Building Myanmar's Largest Local E-commerce Marketplace
Growing rgo47 from a traditional retail platform into a national marketplace, and building the IT department that made it possible.
Context
rgo47, owned by Royal Golden Owls Co Ltd, was a traditional retail business in Yangon when I joined. Myanmar was in the middle of a rapid digital shift. Affordable smartphones and data had arrived only a few years earlier, and consumers were moving from physical stores to online shopping within a single generation of devices.
The mandate was to turn a retail operation into a marketplace platform, and there was no technology team to do it with.
Approach
The first job was people. I built the IT department from zero: developers, full-stack engineers, QA, and infrastructure. Hiring in an emerging market meant finding people with strong fundamentals and growing them into roles that did not yet exist locally.
Growing a team and growing a product at the same time forces a choice every week: invest in the thing that ships now, or the person who will ship for the next three years. Getting that balance right mattered more than any single feature.
Product work ran in parallel. We moved from a single retail catalogue to a multi-category marketplace covering fashion, electronics, and general merchandise, with the seller onboarding, payments, and logistics integration that a marketplace needs and a retailer does not.
Outcome
rgo47 became Myanmar's largest local e-commerce marketplace. The platform reached 150,000 monthly active users, the IT department grew past 25 people, and the company secured funding from Daiwa PI Partners in March 2019. Coverage in DealStreetAsia, e27, and The Nation Thailand followed.
Reflection
Scale is a people problem before it is a technology problem. The platform scaled because the team could, and the team could because we hired for the role after next rather than the role we needed that week.