Interview with A Founder: Edwin Wong (Co-founder of Cloudbreakr - 亞洲網紅行銷平台)
By Ching Tseng (AppWorks Associate)
Edwin Wong is the founder & CEO of Cloudbreakr - an AI-powered influencer marketing platform in Asia. He has focused on influencer marketing & social analytics for years, with an aim to empower pioneers and brands to share the stories that influence people. The company has expanded its services from Hong Kong to Taiwan, Malaysia, and Thailand, servicing over 10,000 marketers in over 6 GSEA countries.
1. What is the best advice you would give to first-time founders? What is the most important question that you can ask yourself?
You need to have a strong belief in what you are doing. Before getting good traction, people will keep questioning you why you are doing this. If you don’t have a strong belief in what you are working on, you might give up easily. On top of that, I always ask myself how to be a better founder all the time because founders are the people who have the deepest impact on the company. Your management style and your ability matters. If founders can’t strive to improve themselves, then the company won’t be able to grow as well.
2. What experience made you the founder you are? And what motivates you?
In the early days of Cloudbreakr, I’m the only full time founder, and the team didn’t have a strong engineering ability. With limited work experience, I wasn’t good at arranging tasks which made our development progress sluggish; in the end, two of my co-founders jumped the boat earlier than I expected. At that moment, I realized that I might fail this startup if I kept on managing the company like this, so that’s probably the moment I became the most determined to take this company to an impactful level. Also, I’m not the type of person who gives up easily, I don’t want to let my friends and family down because they have been supporting us this whole time. All of these are what motivate me everyday.
3. What is the biggest mistake and takeaway in your founder journey?
I don’t like to fight with others; I tend to compromise. For example, when negotiating salaries with our employees, I used to accept all the requests just because I didn’t want them to leave or make me unhappy. I didn't take the company’s long term benefit into consideration when making those decisions. Later on I realized this would do long term harm to the company. In order to urge myself to do more long term thinking, I asked my co-founders to give me direct feedback whenever I’m not dealing with things from a more rational perspective.
4. What have you learned in 2020?
It’s a tough year for everyone but also a great moment for the ones with a solid base to shine. How fast you can make the right decisions is a crucial ability in 2020. For example, it’s difficult to predict things and decide whether you should keep the project ongoing or not, and how to react to city lock-down while you still want to have a great momentum of business expansion. I learned to not drown myself in the daily tasks, but to make strategic decisions at the management level, after all, being able to identify the long term goal of the company is what a leader should strive for.
About Cloudbreakr
With the vision to build the largest community for influencers and brands in Asia, Cloudbreakr provides an integrated influencer marketing platform and all-rounded solutions to connect marketers with hundreds of thousands of influencers across Asia.
From influencer discovery, profile analysis, complete campaign management to social monitoring, we empower every retail brand, shopping mall, and marketing agency to optimize the ROI on influencer marketing. The company currently operates in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Thailand, servicing 100+ Fortune 500 brands.
We welcome all AI, Blockchain, or Southeast Asia founders to join AppWorks Accelerator: https://bit.ly/33cXkq4
