Jay: This week’s show guest is Mark Koh, who is the co-founder and CEO of Supahands. Supahands is a service that helps companies across the globe scale, increase productivity through the outsourcing of tedious and repetitive business processes. They do this by providing clients with a large talent pool of SupaAgents that span across Southeast Asia to assist with tasks such as database management, content moderating, and image annotation. Mark, welcome to the show, man.

Mark: Hi, Jay. Thanks for having me.

Jay: Cool. Why don’t you give our audience a little bit of background of yourself — where you came from, what you studied in school or didn’t study, and if you had any jobs prior to becoming an entrepreneur.

Mark: I guess my background… I’m Malaysian. Born in Malaysia, grew up in Australia, did school over there, worked in banking. So not the most interesting job in my early years, but I guess it sort of gave me a bit of corporate experience. I then decided to move back to Southeast Asia because, I guess, it was becoming a pretty interesting space. I think things were really starting to boom. The market was starting to heat up. Tech started becoming a bit more interesting in Southeast Asia. So I thought, hey, let’s move back to the region, and let’s see what we could build.

When I first went back, I set up an ecommerce business — a streetwear company — doing retail clothing and a whole bunch of other things. After a few more years, decided to set up a call center.

Jay: This is in Malaysia?

Mark: Yeah, in Malaysia. That’s right. So I was essentially doing call center work for Australian companies. Partway through that business, I realized there must be a better way to build an outsourcing company or build something that’s a lot more scalable that didn’t have the capital intensity and the high attrition rate of humans sitting behind a desk.

So we decided to crowdsource our workforce, decided the find people who could work remotely to help us. So we shut that business down and set up Supahands. So we’ve been around for about three and a half years now.

Jay: Very interesting, Mark. Now you have family in Malaysia, I gather?

Mark: Yeah, that’s correct.

Jay: Okay. And then you were doing banking and this sort of thing in Australia at the time.

Mark: Yeah, that’s right.

Jay: Cool. Look, I used to be a banker too. And I think a lot of my audience and my subscribers, they’re well familiar with this sort of thing. But I actually have a soft spot for bankers that have come out because, for the most part, I’m just jealous because it’s actually difficult to come out of the banking system and just kind of do a startup. And so when I meet ex-bankers that are doing interesting startups, I actually really enjoy hearing what their process is because I think…maybe it’s not just banking, but every industry, when you’re working for someone else and if you’re more entrepreneurial, you’re always thinking, “How am I going to get out?” or, “Maybe I should try this and that on the side.” And then, when you finally do get out and are starting to see some traction, then it’s always heartwarming for me to hear.

It’s interesting when you said that you originally started with call centers because a couple of my friends do that sort of thing in the Philippines, and from what I’ve gathered, it’s actually a fairly lucrative business, no?

Mark: Yeah, it is. It is a good business. I think, definitely in the Philippines, even in Malaysia, it’s quite a big business. But I wanted a more technology-driven business, something that wasn’t as traditional as outsourcing, and we decided to move the business into something that was a bit more interesting, a bit more different.

Jay: Right. So if you basically were thinking I want to take this — whether it’s a call center or maybe expand the suite of offerings and actually make it into a technology-based solution, what was your first step? Do you have any tech background yourself? Or did you have to hire, find a co-founder, that sort of thing?

Mark: Yeah. No tech background. Essentially it was putting a bunch of friends together — guys in tech, guys in consulting — and we built the team. We launched the first product, and here we are.

Jay: Was it clear? The first offering was basically let’s replace the call center with—

Mark: That was never the intention because call center businesses, I feel, will remain for the next couple of years. But what we wanted to do was move away from calls and focus on data. So anything to do with data that can be worked on virtually. So we wanted to empower people who could work from home, working on little pieces of data for company across the world.

Jay: I see. Interesting. Why don’t you have us sort of the 101. I know I gave a very broad-strokes overview before we started talking. Let’s dive in a little deeper. Tell us exactly what the offerings are that you guys have and how, potentially, a client can use your services. So maybe you could walk us through the user experience as well?

Mark: Sure. I guess today, the business is at a point where we help companies digitize. We help companies clean lots and lots of data points. We help companies train data for machine learning applications. We help companies tag, annotate, label lots and lots of data points, and it ranges from images to audio to video. And what we do is, with our platform and our technology, we’re able to break these large projects down into very small micro tasks and feed them across our workforce, across our platform to different people to work on.

Jay: I see. Is there a good example of an ideal client of your company? I know you work from everything from SMEs to large multinationals. So what is your most popular type of client that comes to you for help?

Mark: Essentially, a digital company that might have lots of, say, products that need to be curated. So when merchants upload products on ecommerce platforms, it comes in… They send through images. They send through different data points. So what we need to do is to basically ensure it’s clean. We need to make sure it’s QCed and qualified and verified using our tech and using our humans. So that’s a very typical example of the kind of work.

Apart from that, we’ve got machine-learning companies. In this current time, lots of companies are moving to the machine learning space. And they then realize that you need a lot of clean data, and it’s not so easy to get data clean. And we, essentially, act as the sanity check for a lot of these machines. We receive data from different companies. We help them to annotate it and clean it before it can be uploaded into their models itself.

Jay: Alright. So let’s do a really, really basic example. You mentioned an ecommerce-type company. Let’s say — I don’t know. Would an example, Mark, like—

Mark: Let’s say a large ecommerce company with lots and lots of merchants uploading products on a daily basis.

Jay: Right. So any one of the large retailers, let’s say — or even medium-sized — that have a bunch of different products, uploading to their site, that their customers then are coming to their site. A bunch of page views, trying to click and buy, purchase products off their website.

Mark: Exactly.

Jay: So if this is a customer of yours, they come to you, and they’re like, “Okay, Mark, I need up with my data.” What can you do for them? You mentioned the term “clean” data. What exactly does that mean?

Mark: What we do is we insure that the tags that they have on the products match the frontend of their website. So, for example, we match the color of a t-shirt, for example. We match the occasion that they might be using that type of clothing for. It could be electronics, for example, where we might need to insure that, say, the phone that they’re uploading matches the description or the features of that phone that’s on their website itself. So that’s how we insure it’s clean data and a clean product.

Jay: I see. Let’s just take a real quick example of like a clothing company, say something like UNIQLO, for example or something like that. So they have all these products—

Mark: It would more of a marketplace, actually.

Jay: Okay, marketplace. Something like Amazon. They have just a bunch of different verticals, every category you could imagine under the sun. And within that, there’s all these different products with all different colors and sizes and shapes. So there’s basically just a boatload of data, and there is… I guess, if normally companies would want to do that, is it usually…as they scale, is it just a workforce that basically uploads the photo and adds the description and tag and then that’s how the dataset gets built initially?

Mark: Yeah. I think it’s a combination of tech and also workforce. You do need localized knowledge, especially if the data is being uploaded from, say, Southeast Asia. You do need the understanding of what different things are used for.

Jay: So let’s say Amazon comes to you, and they’re like, “Okay, Mark. I need your help.” I’m just curious as to… I apologize because I’m not that familiar with the data management side of these businesses. But I’m just curious as to what point do these companies have to… What’s the benefit of using Supahands versus basically them beefing up their internal department? Is it a cost thing? Or is there actual superiority in the technology that you provide?

Mark: Yeah, it’s a combination. One is definitely the technology, the speed, that we’re able to do things at. The accuracy — I think that’s a key thing that everyone focused on. It’s the accuracy of the quality checks that we go through, the speed that we can get it done at, and at the scale. So we’re able to scale things up and down whenever the client needs to. So during occasions like Christmas, for example, when there’s a whole bunch of products that need to be uploaded really quickly, we’re able to scale up and scale down whenever they need to. So I think these are the three key things that these companies look for. And that’s why they’d rather pass it on to us who are experts in this field than do it themselves internally and having to build their own workforce and build technology internally.

Jay: Okay. Got it. Understood. So I guess this would be… This is interesting. I guess at some point when the business starts scaling, and it’s basically a cost thing where it’s like I could just hire Supahands, and they’re probably going to do a much better job for a lot cheaper than me trying to piece together and in-house tech team to do this.

Mark: That’s right.

Jay: So how does your company’s revenue model… Is it basically a contract? They hire you for a certain period of time?

Mark: It’s usually… A lot of the work in ongoing in nature. So you’ve got data uploaded and passed onto us on a daily basis. So we are on longer-term contracts, but we like to offer the flexibility to different clients, depending on what they need. So essentially, what we try to do is to help these companies accelerate their charge towards digitization, and we’re able to then scale up and scale down whenever they need that to happen. So we do have contracts with each of the different clients.

Jay: Got it. Tell us a little bit about the SupaAgents. I guess they work for your company, right?

Mark: They don’t work for us directly. I guess you could call them agents on our platform. To they come and go whenever they need to. We curate the workforce. That’s a key USB that we have compared to a lot of other guys in the space. We insure a curated workforce that comes through, and the localization of this workforce within this part of the world.

Jay: I see. And this supplements your own company’s… Do you have your own agents? Or you’re actually, literally, just the tech and the middle man?

Mark: We’re the tech in the middle.

Jay: I got it.

Mark: So we’re an asset light business, essentially.

Jay: Got it. Understood now. Sorry, Mark, it’s taken me a little while to actually understand your full business model. So basically on the frontend, you’re providing this service, but also on the agent side, you’re basically providing something like…

Mark: We’re creating jobs.

Jay: Right. Like a Fiverr where people can actually be hired for these tasks.

Mark: That’s correct.

Jay: Got it. Now I fully understand. So how does the payment work? I guess on the client’s side, you have that that you just talked about. How do the agents get paid then for their work? Is it just on a contract basis? Is there any sort of bidding process for them to earn jobs?

Mark: It’s essentially for each unit that they complete. So a successful completion of work, they do get paid for that. And the platform is able to help us to decide what the amount and what the payment terms are.

Jay: Okay. And how do you handle the quality control of the agents that are doing the work for you?

Mark: So we built multiple models internally to help us do that. So I guess it’s the platform, the technology that we’ve got, that helps us to create the efficiency to help us to curate and QC the kind of work. But I think the curated workforce that we also have, how we put the agents through different tests, do help us to insure that we’ve got high-quality guys who do the work. We’ve got routing technology that helps us to route the right job to the right person at the right time. Because when we collect data on all the different agents that we’ve got, we know who is good at doing what particular type of work. We’ve got historical data on different agents so we know how accurate each person is and how much quality each person is able to output.

Jay: I see. What is the application process like for if you want to be an agent? How does that work?

Mark: It’s quite simple, actually. You just jump on the platform, Supahands.com, and hit the SupaAgent side of things, and you’re able to go through a quick questionnaire, a couple of assessments. You might get selected to jump on. And then there are different hoops that you’ve got to pass through after that as well. It’s fairly straightforward.

Jay: Very interesting. So I guess if you’re in that space, if you have a skill set, then you probably will have heard of Supahands. Now are there… I imagine there are competitors in what you’re doing because it sounds pretty sophisticated. I’m sure that there are other people that have thought of it…or maybe not. I don’t know.

Mark: There are. I think around the world and globally, there are quite a few competitors in the US, in Europe, and in India as well. However, I believe that each of us have our own USP, and each one specializes in different things. It’s definitely a growing space, and I think there are a lot of companies trying to digitize a lot more and are accumulating a whole lot of data. So that means a lot more job creation for companies like mine, across the world, actually. And everyone uses technology in a very different way to streamline, to create the efficiency that’s needed.

Jay: Got it. Would you say… What would you say your strength and USP would be? Is that within Malaysia? Within Southeast Asia? Does it touch Australia? How do you stack up against the competitors?

Mark: Our clients are based globally. A lot of them are Southeast Asian, but we are starting to get a lot of clients from Europe and the US, from Australia, of course. Our workforce, primarily, is in Southeast Asia. So we focus a lot on building the community in Malaysia, in the Philippines, in Indonesia. We’re looking at Thailand. I think what we can offer over here would be that cultural understanding, the different languages, because everyone in Southeast Asia speaks three or four different languages. In Malaysia, you’ve got guys who speak Mandarin, Cantonese. You’ve got Bahasa; you’ve got English. So it’s a very diverse community in Southeast Asia. So I guess that’s where we focus on in terms of our pool of labor. And we like to insure that everyone sort of feels part of the community that we’re building.

Jay: Got it. I feel like that’s another…with the language thing, I feel like if you’re a marketplace or any sort of ecommerce online, those are basically additional toggles. I feel like every website now needs to have a Mandarin option.

Mark: Yeah, that’s right. I think our clients generally are not limited to guys in ecommerce. A lot of companies now are also trying to build their own machine-learning applications. And we’ve become a very good partner for them, especially when they’re trying to scale up.

Jay: Cool. You mentioned just briefly just now about where you’re seeing traction and where you’re looking to expand. So what are your current 2018 goals for Supahands? And then what other longer-term goals — maybe if it’s countries or regions you’re looking to expand to or different offerings or different ways that you’re trying to grow your business? What are some things that you guys are working on that you can tell our audience a little bit about?

Mark: Definitely trying to scale up the SupaAgent workforce across Southeast Asia, trying to get deeper and build a larger variety of languages, cultures, nationalities, skills within this region itself. Also to try to solidify our position in Southeast Asia or Asia Pacific, for that matter, because now we’re starting to expand a lot more into different countries across this region from, say, India to China. And also, we’re looking at, say, potentially the US market for partnerships. So we’ve been trying to find partners across different regions to help us scale that part of the business in terms of a client base.

Jay: Got it. Cool. Mark, I want to switch gears a little bit here for the last segment of the interview. You guys have gone through the 500 Startups Class, which is how we were introduced. We’re good friends with them here at the show, obviously. I know a number of the partners there. They did highlight the fact that you guys were one of the very select few that have gone through the Alibaba eFounders Program. As part of this series that we’re doing in conjunction with them, I just wanted to ask you about the program. How was that experience there? What were your thoughts? What did you learn? Are there any good takeaways that maybe you could share with the audience?

Mark: Yeah. I think the Alibaba program was extremely interesting. Going into it, we weren’t sure what to expect. And it was a two-week immersion program, and each day, it was essentially classes that ran from early in the morning until late in the evening. We spoke to directors of different business units. We spoke to the managers, the operational guys. So it was a full immersion into the Alibaba culture, the Alibaba ecosystem.

What I found most interesting was essentially the culture and the value system that they focused on a lot. And that took up two days of the two week program. It was actually just talking about culture, talking about values. It made me realize and made me think about how I could improve the culture within our business itself. How do I make sure that part of…I guess, there’s a long-term future for and it’s pinned down, and it’s a lot more structured rather than something a bit loose. And I think that’s something that a lot of us founders take for granted in the early days because we’re trying to build the business itself. Looking back, I’m thinking maybe we should have focused a lot more on the culture of the business, the value system that we have. So I think that’s a key takeaway from the Alibaba program itself.

Jay: That’s a great point, because I think that if you do case studies of the most successful startups, it’s pretty binary. You hear about the ones that are just awful places to work because the culture is just really bad. And I feel like it does come top down. And I also feel like, to your point, people are very focused on growth, especially when it’s a startup, and you’re in funding, and you’re taking investors’ money, and you just want to hit the metrics and this sort of thing. And I think it is helpful to actually be cognizant of what kind of culture do I want to build here at this company. Even as a founder or a leader, how do you project that to your subordinates as well. So that’s pretty cool.

Were there any specifics about Alibaba’s culture that you appreciated that you might want to emulate in your own company?

Mark: Something which was interesting was… Because Alibaba.com is a B2B business or was launched as a B2B business. And as they continued to grow, they launched a C2C business, which was called Taobao.com. And essentially, what they did was to get people to think in an opposite way. Because the B2B and C2C is extremely different business. They had this things where they got people to stand upside down or do handstands in the office space. Initially, it was to get the blood circulating within the body itself. But after a while, they realized this is something that we could use as part of the culture of Taobao, which is thinking upside-down or taking a different point of view of how you look at life. I found that really interesting. It was a good application to an active activity, essentially.

Jay: That’s pretty cool. It sounds like a great program. I’m glad you got a lot out of it.

Mark, as we look to wrap up here, two final questions for you. The second-to-last one that I always like to lead off with, especially when I’m interviewing entrepreneurs that have found some success in what they’re doing, for the those in the audience that are listening in that maybe are still banking and want to break up and try to maybe do the entrepreneur thing and follow in your footsteps, what’s one piece of advice that you could give them?

Mark: I think it would be adaptability. I think that’s very key at this time of life. Things are changing so quickly. New technology is coming through, and you’ve just got to be adaptive to what’s going on in the marketspace. You need to know what’s going on in the West and how you can adapt that to the East.

Jay: Absolutely. That’s a good point. And even just personal adaptability as well. As an entrepreneur, there’s up and downs. There’s always going to be failures. So to be able to be nimble and agile and all that, I think it’s important as well.

Mark: Exactly.

Jay: Awesome, man. It’s been great getting you on the show. And thanks so much for sharing about your company, Supahands. We’re definitely going to keep an eye out for it and follow your progress. What’s the best place that people can find you, follow you, or learn more about what you’re working on there a Supahands?

Mark: Easily on Facebook, Supahands.com, or Instagram itself.

Jay: Okay. And you’re on LinkedIn or any of those networks?

Mark: LinkedIn as well. Either Mark Koh or Supahands.

Jay: Fantastic. We’ll get that all linked up in the show notes.

Mark: Cool.

Jay: Thanks again, Mark. We appreciate it, and best of luck.

Mark: Thanks, Jay.

Jay: Alright. Take care.