17/11/2016
Dear HeyKuya Users,
Upon selling your company, there is a reality that no entrepreneur talks about; the fact that you no longer control the destiny of your company. It’s quite hard to get adjusted to that truth but let’s look back:
On September 2015, we began our voyage that has been unbelievably crazy so far. Our mission at HeyKuya was to “save people’s time”. We launched the service and in these 15 months we have saved more than 65,000,000 minutes for the people or more simply, 123 years. It was all made possible by more than 30 relentlessly-hardworking people in our team and of course, our technology. Isn’t that astonishing? More than 12 decades being saved from being wasted…
Of course it is an exciting opportunity for an entrepreneur to be able to sell his company just within 5 months of setting it up, but for us, it was an opportunity to join forces to spread that mission, faster, better and at a bigger scale. HeyKuya got acquired by YesBoss Group of Indonesia in March 2016. Until last week, we were serving more than 2,000 requests for 40,000 people every single day! Our fleet of riders were able to master the art of getting things done in the fastest way possible in Manila’s traffic. Our team set the standards on how customer service should be. We challenged the market and the market was nothing but more receptive than ever. Thousands of satisfied customers sharing their experiences on social media and brought more fuel to our team to do this bigger and better.
Surely no one likes a long waitlist. Some sad realizations along the way for me were the times when we all wanted to grow the company faster. When we wanted to launch our app sooner rather than later. When we wanted to give our daily users more options to access our services faster and easier but my hands were tied. The truth is when you agree to sell your company, you agree to let go of the control that you have over such decisions. I’m very sad to announce that YesBoss Group Pte. Ltd. has decided to cease operations of HeyKuya here in the Philippines as they get ready to march towards building an Artificial Intelligence platform using the data provided by HeyKuya. Kuya definitely did not plan to say goodbye this way. He cares about his friends way too much to do that!
On the other hand, I’m more than happy to say that at Machine Ventures (Original Builder of HeyKuya and the company I co-founded), we have been up to some amazing things. Our real-estate technology platform, Get.Place, just launched their product on web aside from mobile and their growth has never been more spectacular. Furthermore, we have the new batch of Machine Ventures already in the pipeline to disrupt and make life simpler across many different industries. I am so thrilled for that, not just because they are going to be amazing companies in their own markets, but because it will also allow us to hire most of HeyKuya’s hardworking team back at Machine Ventures and make sure that everyone in the HeyKuya team has a smooth transition.
What an amazing journey it has been and thank you for being part of it, hope we lived up to your expectations.
P.S. For press and business inquiries please contact me at [email protected]
Yours truly,
Shahab Shabibi
Founder and CEO
HeyKuya
