We managed to steal 5 minutes of the young entrepreneur's time to find out what started the ball rolling with KFit and what new experiences it has introduced to him.
Joel Neoh made waves in the entrepreneurial world yet again when he announced he was leaving Groupon Malaysia, the crowd-discount site that he founded and led to great success in Malaysia. Before long, the reason behind his leaving was apparent with the introduction of KFit, the fitness sharing platform that burst onto the scene in Kuala Lumpur a month ago.
We managed to steal 5 minutes of the busy man's time to find out what started the ball rolling with KFit, what he's planning to further do with it and what new experiences has it introduced to him.
Starting up companies has always been something I really enjoy. I’ve started up many companies before Groupon. Running a big organisation and starting up a company from scratch are two different things. Starting something up gives me that ability to create. I love that process of creation. I’m not big into just managing.
I think it was all timing. I’ve been with Groupon for about 5 years. I was itching itching to start and create something again. I’ve been looking out for different ideas for 2 years and this idea for KFit made sense since I’m very big into fitness as well.
I see a big opportunity in fitness. The fitness industry in Malaysia hasn’t really evolved that much in the past years. I saw this new fitness model in Europe and the US which I felt was a good opportunity to democratise and bring to Asia.
Once I came across this model (for KFit), everything was straight-forward. There is a good product market fit – I love fitness, I love e-commerce, it’s got the potential to go global so it all came together. I read up more about it and saw the potential in it to grow across Asia.
We need to realise that there are so many different fitness club and dance studios and boutique fitness providers that people are actually interested in going to try, but they can’t get the access. It’s quite intimidating to start something new as well because of all the commitments that come with it.
KFit aggregates all these fitness providers and allow you to access them and the platform then pays these providers individually. It takes away that barrier to start and try something new, so everyone can try.
I believe this fitness trend will spread to this part of the world. You’re already seeing the trend with celebrities constantly Instagramming their workouts, you see all these health juice places springing up. As the population becomes more and more aware of the importance of health and fitness, then in general this will follow.
The opportunity and mission is big enough to take up the next few years to build. In the past 2 months, we’ve been scoping out the landscape in Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, trying to build the right teams and find the right partners. It’s an interesting model to go for.
After we started KFit, now for the first time I’m actually working out with my friends and colleagues. For the past 10 years, I mostly work out alone. Now because of KFit, we can access all these different providers and try out all these new stuff.
I did yoga for the first time last week with 2 other friends. We tried flow-yoga which I thought would be easy: “Get with the flow” right? Flow actually means non-stop so what entails is non-stop yoga for a whole hour. In 20 minutes I was on the floor. My friend looked like he was having a seizure.
Now I'm just using KFit to try different things. I’m doing pilates next week.
Pole-dancing is a little ambitious at this moment. You got to wear really short shorts -- I don’t know about that. Yeah, pole dancing is probably one item high on the list of things I won't be trying soon in terms of ambition to try something new.
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