Expert Interview: Clement Wong, Founder & CEO of BeMyGuest
Visiting Asian countries and thinking what all you can do in the destination? Look up BeMyGuest, Asia-focussed tours and activities platform, to browse the options and book them online.
Clement Wong, founder and CEO of Singapore-based BeMyGuest, speaks about the company’s product strategy, what it took for BeMyGuest to stitch an API partnership with China’s biggest OTA, and more.
What are three of your biggest product mistakes so far?
- Focusing on two fronts in the beginning: both local accommodation and tours & activities at the same time
- Having a large tech team versus a quality tech team in the first 18 months
- Hiring a tech lead who is not hands on
What made the largest OTA in China, Ctrip, to select BeMyGuest’s API to power its Tours & Activities business?
There are many. I would say below are the key reasons:
- Our API is very simple to use for developers and has a very extensive documentation. We were the first tours and activities API in Mandarin.
- We were able to model very complex data structure for Tours & Activities and it is pricing.
- On top of that, we provide a Software Development Kit for major programming platform and an API Client which runs on all popular operating systems.
- Our team is also able to provide meticulous tech support to our partners’ programmers from day one until whole integration is finished.
Tours and activities segment is one of the most under penetrated and unorganised in travel industry. What are some of the product level challenges you faced / still face?
Distributing Tours & Activities in a fully automated way is not an easy task. The most difficult parts are inter alia:
- modelling complex products’ structure that have to be unified for broad range of different product types
- modelling complex pricing structure that is related to our Revenue Management System
- integrating different systems between BeMyGuest and suppliers to provide as fast delivery as possible
What are some of the features that you killed in BeMyGuest due to its less impact?
Some smaller B2C oriented products and features that did not perform well in terms of ROI.
When you shifted focus from B2C to B2B, what was the change in product strategy?
Listening even more to what our B2B partners need.
If you are the CEO of UBER, what all new products you would ask your team to build and why?
UBER for all modes of transport: Water, air, etc
What are the top three products you admire, and why?
- Dyson: innovation at its very best
- Wechat: how everything came into place under a single all encompassing app
- This is not a pure play product, but an implementation example — High speed rail development by China: How they have managed to combine the best of German, French, Canadian and Japanese rail technologies into their own lower cost yet high performance product. A huge country like China that’s all connected by high speed rail, and soon Europe and Asia/Southeast Asia!
What all qualities you look for while hiring a product management professional?
- Ready to look beyond our core domain of travel industry
- Making sure that products make financial sense to build
In the first one year of BeMyGuest, you were handling product, marketing, and supplier signup. Which role took most of your time and why?
Product!
So that, we could build a prototype in order to attract investment. Not many investors out there are willing to invest off a powerpoint deck.
Have questions for Clement Wong? Ask in comments section below.
