From online queue to F&B social commerce, Kewdoo is revolutionizing the dining experience and generating income opportunities for Malaysians

“I am sorry team, we couldn’t make it into the University Startup Challenge (USC), we have missed the deadline,” said Grace Lai, the Gen Z woman entrepreneur who led the founding of Kewdoo. Kewdoo is an F&B social commerce platform based in Klang Valley. It all started with a simple idea, to provide an online queuing platform for restaurants and cafes. The idea was initiated by Grace and her friends when they were brainstorming for the University Startup Challenge back in 2019. They saw popular eateries and consumers were facing long queues during peak hours. Both merchants and consumers were unsatisfied with the manual way of handling queues, which was time-consuming and prone to human error.

The team did not get into the USC and they were left with two options, either they stop working on this idea or they build a business out of this idea. Eventually, Grace was the only one who wanted to continue with this idea while the other members chose to focus on their studies. She later invited James Koo to officially co-founding Kewdoo and the other team members, Foong and Liong to join them in this new venture. The startup graduated from the Breadboard Incubation Program and gained several early adopters for their online queuing platform. Merchants like hotpot and BBQ restaurants join Kewdoo for their easy-to-use solution and affordable pricing. More restaurants are aware of how Kewdoo can enhance their customer experience, at the same time, keeping their staff and customers safe in this pandemic.

Since launching the platform in September 2020, Kewdoo has been evolving to offer more solutions to the Food & Beverage merchants. The startup has introduced an online reservation system to help both restaurants and consumers to save time and effort in the table reservation process. The queue and reservation systems are integrated to ease the restaurants’ operation, at the same time, acting as a CRM tool to build a loyal customer base. Some of the popular brands that have been partnering with Kewdoo are Mitasu, Sweetree and Little Salty Cafe.

While Klang Valley experienced several lockdowns and dine-in were prohibited, eateries were suffering due to reduced store traffic. The team behind Kewdoo identified that most of the eateries are suffering due to poor marketing. A lot of them are SMEs who do not have the expertise in marketing nor the budget to hire an external marketing advisor. Coupled with the increasing unemployment rate in the prolonged lockdown, a lot of people are joining the gig workforce to make a living, where the number of gig workers in Malaysia is close to four million.

Seeing the pain of the SMEs who run eateries and the hike in the number of people who lost their jobs, Kewdoo is launching its F&B social commerce platform to help both parties. Social commerce is the use of a social network community to drive e-commerce sales. Kewdoo boosts the online presence of F&B brands and helps drive sales through the social sharing mechanism. At the same time, end-users are provided with earning opportunities where they can earn affiliate commissions when someone orders food from their unique affiliate links. With the concept that everyone can promote and earn, Kewdoo not only helps with the marketing of local eateries but also allows Malaysians with internet connectivity to earn while sharing the good food around them. Kewdoo would allow consumers to join online queues, make reservations and order food for deliveries or takeaways from the merchants who join the F&B social commerce platform.

“Kewdoo is allowing everyone to earn an extra income just by sharing good food to their friends online, you don’t need to be a social media influencer to start sharing”, said Grace Lai. “Merchants now don’t have to worry about spending a huge marketing budget up front which doesn’t have a guaranteed ROI, they only share the commissions with the users when the food orders are fulfilled”, added James Koo, who handles the finance and business development of Kewdoo.

With an extremely lean team of only 6 members, Kewdoo team members have to juggle between coding, designing, marketing, operations and business development. This requires them to wear multiple hats at a time but they are enjoying the process of building the startup. “Often we have to work till late midnight but we feel it is worth it when users love using our platform and we are helping merchants to get more sales”, said Foong, who is the full stack developer and founding team of Kewdoo. The DevOps engineer and one of the founding members, Liong, also added, “It is not easy to build the business from scratch, but we see vast potential in Kewdoo and we believe that with great determination and good teamwork, we will reach our goal soon.”

To date, Kewdoo has more than 80 merchants around Klang Valley and 20,000 active users. The team, who are all in their 20s, are highly passionate and skilled enough to grow the startup. Kewdoo witnessed a 135% Month-over-Month revenue growth since its launching. They are the Top 20 startups of MaGIC's Virtual Global Accelerator Programme (GAP) Cohort 5 and SIDEC’s Selangor Accelerator Program (SAP) 2021. Other than building networks and seeking guidance from mentors, the accelerator programs are preparing Kewdoo to be investment-ready before seeking investment opportunities locally and abroad. With a strong love of Malaysian food, Kewdoo plans to expand to all Southeast Asian countries within the next five years.

The F&B social commerce startup is actively recruiting merchants around the Klang Valley area to join its platforms. Merchants need no cost to join the platforms while commissions would only incur when a food order is successfully made. Part of the commissions would be shared with the affiliate users who promoted the eateries. At the same time, Kewdoo welcomes more users to join them as affiliate members to help promote the merchants in the F&B social commerce platform. In coming months, Kewdoo is looking to expand out of Klang Valley.

To know more about Kewdoo, visit their website at www.kewdoo.com or follow Kewdoo Malaysia on Facebook.

This content is provided by Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre (MaGIC).