Why I Left Shopee Singapore?
“Why you left such a great company?”
“Shopee benefits very good, you shouldn’t leave there.”
“Why you give up your salary in Singapore and back to Malaysia?”
There’s a lot of people asking me these questions.
Let me introduce myself, I have been working as a Software Engineer and Business Intelligence for 6 years in Malaysia (my nation) and Singapore since the year 2013, and in this year, I finally make my decision to leave my company — Shopee Singapore to run my own startup — provide technical solutions, to create software, mobile and web application for our clients and also create my own business idea.
Why Startup?
The reason why I wanted to run my own startup was because of realized I can use my own skills to help the SME business in Malaysia, as I saw there are a lot of the SME are still managing their business in manual ways, for example a new co-working space business, there are using a notebook to mark down all the customers schedule bookings; a startup company, there are using a punch card machine to capture down the employees working hours. After I see this happened in my hometown, I decided to register a business and to set up a goal — to help SME create technical solutions, to improve their business process. I knew there was a lot of the technical solutions companies in the market, but in order to promote the benefits of the technology, I choose to help the SME without any charges or in minimum charges.
Declined The Offer
I decided to resign my current position — Senior Associate, Business Intelligence in Shopee Singapore. Meanwhile, I got an offer from a tech company as a Senior Software Engineer role, and the offer was very attractive. To achieve my goal, I declined the offer and start to prepare to move back to my hometown — Kuala Lumpur from Singapore.
First Step: Planning
I started my plan a year ago, before I resign from the company. For me, planning is a very important step to set up my mind, it definitely bring me a very clear picture of what I’m going to do first. Like how I am going to achieve the steps, who is my target clients, do I need a partner and etc. I always mark down everything in my mind, my crazy ideas and solutions, and do planning. So I can execute it in one day.
Second Step: Business Network
After resigned from the company to start my own business, I realized the business network is very important. So I started to build my business network by adding SME founders and entrepreneurs via LinkedIn, join some SME events to get to know more entrepreneurs, and had a coffee session with them to hear about their experiences, feedbacks and advices.
Third Step: Business Registration
I am so lucky to find another 2 partners, which have the same vision with me before I start the journey. And yes! We have done our business partnership registration in Malaysia — SquareBox Technology. You may check it out to give me some feedback on our website: https://www.squareboxtech.com
And also our logo:
Fourth Step: Start The Projects
In July, we finally get our 1st project! Although this is just to build a simple WordPress website, but we are very excited! Slowly, we’ve gained our projects within 4 months including WordPress websites, Ionic mobile project and ERP mobile application and etc. Besides that, we are also creating our own product, I will update our progress in the upcoming post! 😎
Last Step: Be Confident
“The expert at anything was once a beginner.”
― Helen Hayes
Be confident on yourself, you can create more than what you think and walk further than what you have expect.
Last but not least, I hope you guys really enjoy to read this post, please comment below to tell me about your thoughts or if you want me to share more about my journey.
Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn@ChengYew and LinkedIn@SquareboxTech.
