Beyo Global 2022 Round-up
I started the year 2022 travelling back to Malaysia to visit my family for the first time after 2 years on New Year’s day. I stayed back until early April. Apart from taking a week off during Chinese New Year in early February, I’ve spent most of my time working remotely from there.
One day my mum casually said to me “You’re constantly working”. It struck me at that moment that she was absolutely right. I cared so much about what I do, delivering the best (more than 100%) I can do for my clients, and constantly thinking ahead about what was next. I ended up do not do much outside my work. Since then, despite feeling that I had lots to do, I made more conscious decisions in stopping, and spent more time with my family, especially my parents and friends when I was out in Malaysia. For the rest of the year, I still had to make effort to remind myself to slow down. It means there were a few weekends that I managed not to open my laptop for a change.
I haven’t posted as much on LinkedIn this year as compared to other years. I care a lot about the value my posts would bring to others, hence it often takes me a long time to write one, not getting to finish writing them during the gaps between committed work. Hence, I haven’t shared much about what I had been doing and this summary also comes a bit later than planned. Better late than never though.
Key themes for 2022
2022 was about international growth for me and the companies/teams I worked with.
If I were to summarise the work I’ve worked on this year, the collaborations I have with clients and management teams of various sizes cover three main areas:
Advising role
New market launches and expansions of international footprints
Growing existing global markets (over 20 countries, to be a bit more precise). This covers many different growth aspects which makes things very interesting
Photos that representing some of the countries we (my clients and I) had been working on for growth. No, I didn’t travel to all the countries this year, just four :)
Advisory role - business strategies, new market launch and international growth
Throughout this whole year, I’ve been offering advice to various start-ups on their business model, value proposition, customer/client experience and overall growth strategies. It is a rewarding experience to be able to put my expertise and experience to good use, offering support and being the sounding board, especially for social enterprises which aim to tackle the world’s pressing social and environmental challenges. It is something I want to do more in 2023, for sure!
I’ve also been supporting some start-ups and the management teams of various-sized companies in either preparing for their international expansion or advising on their international strategies, or both in some cases. The start-ups include an Edtech company with a passionate team who genuinely cares about making education more accessible for everyone, a digital creator marketing service which aims to make creators more accessible and better interactions with their fans and customers, and a health tech company that focuses on providing mental health resources and therapy support digitally.
Growth by targeting untapped users in specific market(s)
One way to look into further growth of a market is to capture untapped users in specific markets not currently being served by their existing products and portfolios. This could include exploring and introducing new propositions which could offer a better product-market fit for the identified untapped users.
This year, I’ve worked with various teams in Spotify to explore various new propositions.
For example, one proposition already exists in one of their key markets. We wanted to explore the product market fit and attitudinal response towards the core value of this proposition (simple, intuitive, zero effort) amongst a largely untapped audience segment in Japan (>57M TAM), and to further validate if a localised product approach will be effective in driving meaningful growth in that market. The ultimate outcome was that, the signal of product-market fit was rather weak and the business case was not strong enough so the final decision was not to move forward as a separate proposition but to incorporate it into a key feature of the existing product. This is an important decision as it avoids spending further investment in launching something that is not going to help with the market growth.
In November 2022, Spotify introduced and released a new plan in South Korea allowing only streaming without downloading on mobile and PC. The same proposition already exists in this market offered by other competitors and it is something South Korean users are familiar with so launching it is a sensible move. But what was important for us to find out is the ‘ideal’ naming for this plan, which make sense to the users (e.g. users can understand easily by reading the plan names) and would go well with Spotify's existing plans. The new plan, Basic, now is available alongside the existing plans in this market (Individual and Duo).
A quick photo when visiting Spotify São Paulo office with the team
On the other hand, another team at Spotify has identified a new proposition as a promising plan to unlock new audiences in certain markets based on learnings from the painted-door tests and qualitative research. We worked together to further understand the motivation and use cases of the targetted users for this new proposition and most importantly, identify ways to market and surface it to maximise the revenue potential for when they launch in the specific markets. Due to confidentiality, I’m not able to reveal what the proposition is and which markets they are but the proposition should be launched in 2023!
Working with another team at Spotify, we also explore another new proposition with a strong hypothesis that there is an audience group which is not being served by their existing portfolio that could be unlocked with this new offering. It is still at an early stage in the exploration of this proposition so we use various methods and sources to identify which customers show an appetite for this potential new proposition, why they are unique, why are their needs not being currently served, could they be served by better pricing/packaging of their existing offering or if this new proposition would have a big positive impact and if the answer is yes, what should inform the design of the proposition. We looked into several selected countries which show the most potential, covering all continents. We are continuing this work effort in 2023.
Launching new products in specific market(s)
Continuing my collaboration with SEEK from 2021, together with one of the SEEK strategy teams, we looked into ways to refine one of the three product pillars which SEEK has identified as an opportunity to activate a passive and dormant segment of the candidate audience, for example, by providing a product to engage with candidates outside of the job-seeking cycle.
I won’t be able to reveal the pillar that I was working on with the team yet but I can share with you one of the other pillars that SEEK has launched in Indonesia this year: seekMax. According to Peter Bitos, CEO of Seek Asia in September 2022, “We recently launched seekMAX, Indonesia’s largest free learning platform, which is available on the JobStreet app and has more than 1,500 original and curated videos of Indonesian edutainment content from top studios, influencers and international content providers.”
Spotify launched audiobooks in the US in September 2022, then in UK, IE, AU and NZ in November. Before the launch, I worked with Spotify audiobooks and Findaway Voices team as part of their effort in exploring the high-impact opportunities they could pursue to grow the Findway Voices business.
Continuous market growth strategies
After running a Growth Strategy workshop with the MENA team at Storytel at the end of 2021, we continued to look into ways to grow their markets in this region, specifically Saudi Arabia. We looked into various focus areas and strategies for growth to increase conversion rate, engagement rate and retention rate. It touches on various aspects including redefining their strategies in products, marketing, editorial content, design, and potential partnerships too.
Indonesia represents the largest and fastest-growing market for SEEK in Asia. Following our focus in 2021 on hirers in this market, we looked into the potential growth and opportunities the candidates hold in Indonesia. As the newly appointed JobStreet Indonesia Managing Director, Varun Mehta said “The key to achieving our aspiration of helping 500 million people develop their careers with 5 million companies. The sheer size of the nation’s workforce of over 140 million people and 60 million businesses means that there is a huge opportunity for us to deliver on our purpose of helping people live more fulfilling, productive working lives and helping organisations succeed.”
I also worked closely and collaboratively with various regional teams in Spotify, to look into ways to improve the growth (total number of users and subscriptions) by identifying gaps and opportunities to increase Spotify free users and Premium subscriptions. Countries we covered include Poland, Hungary, South Korea, South Africa, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
In Turkey, we focus specifically on growing the subscriptions of the Spotify Student plan. With more than 200 universities in Turkey, it has been identified as a priority market for the Student product. Overall, the student audience represents a significant portion of the TAM in the country and is the most likely to subscribe to Premium. Even though the subscriber base has been growing at a good pace, we continued to look into ways to lead to even higher conversion performances.
Innovative growth
Innovation is another crucial approach to driving growth. Despite already having successful business models in 184 countries (out of 195 countries in the world), the company (one of my clients) continuously looks into how they can learn from other businesses. For example, we work together to investigate and learn more about an interesting player in China (a market that they have no intention to launch in) - one of the longest-running and popular services in a similar industry as the client. We looked into what drives their success, their business model and funnel strategy, their product and value proposition and main features, how their propositions and products surfaced, their UX and visual strategies and how they engage with and facilitate between users, fans, creators and providers. What we found was fascinating and we see there are many opportunity areas where the client explores further for their new innovation strategies.
In-person speaking
My opening keynote at UX London 2022
Speaking at WUD Estonia in Tallinn, November 2022
I had the pleasure of giving an opening keynote at UX London in June, as well as catching up with old friends and making many new interesting connections. In November, I travelled to snowy Tallinn to give my talk at WUD Estonia. Despite the short visit to the city, I learned a lot about Estonia. I thoroughly enjoyed both of my in-person conferences this year!
All in all
It has been an interesting year - challenging in many aspects but I am pleased with the work I have contributed to helping businesses to grow and delivering meaningful services to people around the world.
Thank you to everyone who has, one way or another, made a mark on my 2022. Looking forward to what 2023 would bring.