Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the organization.
RedSquare helps businesses by consulting, building, and measuring systems critical to modern organizations. These include services like consulting, design, software developments, and performance analysis. Our clients include government agencies, enterprises, SMEs, and startups. As the CEO, my day to day involves:
- Business development and sales.
- Process Engineering to make our service delivery faster and more efficient.
- Running internal workshops in design, project management, and software engineering.
- R&D for new products and services.
- Relationship management with clients and partners.
What is the story behind starting this company?
One of my cofounders (Justin Wong) and I were rivals in University in the Malaysian Student Startup scene, often bringing our competitiveness up to national-level competitions. In 2018, we decided to join forces upon graduation when we realized we were better as a team. A few months later, another one of our mutual friends (Wei-Ming Thor) decided to join us as the agency he worked at got acquired by McKinsey & Co. and the prospect of wearing suits and ties to work every day wasn’t his cup of tea. Our first client was a now-defunct financial education company that paid us MYR 30,000 (~USD 7,430) for 4 months of work.
Fast forward to 2020, RedSquare’s highlight over the last 3 years includes:
- Helping an MNC accelerate an e-wallet and reach a 7-figure user base. (Axiata)
- Running a digital campaign for The Minister of Youth and Sports to lower the Malaysian voting age from 21 to 18. (Undi18)
- Helped a government agency create a national impact assessment platform to monitor the socio-economic progress in Malaysia. (Impact Malaysia)
- Creating a social network to motivate and monitor the progress of Malaysia’s best young talents (Malaysia Future Leaders’ School)
- Increased our services offering from just web and mobile application development to SDKs, enterprise-grade on-premise solutions, business analytics, and public policy research.
What are your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
Both. We have an internal team of 14 people. When required, we have a vetted list of partner agencies that assist us by providing manpower.
How does your company differentiate itself from the competition?
Two major differences between RedSquare and other software development agencies in our weight class:
- In the public sector, GovTech. Servicing government projects used to be in the realm of giant public sector cronies. The software development methodologies, design, and research offered by these complacent giants have not changed much since the 1990s. RedSquare provides a fresh breath of air by balancing modern processes and bureaucratic nonsense.
- In the private sector, Joint Ventures. We want our clients to be successful and we want them to grow. We often form relationships beyond the standard vendor-client mold. We advise, we provide CTOs and we develop long-lasting business structures to help them sustain their digitalization efforts. One such partnership is with Impact Malaysia. They managed to deliver over MYR 1 Million (~USD 250k) worth of digital solutions without having an internal tech team in 2020 alone.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
For the government, we help create digital solutions to either conduct research, run campaigns or create custom social networks. In the private sector, we focus on fintech, e-commerce, and media.
Most enterprise and government sector clients are repeat customers. Roughly 80% of our 2020 revenue was through repeat customers or referrals. The remaining 20% were new customers.
Please share some of the services that you offer for which clients approach you the most for?
Digital strategy consultation, mobile & web application development, analytics, and hardware infrastructure setup.
What is your customer satisfaction rate according to you? What steps do you take to cater to your customer’s needs and requirements?
We measure our customer satisfaction rate by how much they spend in the next round of service. Our average revenue growth per client has been around 180% over the last 3 years.
What kind of support system do you offer to your clients for catering to their queries and issues?
We offer on-site consulting, we represent our clients in meetings with their customers and we offer concise month reports every month. We have dedicated account managers for individual clients to resolve any urgent issues that might arise.
What kind of payment structure do you follow to bill your clients? Is it Pay per Feature, Fixed Cost, Pay per Milestone (could be in phases, months, versions etc.)
Mostly pay per Milestone. For digital consulting we charge monthly, for custom software development it is based on phases. For premade solutions, it’s Fixed Cost with maintenance fees.
Do you take in projects which meet your basic budget requirement? If yes, what is the minimum requirement? If no, on what minimum budget you have worked for?
We have premade products such as our eCommerce solutions that go for MYR 35,000 (USD 8,669) but we also have custom enterprise solutions that go for MYR 850k (~USD 210k). A good client for us is someone who has a budget around MYR 150k-250k (USD 37k - 62k).
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2020?
- Premade ecommerce - MYR 35,000 (USD 8,669)
- Custom enterprise solutions for the Malaysian Government - MYR 850k (~USD 210k).
Where do you see your company in the next 10 years?
In 10 years I hope RedSquare will have 3 major wings:
- A GovTech wing will help Malaysia modernize with data-driven governance, on par with Estonia and China.
- A group of joint venture private companies driven by human-centric technology as its core in multiple industries.
- An education arm to help feed the ecosystem with the digital talent that it will need.
