Founded in 2015, Malaysian company BEAM which operates a social networking platform for businesses has since rebranded to BEAMSTART.
The name BEAM comes from their first event which was titled “Bridging Entrepreneurs Across Malaysia” or B.E.A.M in short.
The addition of “START” to their rebranded name is taken from “startup”, and Kenneth added that they went with BEAMSTART because it still carried their old name while also being short and easy to say.
“We actually felt the need for a name change very early in the beginning,” CEO Kenneth Ho shared, “‘BEAM’ is a very generic English term and many other companies also used the same name.”
“I think there were over 10 other companies across the world using the same name, drawing lots of confusion [as] to who we are.”
“We eventually realised it has been 3 years since we started out and it was high time we fixed this moving forward.”
The rebranding has not affected the way the company operates, with Kenneth saying, “Aside from the fact we will need to get used to introducing ourselves under the new name and refreshing all marketing collaterals, nothing much has changed.”
How They Monetised Then And Now
When BEAMSTART was still in its early days and operating under the name BEAM, they were monetising “mostly from events ticketing and sponsorships, while experimenting on other scalable models,” Kenneth said.
Back in a 2017 interview with Vulcan Post, he told us that the company’s future plans for monetisation lay in advertising or through aiding in services surrounding recruitment.
Today, he shared that monetisation through the latter channel has manifested, and that “the results have been promising.”
“However, we aren’t doing it via the ‘advertising’ approach as we started out, as that is a very competitive space and proven to be less effective for us.”
“Instead, we’re using machine learning to identify and match talent with the relevant companies in our database.”
“Finding suitable talent for companies has always been challenging, especially in today’s world where there is an increasing need for high-skilled creative and technology-related talent.”
“Our talent business is still relatively new but has brought in about 1/3 of our revenues so far.”
He categorised BEAMSTART’s monetisation into 3 main areas:
- Tech solutions: They have a software team focusing on platform deployment and integration for SMEs.
- Cross-border commercialisation solutions: They provide marketing solutions to companies that want to expand and cross borders, and this includes their events and media / marketing businesses.
- Opportunity matching: They monetise off digital purchases, talent solutions, investor matching, and more.
A Slight Shift In Focus
To date, Kenneth shared that BEAMSTART has over 130,000 users across the Southeast Asian region “and a little bit of India” with a large number of them being from Malaysia and Singapore.
According to their press release, BEAMSTART “will double down activities related to SME digitalization, talent solutions, and cross-border commercialization for businesses across the region.”
“When we started out, we focused a lot on community activities surrounding the startup space, by being a platform for startup entrepreneurs to connect and collaborate as well as reach investors,” Kenneth said.
“Today, we’re focusing more heavily on the SME (traditional businesses and brick & mortar) space, which makes up over 90% of the region’s businesses.”
Moving forward, BEAMSTART will be carrying out 3 main activities:
- Offering solutions to solve businesses’ problems;
- Increasing engagement with them via offline-to-online activities like events and business networking online;
- Bridging people within the startup / tech space and SME space more effectively.
“In today’s economic landscape, many of these SME companies are struggling with the aspect of going digital and automating internal processes.”
“Hiring talent and expanding regionally has also been a big challenge for them,” he explained.
- You can read more about BEAMSTART’s earlier activities here.
Featured Image Credit: Kenneth Ho