Jay: This week’s show guest is Gideon Chutinaton, co-founder and CEO of Flow Account. Flow Account is a cloud-based accounting platform designed for small to medium-sized enterprises to track payments and invoices. Flow Account’s particular appeal is that it is built for Thailand from the ground up. Online forms, invoices, processes, etc., are all geared towards Thai system. And the platform is fully bilingual. Gideon, welcome to the show.

Gideon: Hi, Jay. Thank you very much for having me.

Jay: Thanks for coming on. Maybe first you could give us a little bit of background of yourself — where you’re from, what did you study, how did you become an entrepreneur.

Gideon: I studied computer science during my university years. So I graduated with a Bachelor’s in computer science but I always really enjoyed running my own business, so entrepreneurship was something that I chose as something that I could pursue my passion or could get to do the things I always wanted to do.

Once I graduated, I did a couple of things. I went to China, learned some Chinese, worked there for a couple of years, came back, started my own company. Throughout the course of running your own company, you have to do accounting. And so that’s where it started.

After doing my own accounting through all the difficult softwares available in Thailand, I tried to use foreign software which are not made for local workflows and practices, we decided to try making our own.

Jay: That’s basically how a lot of the greatest startups for found, because they are solving a personal pain point. Right? Gideon, you’re originally from Thailand?

Gideon: Yes, I’m from Thailand.

Jay: And you grew up and you studied in Thailand as well?

Gideon: Yes, I studied in Thailand. I went to an international school. You get to learn a lot of English going to a Thai international school. It’s taught in English, so that’s where we learned.

Jay: I was going to say your English is excellent. It sounds like you were actually educated abroad. Did you spend any time abroad?

Gideon: Not much. I spent some time in Singapore but just a couple of months.

Jay: How receptive were your parents about you becoming an entrepreneur versus maybe going into something more traditional?

Gideon: They were pretty open because my dad’s a doctor. So since I didn’t study medicine, he said, “Whatever you want to do.”

Jay: So he already wrote you off.

Gideon: Pretty much. So you go do what whatever you want to do.

Jay: Right. Okay. So you said that basically you always had an entrepreneurial itch. So you kind of wanted to always do your own thing. Right? Now remind us again. Tell us again about your personal pain point that you decided that Thailand needs a better way to do their accounting. What was that story? Give us a story.

Gideon: Okay. We started Flow Account about four years back. Back then, the de facto setup for accounting software is desktop-based. And so if you rewind, certain countries like the States or like the other countries where cloud accounting is very popular, we’re, more or less, ten years behind.

So back then, there was no online solution for anything. Accounting solution, desktop accounting solutions were specially designed for accountants. Over the course of running my own business, I bought a couple of software to try out and tried to see if it would fit what I do. But, more or less, the software, many of them are designed for professionals, for people who actually know what they’re doing.

Jay: That’s right. What was the business you were running again?

Gideon: Oh, I had a media company. I did some training, and I did some advertising.

Jay: In Thailand.

Gideon: Yes, in Thailand. So my first company, I imported stuff from China to resell in Thailand. So I did trading for a couple of years, and then I had an advertising company. We did media production and videos, short films and all that. Because we were in a creative industry, our teams tend to be very small. So we had a less than ten-person team. When you have such a small team, the owner always ends up doing the accounting. Sometimes you have staff. They stay for a year or so. After you train them, they leave. Then you end up doing it.

Jay: That’s right.

Gideon: So over the course of five… We ran the business for five to eight years. So over the course of working, running my own business for about eight years, you learn how to do basic accounting, and basic accounting is not that difficult. But in Thailand, at that point in time, four years back, there was no software designed for the entrepreneur to do their own basic accounting. Accounting was always you had to deal with a full suite, whether you were ready or not.

Jay: So you basically had to hire an accountant to do your books?

Gideon: Right. And so in Thailand, the desktop accounting software were designed specifically for if your company had an accountant, and most companies with accountants are actually much bigger in size.

Jay: Yeah, that’s right. If you think about these multinationals, they might have accounting software, but they problem use… Not even multinational. Maybe if you’re a well-established business, you’re going to use a Freshbooks or one of these types of accounting software, but you will have someone that you’ve hired in-house to do the accounting because they have to navigate through that platform. Right?

Gideon: Exactly. And so the likes of Freshbooks are not available in Thailand. Even though we could use their platform, it doesn’t work with Thai workflows. In Thailand, we have invoices, billing notes. We have withholding tax. We have a lot of things that are what I call “local practice” — local workflows. And it’s very hard to say, as a software vendor, you want to change the way people have been working for the past 30 years. And it’s not only change your own company, but you have to change everyone around you, everyone you invoice, anyone you collect money from. And so it’s very difficult to work on a foreign workflow.

We have concepts of… We’re still using a lot of paper. So everything has original, has a copy. Everything still has to be rubber stamped and properly signed. And so with all these Asian concepts, many times foreign software is for accounting. They just don’t work around here.

Jay: That’s right. So you basically… This was a very, very real life pain point that you went through, I guess, with your media company or what have you. You realized that, look, there is a situation available, an opportunity for technology to basically come in and solve a massive pain point for people at scale.

Gideon: Right. An even bigger reason to pursue such a project or such a startup is that, if you look at a big picture, it’s really sad that a whole nation of 70, 80 million people don’t have the basic accounting software that the likes of Freshbooks, the likes of Zero, Quickbooks… And so our nation is very far behind. And it’s hard for our entrepreneurs to compete, just because we don’t have the basic infrastructure to invoice, to make quotations, to manage your business. And so we see this as an even bigger goal of what we’re trying to do. We actually help someone businesses, or people who want to be business owners, easily become one.

Jay: That’s right. You realized the plight of all your fellow entrepreneurs within Thailand. This is a greater calling, a greater problem that you’re solving.

At what point did you decide, “I’m going to step away from the media company, and I’m going to pursue this full time?”

Gideon: We started… We did our MAP in about six months, four to six months. We launched, and we were actually very fortunate. We won a few competitions. We won a local competition. We were in the top 10 at Echelon the Singapore event in 2015. And so that really proved to us that something as simple as fixing a basic, fundamental need of an entrepreneur could be a viable business. Because if you look back then, startups in Thailand wasn’t that big of a thing. And the probability of being able to get funding was still very low. And so we set out to say “Hey, we’re going to do this. This is useful. We think it’s useful. We’ll probably find a way to survive somehow. So if we can’t survive, we’ll just go find more work.” So that’s the mentality of how we started. And most of the other Thai startups during many years back started on the same logic as well. If it’s good, we’ll probably figure something out later on.

Jay: That’s right. Especially being somewhere like Thailand where, like you said, there was limited access to venture capital funding and this sort of thing. You went out of way. It was Echelon that you said that you went to?

Gideon: Right.

Jay: Which is E27. These go-getters from your country are the ones that are probably thriving right now.

So tell us about Flow Account. Obviously, the concept we understand now. Who did you start it with? Did you go on your own? Did you find a business partner? What’s your team like?

Gideon: We currently have a team of about 25, 26 people. We started out with three founders. So it’s me, my friend who I started university with, and my brother. All of us, we all had our own businesses. And so we knew that this was something useful.

We were a small team of five or six for over a year. Then we got some funding. We won the E27 event, and we were able to meet Singaporean investors, which led us to our first investment from Golden Gate Ventures in Singapore. So that really made us realize that there is much greater potential than what we think we can achieve. So it’s been a great journey ever since.

Jay: Absolutely. It’s so exciting. When you talk about cloud accounting…we talked about Freshbooks earlier and this sort of thing. For you, it was very localized. So it’s basically that Thai people did not have this sort of support. Obviously, when you’re thinking about building out your business, isn’t there a fear that maybe a Freshbooks with, all of sudden, roll out a Thai language platform?

Gideon: Yes, definitely, and I’m sure they are looking at all the countries around the world. It’s just a choice of where to go first. Also, when they come in, are we ready to compete, or are we on a level that we can compete or not. But the main reason behind this is that we really believe that if we properly understand our users in Thailand, accounting is something that is different for every country. And the people who are able to crack it have to put a huge amount of effort. It’s not like a SaaS sales tool that you can put online and anyone can adopt.

So basically, in Thailand, what we do is the lengths we take to adopt a user is ridiculous. We do a lot. We do weekly-monthly workshops. We train about 2,000 small-business owners every year — so about 200 a month. We have a call center support. They call us six days a week. We teach them how to use the computer. Half of the questions are how to use a computer; the other half are how to use our software; and another area is how to do accounting. So you really handhold the user.

Coming from a global perspective, it’s not easy to set up operations in every country, so we believe that because we believe in the market, our market in our own country, when we invest in it, we believe that we’re here for the long run as well. We’re local. You don’t see us going anywhere else, and there’s no decisions to say, “Hey, let’s close down this country and open in another one.” This is home. Our plans are long-term, and we believe that, long-term, we’ll succeed.

Jay: You know what? There’s something that be said for that, Gideon. We’ve seen this time and time again in different markets in different locations where multinationals try to come in and steamroll their way in just because they have achieved it in the US and maybe Europe. They think they can come in. But Thailand is a very nuanced market, and you guys have expertise there. So I think in the long run, as long as the tech is on par with whatever any competitor brings in, you guys will win.

Let’s talk a little bit about the user experience there at Flow Account. You mentioned SMEs, small-to-medium enterprises. Is that your target audience, target customer?

Gideon: Yes, our target customer is basically the small business owner. In Thailand, I would say businesses with fewer than ten employees. That’s our main target customer.

Jay: Let’s say I’m a small-medium enterprise in Thailand, and I want to onboard onto your platform. Why don’t you walk us through that process?

Gideon: Okay. Sign up is free. We have a free membership model. So you can sign up for a free version which allows you to do invoicing — quotations and invoices and billing notes. And then if you want to do more features, you can pay us. We charge about $30 a year for expenses and then $30 for payroll and so on and so forth. So the whole package costs about $60, more or less, per company.

What we do with onboarding is once a user comes on our platform, we look at their activities. We look at what they do and do not do. We qualify them, and we actually contact them. So we give them a call and say, “How can I help you? I see you’ve come into our system. What are your problems? Is there anything that we can help?” We schedule demos, and we schedule them to visit our workshops and so on and so forth.

Jay: I see. I’ve been to Thailand. It’s obviously a very big tourist destination for Asians. I’ve been to Bangkok and Phuket and the likes, but where is your stronghold? Do you see SMEs coming online and trying to potentially be clients of yours throughout all of Thailand?

Gideon: Yes. We have customers all around the country. And the trend is changing very rapidly. The questions we get when we started out are very different from what we’re getting now. In the past, it was distrust — not just because our company was unknown but because SMEs weren’t very familiar with the cloud. They wondered if they stored their data online, would it be safe, and would it be audited by the revenue department. You get all these questions. But now users are seeing there are actual benefits of actually having your system online and the ability to have your data when you want it. And so the questions are much different.

So we see that this is a good opportunity to expand SaaS in Thailand. And I’m sure it’s similar in many other parts of Southeast Asia countries as well.

Jay: Absolutely.

Gideon: Going back to your question, the majority of our customers are in Bangkok because that’s our main business hub. And then we have business hubs in the north, south, east, and west, but the majority are still in Bangkok.

Jay: So for Flow Account itself, what do you see as your 2018 goals and in the next year or two? Obviously, you guys are very localized, specializing in Thailand. What goals do you guys have for the coming year?

Gideon: For this year, actually this year is our biggest challenge. Once you get from a five person team with you and your co-founders to 20 or 30-person team, the goal is are you about to build a company. And that’s our biggest challenge. Are we able to create a culture that our team would want to work in? Are we able to groom our leaders?

I would say for this year, by the end of the year, I would hope that we would have leaders in each of our units — whether it’s sales, marketing — you could build the whole company infrastructure. Then the company is able to run and go on for the long term.

So this year, for us, it’s try to scale, not only in users, but scale our internal management as well. Because if we can’t figure that out, then it’s very hard to move forward.

Jay: Absolutely. I think people who aren’t entrepreneurs, who aren’t running companies, they don’t actually know how difficult it is not only to build a business but also the manager personnel.

This leads me to a very good segue because I know that you guys were… Obviously, you guys are a portfolio company of 500 Startups who we’re very friendly with, who we’re doing this series on. And then you went through the Alibaba eFellows Program. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and maybe talk a little bit about that. Maybe you could share with the audience some of the lessons that you’ve learned there during that program.

Gideon: Oh, yes. During our program, it was really an eye-opening experience for us, especially for me. And what I really learned is the combination between Western management and Easter culture. Alibaba has their KPIs. They have the metrics to measure everything. That’s really Western. But the way they manage their people is much more Eastern than that. So it’s a combination between them both that makes Alibaba succeed.

Jay: Is there anything specific about the way they manage their people? I’ve heard a lot about Alibaba’s culture, but any specific takeaways that you can remember that blew you away or maybe left a lasting impression on you?

Gideon: Yes, there was a 10-day seminar course. So there were sessions every day. At the end of every day, we were all forced to do a feedback form, and the feedback was shown immediately the next day. So if you complained there was no coffee, the next morning there was coffee. So that was the first complaint. Everyone said, “No coffee.” And then the next morning, you had coffee. And you said, “People are asking questions for too long.” The next day, they came up with a platform for you to ask questions.

So it’s an immediate feedback loop. Every day you were forced to do their feedback loop, and the next day they tried to implement it as soon as possible, which is very impressive.

Jay: Yeah. So, specifically, what takeaways do you have that you might want to implement within your own company, Flow Account?

Gideon: What I got from this, you could see that the culture trickles down towards their whole organization. One thing Jack Ma said that was very important is that the only thing that cannot be copied is company culture. With money, you can copy our user interface. You can copy our UI. You can copy our business model. You can develop a tech stack that would probably be even much better. But money cannot buy you the team we have, very similar to money can’t buy you love or money can’t buy you your perfect partner. And so you have to be very focused on nurturing your company’s culture so that your whole team makes the right decisions even though you’re not around, and that’s the actual test.

So the whole trip made me think much more about culture, about how I want to grow the team, what environment we want to promote, what we don’t want to, and it’s been very, very important to me.

Jay: Absolutely. I feel like most founders, they might not think about that because that’s like a huge company. When you’re starting out, you’re bootstrapped, and you’re trying to grow your company and get to a positive cash flow, or whatever it is. A lot of founders don’t think about culture, and that’s very important, though, even from the very, very early stages. Those are great insights, Gideon. Thank you for sharing them.

I have two final questions before we sign off. The second-to-last one I ask all of my entrepreneurial guests on this show. It’s basically, if you had one piece of advice for our listeners who might be aspiring entrepreneurs, what would it be?

Gideon: I’d say just make a decision with whatever information you have. The decisions that you make today may be wrong when you look back three years from now. But you have to just make them, and you can learn from them. The longer you delay, the more time you waste.

Jay: That’s actually pretty good. No one actually has said that yet, so you’re a pioneer, Gideon, but I think that that’s very relevant. People try to sugarcoat entrepreneurship and this that and the other, but at the end of the day, there comes a point in every startup founder or entrepreneur’s life where you have to make a decision without having full information. And that goes for founders and all leaders — CEOs of companies or great investors. And I think there is a part of it where it’s kind of intuition where you’ve had experiences so you know you’re making the right decision, but also a part of it is actually luck. I’ve heard this before as well — where people are kind like “I just felt this was right, and so I made the decision.” And that’s not an easy thing for many founders to do. So I think it’s a great piece of advice, Gideon.

The last question I have for you is where can people find you, follow you, and learn more about Flow Account?

Gideon: You can go to our website at FlowAccount.com. You can sign up and test our software. If you live in Thailand, definitely you can give us a call, and we can help you set up your business.

Jay: Very nice. And are you on social media at all, or are you pretty low key?

Gideon: Yeah, I’m on Facebook. You can search for me, Gideon Kridsada, and I’ll be on Facebook as well.

Jay: Awesome. Well, Gideon, thanks so much for sharing your insights and your wisdom. We wish you the best of luck, and I’m looking forward to your success in the future. So thank you for the time.

Gideon: Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.

Jay: Take care.

Gideon: Bye-bye.