How Grab Became The Super App Of Southeast Asia #scottsthoughts

Welcome to Success Story, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host, Scott D. Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network has great podcasts for business leaders like the Martek podcast. Martek podcast is hosted by Benjamin Shapiro. Each week, he tells stories of world-class marketers who use technology to create lasting success with their business and their careers. If any of these topics are interesting to you, you're going to want to tune in. How science is changing advertising, how to set up a CRM so you actually use it, private equities take on digital transformation, or why big social is focused on newsletters. If these are topics that resonate with you, go listen to the Martek podcast. You can listen to it wherever you get your podcasts, or you can go to HubSpot.com slash podcast network. Today is a startup case study. I'm going to break down the story of Grab, the company that surpassed Uber in Southeast Asia. It started as a ride-sharing app and now it does so much more and encompasses a ton of services. I'm going to walk through the origin story of the founders, how they scaled up, focused on product-led growth to encompass so many different offerings, and some of the strategies they used to become a deccacorn, or actually more than a deccacorn with an $11 billion valuation. This is a startup case study. This is Grab's growth story. In the last few years, Southeast Asia has seen a rapid increase in ride-sharing apps. One of these companies is Grab. If you want to go follow their story, you can go follow them on Twitter at GrabSG. This company saw an opportunity and took it by storm, quickly becoming one of the most successful startups in history. Grab even beat Uber as the top ride-sharing app in Southeast Asia and has gone beyond being a deccacorn, meaning a company worth over $10 billion. This article will explore how they did it and what you can learn from their success story. So where did Grab start? Well, Grab started as a taxi booking app called MyTexi, founded in Malaysia. It was founded in 2012 by Anthony Tan. You can go follow him on Twitter at AnthonyPY underscore tan and a computer science student and his friend Tan Hui Ling. You can go follow her on Twitter at Hui Ling Tan. The founders decided to expand into Singapore, Jakarta and Bangkok with MyTexi and this later became Grab Taxi. In 2014, they decided to expand the Philippines and Vietnam with their service known as Grab Bike. This became a massive success since most of these countries had no official taxi services. Citizens relied on taxis or private cars for transportation. So in 2014, they moved into Grab Bike. They started to expand more. In 2016, the startup was later rebranded as Just Grab. So their ride-sharing service was available in Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. They had also expanded into the food delivery market with Grab Food, a similar model to Uber Eats that allowed people to order meals from restaurants partnered with Grab. To complete their service, Grab also had a service where they could request somebody to come pick you up and drive your car home known as Grab Car. This is almost like a designated driver service. So Grab also had Grab Pay, which I added on later, which was supported in more than 30 different countries, making it easy for foreigners to pay bills. So now you see they have Grab Bike. They have Grab Car, Grab Pay. They have all these different Grab Food. They have all these different apps under one brand. So they turned themselves into a super app way beyond just a ride-sharing app that was already in and of itself more popular than Uber in Southeast Asia. But how did they actually build this mammoth organization, this incredible company? Let's just speak about how far they actually got and then I'm going to break down how they did it. So Grab has gone far since their early days in 2012 when it just started out as a taxi service. Today, it is the top ahead of Uber, ahead of a lift, ahead of any other ride-sharing app, the top ride-sharing app in Southeast Asia with millions of active users every day and various services such as, again, food delivery, motorcycle taxis all in one app. In November 2016, they became Southeast Asia's first unicorn startup by in history, keep in mind, in history. By 2017, Grab became the top ride-sharing app in Southeast Asia with over 100 million downloads worldwide and a valuation of over $11 billion. Making them the most startup, most valuable startup out of all of Singapore. Now, how did they do this? How did they accomplish this incredible success story? How did Grab beat Uber? How did they become the top ride-sharing app in Southeast Asia and how did they even expand successfully into other services such as food delivery and motorcycle taxi rides? There were a lot of variables that made Grab successful. So let's break each differentiator, each variable down so that we have an idea of how they came to this point. So the first thing they did very well was go hyper local. This was core in their strategy. So this is what allowed them to be more successful than Uber. They focused on the local market. So they knew that if they were going to launch a product in a market, they had to focus on the cultural nuances. They couldn't just copy and paste. So when Uber expands into a new market, they usually just take the business model that's worked in one region, say California, and they take that business model and they implement it into a region in Southeast Asia. So this is not the best way to take a product to market in a certain region. Grab understood this and every single rollout was hyper local, hyper personalized for lack of better term to that region. So by personalizing the rollout, making sure they didn't just copy and paste the strategy, the marketing, how they position themselves, how they onboard new customers, and they didn't just copy, paste that into every single place they went, they focused on optimizing each of those take to market pieces for that specific region. That's how they won. When you adopt a hyper local strategy, you can't just transplant the same strategy implemented in one region or one country to another, cultural nuances, region specific knowledge. These are all integral at maximizing the effectiveness of your take to market strategy and your growth strategy. Many companies copy and paste. Grab does things that don't scale. Remember, when you're taking a hyper local strategy and you're taking that to a new region and you're understanding the cultural nuances of that particular place, you are doing something that doesn't scale. However, then you find a way to scale it eventually. You find a way to scale how you understand new regions, new cultures, new nuances, and you take that and that is hyper localization. That's how they really got a foothold in all these regions they launched and beat out Uber. Secondly, they were a super app with all these features. They were all in one. They have grab, grab food, grab fresh, grab car, grab pay. They have many more upcoming projects. They are the go-to app where users only have to use them for everything they could possibly need. So being able to deploy new features that product led growth, that product focus to quickly fill needs in a new market allowed them to be a one stop shop, which definitely helped them with their product led growth strategy and ultimately increased the size of their tam or total addressable market because they had all of these features. So they were hyper product focus. They rolled out new things that their customers were asking for. They were also accessible and convenient. So grab focuses on accessibility for its users. You can download the app on your phone and start using it right away. This makes it easy for customers to access their services anytime they want, which does a few clicks. When competing against Uber, Uber made a ton of assumptions in terms of accessibility and this accessibility also and convenience also ties into that hyper localization strategy. So what Uber did was they made assumptions in every market that they entered that everybody uses smartphones and everybody pays with credit cards and they copy and pasted that strategy in every single region where Uber launched. Keep in mind, Uber did not accept cash until 2015. Grab, realize, because again, they wanted to understand the new ounces of that local culture or local region that they were going to launch into the not all drivers use smartphones, very few customers use credit cards where they had actually launched meaning they were focusing on the actual habits of users in certain parts of the world. For example, like accepting cash from day one, which they did, Uber didn't do that. Always focused on being accessible and convenient for customers in the region, understanding the new ounces of the region where they launched and being accessible and convenient for customers in that particular region. They also added in a reward system. Now this is not the end all, but they did have various rewards that they gave out to their users. You could earn points by using Grab as your ride sharing service in Southeast Asia. The points include discounts on future rides or against other services they offered. This wasn't the best strategy that's going to make or break a company, but it didn't hurt and people do love rewards. So again, loyalty is always a great thing to include in your product. They focused on their company image. So Grab is known to be an excellent company that treats their drivers right. They treat their employees right. There's been a lot of contention over how drivers are classified the benefits of drivers get. They always treat their drivers fairly regarding compensation and money they can earn every month and a little driver and or employee appreciation really goes a long way. They also really focused on trust and trust is paramount when building a relationship with your customers. And the lack of trust and transparency has always been a point of contention with various ride sharing apps like Uber because think about your Uber experience, right. If you're stuck in traffic, maybe you pay more because your ride takes longer. If there's a lack of available Uber cars, drivers, then there's a surge price. You have to pay more. If a driver takes a longer route and doesn't take you directly from point A to point B, you're going to pay a little bit more. This is not the case with Grab. So price transparency, preset pricing, make sure there are never surprises for customers and the pricing is set before the ride even starts. This increases the trust and the brand reduces any uncertainty felt by the customer and incentivizes the driver to get the passenger from point A to point B as quickly and efficiently as possible because they're always going to be making that preset price. So there was no ambiguity about how much you were going to be paying when you use Grab. That increased trust. It increased the likelihood of somebody feeling comfortable using Grab for the first time. These are all things that they noted were lacking in other ride sharing services and they carried these over and they doubled down on them so they made the consumer experience as frictionless as possible. And lastly, they focused on their own people. So we spoke about how they compensated drivers properly, but they went a step further. So when you look at the strategies of several successful startups, one thing is clear. You have to focus on your people. That means they've always focused on their drivers and their passengers and you can see this in just some of the things that I just spoke about. They've focused on their passengers and their drivers, but how do you actually build that into the culture of your company well for their passengers? They had support teams available 24 seven every single day, 365 answer any questions issues that may arise and they provided free training sessions for new drivers as well as opposed to potentially an Uber driver that just is approved and starts driving day one. They also actively incorporated employee feedbacks that they know that they're doing the best possible job they can at serving their customers and their employees listening to your employees incorporating feedback into your company culture into your product development into your customer success strategy. This is something that they always focused on. So they actually went on record at one point, their head of people on kin Yin explained saying our grabbers are at the forefront of solving some of the most significant challenges in this incredibly diverse region from traffic congestion to income equality to financial inclusion. The entire executive team at Grab has always focused on learning from the front line individuals from the front line employees and listening and actioning. So it is not just a top down organization. It truly does value the feedback from the actual drivers and the employees. Grab identifies problems before they spiral out of control by listening to their employees. They implement solutions quickly realize full well the people who work in your business are very likely to have the most meaningful and useful insights that you can use to better serve your employees and your customers. That's something that they built into their culture from day one. So what did we learn from Grab? A couple lessons on of course how to hyper localize, a take to market and growth strategy, how to better serve your employees and your customers, and how to make your product easier to use frictionless. And when you combine all of these things in the right conditions, you see what a startup like Grab can do. It is now Southeast Asia's number one ride sharing app. It has a ton of other services all under one roof that make it a true super app. It didn't get it didn't start there. You know, Rome wasn't built in a day. It does take time to build up that complex of product. But if you focus on the right things, if you focus on serving your employees, your customers, and the places where your customers live in the regions that you want to serve properly effectively, you can get there. The main takeaway with all of this is start slow, do things that don't scale, do things the right way, and you will eventually take your company to hopefully where Grab is right now. And even if you achieve a fraction of the success that grabs achieved, I would say that's a big win.