eCommerce in SE Asia

In this face of global competition, how can SE e-commerce sellers remain competitive and ride the eCommerce wave?

Ken Leaver started in consulting with 7 years at BCG, then moved to the commercial world (CEO of Group Ukraine, ran a $50m issue product biz for visa). He previously was SVP Product at Lazada, Director of Product at Wayfair, and Head of Product at Pomelo Fashion. 

He’s also a serial entrepreneur and now spends his time on his startup (therapada.com, an online therapy marketplace) and consulting different (mostly eCommerce businesses) in the region on product management and operations technology. In the past 5 years, he’s helped Ozon, Yandex, BRANDED, Shipper, Wasoko, Ezie.app, Delami, Rainforest. Always at the CEO/CPO/CTO level, typically driving projects himself.

Ken is most famous for his incredible organizational systems and disciplines which he calls “seal tactics” and has been a big help/mentor.

In this episode, Ken Leaver shares valuable insights and thoughts on the challenges and good opportunities in the Southeast Asian region's e-commerce space.

He believes that there are more new generations of independent creators nowadays looking into creating their communities, and content and building their own brands to sell to, thus, we see an e-commerce landscape making a lot of difference three to five years down the road.

Topics Covered:

• Ken's journey to Southeast Asia and why he chose to stay [01:59]
• Compared with the US and Europe, how did SE Asia's e-commerce business landscape look [05:15]
• The complexity of finding product differentiation from the supply chain in the SEA region [11:23]
• Creating product differentiation [12:29]
• Not just a random way but an analytical process of making decisions about product differentiation [14:10]
• Achieving product-market fit [15:00]
• The most a start-up can do when you want to penetrate Southeast Asian e-commerce [ 18:37]
• Seeing the Southeast Asian e-commerce landscape five years down the road [19:59]
• The two competencies where you see Southeast Asian region is fast scaling  [22:32]
• Ways of creating a business and scaling it that not everybody agrees on [26:49]

People and Resources Mentioned:

- Alibaba

- Taobao

- Facebook

- Instagram

-Tiktok 

- The Kardashians

Ideas Worth Sharing/ Quotable Quote:

[on SE Asia’s Uniqueness] "I was sitting in a macroeconomic class at Cornell. And they were just showing how GDP per capita in Asia was so low, and it was increasing quickly. In the US, it was already high. These things would more or less converge as education and technology were available to both. Given these dynamics, I knew the place to be was in a developing country like Southeast Asia." - Ken Leaver

"Southeast Asian sellers are sourcing products locally, allowing their supply chain to be relatively not complex. They're starting to think, how do I find a differentiated product in my supply chain? That's where I think the next wave of evolution is." - Ken Leaver

[First world countries approach on product-market fit] " I'm going to create product differentiation, but to determine what kind of differentiation it is, I need to be more advanced analytically. And I think that is the other thing that is coming here." - Ken Leaver

[on product-market fit]" Don't just assume like everybody else's dumb and your ideas like nobody's thought about it, and instead make sure you've systematically done your homework on what are the similar models in other countries that have made it and then do your reverse engineering." - Ken Leaver

"You're going to see more and more of these young, independent content creators; they're not worried about the career path; they want to create their own brands. And I think that will change the Southeast Asian landscape a lot." - Ken Leaver

"In the past year, there's never been as much movement or excitement going towards influencers, affiliates, referrals, and partnerships." - Ken Leaver

Connect wih Ken Leaver:  

• Website 
• LinkedIn