For the last 18 months, we have been trying to improve the way people find services in Malaysia.
It has been an exciting and immensely fulfilling journey, and I am proud to have played a part in building a community of awesome service professionals, along with many satisfied customers who have hired them.
As of last week, that journey just got a lot more interesting.
We got funded
To help us expand and improve our offerings, Gobi Partners, one of China’s leading venture capitalists (along with other joint investors) decided to invest USD1 million into our business.
They share our belief that everyone deserves better services, not just in Malaysia, but across the South East Asian region.
This investment will allow us to make that happen.
When we shared the news last week, we were overwhelmed by the coverage in global news portals like TechCrunch, Tech in Asia, Echelon, and Deal Street Asia, among others.
Naturally, the Recommend.my (formally RecomN.com) team in Malaysia and Sejasa.com team in Indonesia are absolutely ecstatic about this, as it enables us to grow faster and serve many more thousands of customers like you who are seeking for good quality services for the important things in your lives.
Looking back
Over the last 18 months, it struck me that our journey had so many ups and downs.
We were honoured to be chosen for Cradle’s Grant program, MaGIC’s e@Stanford program, as well as nominated as Echelon’s Startup of The Year in Malaysia.
At the same time, we went through many hair-raising moments (let’s call them educational moments).
Like when software problems caused people to get random emails. Or when we went down over an entire weekend and our pros couldn’t check on their jobs.
Through it all, one thing has kept us going – you. The ones among you who wrote back and told us how happy you were with the fast responses, how you appreciated the reviews and ratings from others, and how thankful you were about the good quality service professionals you hired.
We are also very grateful to those who gave us feedback on what wasn’t working, which service professionals were not performing, and how we could improve to serve you better.
From the bottom of our hearts, thank you – we formed this startup to transform the services industry and we couldn’t have come this far without your support.
So what’s next?
We will keep growing, getting better, and finding more awesome service professionals for you. We have got our work cut out for us – but we still believe we are on the right track.
One day, when anyone can hire services without worry of disappointment, we can say that we had a part to play in making that happen.
