Chapter 03
The Scale
2017–2021
Building an IT department from zero, scaling an e-commerce marketplace to 150K users, and helping transform how a country shops.
Zero to one
rgo47 was Myanmar's emerging e-commerce marketplace — a platform trying to become the place where an entire country learns to shop online. When I joined as Product Manager, the IT department didn't exist.
I built it from scratch.
That meant everything: hiring developers, fullstack engineers, QA testers, infrastructure specialists. Defining roles, building processes, creating a culture where shipping fast and shipping well weren't opposites. Over the next four years, the team grew to 25+ people.
Building a team from zero teaches you something that managing an existing team never does: every decision compounds. The first three hires set the culture. The first architecture choice constrains every feature that follows. The first process you skip becomes the debt you pay forever.
The marketplace
rgo47 was a general marketplace — fashion, electronics, everyday goods. The parent company, Royal Golden Owls Co Ltd, had backing from Daiwa PI Partners, who closed a funding round in March 2019. The platform was covered by DealStreetAsia and The Nation Thailand as Myanmar's digital retail transformation gained momentum.
The growth trajectory was steep. We scaled to 150,000 monthly active users — buyers and sellers using the platform to discover, list, and transact. The marketplace model meant we weren't just building a product; we were building a two-sided economy with its own dynamics, trust mechanisms, and growth loops.
The transformation secured 7-figure funding — validation that the platform was working and the market was real.
The context that mattered
Myanmar in 2017–2021 was undergoing one of the fastest digital adoptions in history. A country that had essentially skipped the desktop internet era was going straight to mobile commerce. Consumer behaviour was shifting from traditional retail to online shopping in real time.
rgo47 was positioned at the centre of that shift. We weren't just building a product — we were helping define how e-commerce works in a market that had no established playbook.
That meant solving problems that don't exist in mature markets: building trust mechanisms for users who'd never bought anything online, designing payment flows for a largely unbanked population, creating logistics partnerships in a country where addresses don't follow a standard format.
What I learned
Growing a team and growing a product are the same discipline. Both require understanding what the next stage of growth demands — and building for that, not for today. The engineers I hired in month three weren't solving the same problems as the engineers I hired in month eighteen. Hiring for current needs in a scale-up means you're always behind.
National-scale transformation is humbling. When your platform is one of the forces changing how 50 million people shop, you feel the weight of decisions differently. A UX choice that confuses 1% of users means 1,500 people having a bad experience every day. Scale makes everything matter more.
Zero-to-one is a specific skill. Not everyone who can manage a team can build one. Not everyone who can optimise a product can create one. The zero-to-one phase demands a different kind of thinking — comfort with ambiguity, willingness to do things that don't scale, and the judgment to know when to start building systems that do.