run our analysis, credit modeling. And then this is one type, and then the other type, it's some of it, it's more offline or tech startups, you know, to other types that we fund.
So the biggest pain point I see for them is because these are relatively new types of industry that banks do not know how to underwrite. And for them to go get funding, it's most likely, "Hey, I need to give out some equity if I go to an equity investor." And equity is the most expensive type. If you're an e-commerce or brand, you're unlikely going to use your equity to buy inventory or spend it on ads. It doesn't - that's the most expensive way to do it.
I think debt financing for them will be better. And debt financing can include invoice financing, factoring, deal financing, or even a traditional vanilla loan. So there's no fixed way, but this is more like debt. So for revenue-based, it's a bit of a hybrid. Although it's still a debt, we behave like an equity investor. It's like a buy now, pay later concept that many people are familiar with.
We're like a B2B version of BNPL. So we give you, say, $100,000 to procure inventory and then to spend on Google Ads to prime you for your Christmas, Black Friday, or Double 11, Double 12, you know. And then when you sell, as you sell, we take a percentage of your sales. So when you have more sales, you pay back a bit faster. If you have lower sales, you don't have the pressure to pay us back immediately. So this is more of a win-win situation.
However, I mean, RBF, revenue-based financing, it's our bread and butter. We have helped, I'll say close to a thousand different businesses, merchants so far, and we expect that to double every year hopefully.
Yuying Deng:
Wow, that is a fantastic growth rate.
Percy Hung:
Thank you. That's we're scalable because of our tech and product really, and AI. So one key part is when we speak to our clients, we realize revenue-based financing is good. However, there are a lot of other needs that they have, and so we started developing new financial products. For example, insurance-backed invoice financing, which a lot of our clients wanted to use. So we started developing that. We have some companies, brands, or startups that they say, "Hey, I want to grow my top line. I would like to acquire another smaller competitor." So you do M&A kind of financing as well.
We do, and because we know, for us, the number one criteria, actually one of the hard mandates for us is, as long as you're revenue generating, we can structure something for you. Because business is forever changing and moving, we don't want to be like..
Yuying Deng:
Hey, this is a $100,000 loan. This is the principal plus interest payment every month. I don't care how you do it, which is what the bank would do, right? This is my vanilla loan: you take it or you leave it.
Percy Hung:
Yes, so that's the creativity behind the way that you can structure it and customize it for each of the different business models. Our Tieken product really comes in when a lot of these so-called e-commerce sellers or digital businesses don’t want to talk to anyone—loan officers or whatever. Some people don’t even want to chat. They can just go to our platform where they can self-serve, and we can reach a wider audience. However, when the business owner wants to chat or learn more about other businesses, that's where our customer service team is there 24/7 to provide support. We try to see every business as a partner instead of just a client.
Yuying Deng:
That’s definitely a great philosophy. I'm going to learn from you over there. I’ve seen you grow as a founder as well and as a friend. I would be interested to hear from your point of view how you view your role as a founder and how it has evolved as Cho has grown from year zero until today—five or six years later.
Percy Hung:
Yeah, it’s been about five to six years now. I’d say for the first two to three years, it was during the honeymoon stage. Things were going really, really well because it was something new. Everyone wanted to try it. But, is it real? What's the word? Is this because your business model and what you’re doing is right, or is it just by luck that it’s good? I think it’s the latter.
When problems arose, that was during the boom period of VC funding and all that. Sometimes, we got carried away as a team—including myself—and I need to take ownership for that. It was a big learning experience. So when things are going well, you still have to keep an open mind to learn and accept criticism and change. In the first two years, we were definitely not integrated; we weren’t tech-enabled, and we weren't leveraging data. We were making money, but we were still doing it more traditionally. It wasn’t aligned with our mission.
We went back to our North Star: how to empower a million asset-like businesses to grow. That was a wake-up call. We started biting the bullet after the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. I still remember that. Everyone was just focused on keeping the momentum going, but it was the toughest time for us. We restructured and had a lot of difficult conversations, including having to let people go. People wanted to leave. I think without going through that, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Looking back, we had to optimize, and there are still going to be challenges ahead. But what we went through two or three years ago really prepared us as a team.
I’m very grateful that our turnover rate dropped significantly over the past year.
Yuying Deng:
That definitely shows a level of maturity in the company culture and in you as a founder as well.
Percy Hung:
Thank you. Emotions have been a big part of my experience and of a lot of team members. Learning how to contain those emotions and not let them affect the wider team has been crucial. It’s helped us build more trust and even helped my family as well. It translates not just at work but outside of work too.
Yuying Deng:
I can definitely tell having known you for quite a few years. Percy, are there any other things you might want to share with our audience about distributed work, the future of work, or about Choco's future?
Percy Hung:
Since today’s topic is about scaling up, I think a lot of people feel that scaling is just about driving top-line revenue. However, we’ve seen, touched, and talked to a lot of businesses where scaling is not just about dollars. The dollar is a good byproduct and definitely a goal we should focus on, but scaling sustainably is more important. If you spike your growth for a quarter or two through shortcuts, it might come back to bite you.
You shouldn’t hire the wrong people; that’s the most important lesson. I’ll share a quick story about an Amazon D2C brand owner that we funded. For a local brand to enter the Amazon US market, you need to invest a lot of money for three to six months. Three months isn’t enough. When you start selling on Amazon US, the market is huge. If people search for your item, you might be on page 27. How do you get to page 25? How do you get to number three or two? It’s not just about giving a million dollars to Amazon to solve the problem. It takes a lot more than that.
You need to be patient. If you open one coffee shop and it does well, that’s great, but if you open a second one and it works, it could still just be luck. We need to keep it real with ourselves. We can lie to the world, but we cannot lie to ourselves. If the business isn’t doing well, there has to be a reason. Take ownership. If you’re not in a rush from a VC that requires you to go through multiple rounds and exit within five to seven years, I’d rather maintain the status quo than rush to scale.
Yuying Deng:
Thanks for that advice, Percy. I think it will be beneficial for a lot of our listeners who are likely looking for venture backing for their companies. Where can our listeners find you? Are you active on LinkedIn or elsewhere?
Percy Hung:
I’m open to connecting on LinkedIn, email, WhatsApp—I'm approachable. I don’t mind if people private message me on my personal WhatsApp, email, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Yuying Deng:
Great! We know where to look for you then. Thank you so much, Percy.
Percy Hung:
Thank you!
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