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.
A different seat
Two of my closest colleagues from Revo — both tech leads — joined rgo47 with me. We were the company's first product and engineering team. Before us, rgo47 had an IT team that handled networks and administration, and vendors who'd built the existing e-commerce platform. We were something new: an in-house team that would own the product.
We had a dedicated workspace, but we barely used it in the first few weeks. Instead, we sat with each department — operations, logistics, customer service, merchandising. We wanted to understand their workflows, hear their problems, and build enough rapport to set product goals that actually reflected the business.
It was a completely different environment from agency work. At Revo, we built things for clients and handed them over. At rgo47, we lived with the consequences of every decision. If the checkout flow confused people, we heard about it from customer service the same day.
Finding the right people
We didn't want to scale rapidly and burn through budget. The Yangon tech scene was getting competitive, and experienced developers had options.
So we went to universities. We talked to students, found talented young people, and brought them on as interns and juniors. It was slower than hiring laterally, but it was deliberate — we could teach technical skills, but we couldn't teach curiosity or the willingness to figure things out in a market with no playbook.
Those early hires became the core of the team. The interns who joined in the first year were leading features by their second. When you build a team this way, there's a shared investment that lateral hires rarely replicate.
Fifteen million text messages
The moment the scale became real was a joint campaign with MPT — Myanmar's largest telecom operator. We'd done our risk planning. We'd stress-tested what we could. We thought we were ready.
MPT sent fifteen million SMS messages to their subscribers promoting the campaign. Our site went down.
The team spent the entire day and night scaling infrastructure and getting it back up. Nobody watched the clock. Nobody needed to be asked to stay.
The campaign ran for another seven days after that first-day disruption. We surpassed every KPI by more than double.
But the number that stayed with me wasn't in any dashboard — it was the fifteen million. That was when we understood the scale of what e-commerce meant in Myanmar. We weren't building a product for early adopters any more. We were part of how a country was learning to shop.
After the funding
The platform's growth caught investor attention. Daiwa PI Partners closed a funding round in March 2019, and I was involved in preparing the data, reports, and analytics that supported it. The coverage in DealStreetAsia and The Nation Thailand described it as Myanmar's digital retail transformation — which felt both accurate and surreal to read about something we'd been too busy building to name.
The funding changed the team's trajectory. We expanded from around ten people to twenty-five-plus within a year — developers, QA engineers, infrastructure specialists. The university recruitment pipeline we'd built early meant we had a bench of junior engineers ready to step up when the budget allowed.
By the time we reached 150,000 monthly active users, rgo47 had become Myanmar's largest local e-commerce marketplace. Buyers and sellers across fashion, electronics, and everyday goods were using the platform daily.
What I carried forward
Four years of building rgo47 taught me something the agency world never could: the difference between building something and running something. At Revo, a project ended with a handover. At rgo47, there was no handover. Every architectural shortcut, every hire, every product decision — you lived with all of it.
The university hiring approach shaped how I think about teams. Hiring for potential rather than credentials is slower, but the people who grow with your product understand it in a way that no onboarding document can replicate.
And the MPT campaign taught me that preparation has limits. You can plan for the traffic you expect and still be wrong by an order of magnitude. What matters more is whether your team can hold together when the plan fails. Ours did.