From $4,000 Website to $27 Million a Month: Chen Chow on Building, Scaling, and Surviving the Startup Rollercoaster

By Karthik Nagapuri · 2026-01-20

When Chen Chow and his co-founder Joel decided to start a company, they had no idea what they were going to build. They had just received competing job offers, and Joel asked a simple question: "Why don't we start a company?"

That question led to Fave Group, a journey through eight countries, a Sequoia investment, an acquisition of Groupon Asia, and eventually a COVID-era exit to Pine Labs. Along the way, Chen Chow learned lessons about speed, survival, and what really matters when you're building something from nothing.

The Beginning: Copy First, Iterate Later

A friend dropped Chen Chow a message about ClassPass killing it in the US. Within hours, they had a plan.

They bought a $4,000 website template. They scraped the ClassPass website, changed the wording, localized it a bit, and launched. Same color. Same logo. Just different words.

"Today, if you have AI, you could do it in minutes," Chen Chow noted. "But literally, they were in the US. We were in this part of the world where it was less strict."

They built a simple survey: Do you exercise? Do you pay for exercise? How frequently? After collecting responses, they showed each person their ranking number — number one, sixteen, one hundred sixty-six — and asked them to convince others to sign up.

The psychology was brilliant. This was early Facebook era, when people loved showing they were early adopters. Within a few days, they had 100,000 email signups.

The Sequoia Pitch: No Slides, No Office, No Problem

Eleven days into having nothing but a website and email addresses, Sequoia Capital reached out. "Come pitch us," they said.

Chen Chow and Joel knew they weren't ready. They had no app, no office, nothing but enthusiasm. But Sequoia insisted.

They walked into a meeting room expecting a formal presentation. Instead, they were asked to use the whiteboard. No slides allowed.

What happened next was pure luck meeting preparation. Of the three Sequoia partners in the room, one had worked with a co-founder at Groupon, another had traveled through China with them during their student days, and the third had previously managed their CTO.

By that night, they had $2.25 million.

But there was a catch: Sequoia wanted to visit their office the next morning. They didn't have one.

They scrambled. When the Sequoia team arrived at 8 AM, there was no logo on the door. The lights were off. It didn't matter. The check still cleared.

61 Rejections Before the 62nd Said Yes

The Sequoia story makes fundraising sound easy. It wasn't.

For their Series B, Chen Chow was rejected by 61 investors before the 62nd wrote a check. They were one weekend away from having no money to make payroll.

The headlines announced they raised $20 million. The headlines didn't mention the months of rejection that preceded it.

Chen Chow's approach to fundraising was relentless. From term sheet to money in the bank, he typically closed in thirteen business days. Every day during a raise, he had calls scheduled. After each call, the lawyers would send a draft in the afternoon, another at night, and another the next morning across time zones. The cycle never stopped.

Before big pitches, his investors would run simulation drills, role-playing as the person he was about to meet. He'd research targets using tools like Crystal Knows, studying their communication preferences, watching their YouTube appearances, analyzing their body language.

He maintained a master spreadsheet tracking every person they'd ever met: when, where, what was discussed, what advice was given, who made introductions. When meeting someone again, he could pull up the history instantly.

For negotiations, he used a simple framework: red lines, orange lines, and yellow lines. Red lines were deal-breakers — if that clause stayed, he'd walk away. Orange lines would affect his sleep — he could live with them, but they'd bother him. Yellow lines were nice-to-haves. Reading any agreement, he'd mark it up by hand, knowing exactly what to fight for and what to let go.

"You can't bargain everything. Know what matters."

The Power of Speed

Speed became Chen Chow's defining competitive advantage.

When Alipay announced a partnership with Touch 'n Go in Malaysia on a Monday, Chen Chow called them immediately. "I know you're working with Touch 'n Go. I want to give you all my merchants from Malaysia and Singapore for free."

By Thursday, they had agreed on terms. By Tuesday, they were featured in the Wall Street Journal.

Six working days. From cold call to global press announcement.

When Alipay's regional head explained why they chose to work with a tiny Series A startup, the answer was simple: speed. Chen Chow's team replied to emails at 2 AM. When Alipay responded at 2:30, his team asked if they could have a conference call at 2:45.

"As a startup, I'm not afraid of big companies," Chen Chow said. "I'm afraid of fast big companies."

Their competitors had market caps two or three zeros larger — Alipay, CIMB Bank, major players. The only way to survive was to be faster. And when competitors copied their features, they celebrated.

"We actually want competitors to copy. It's internal validation. If we do something right, people will copy. The big guys have more money. They will copy. As they copy, we need to be on the next iteration already."

The Unit Economics Problem

The original KFit model — pay $99 a month for unlimited fitness classes — had a fundamental flaw.

One of their main investors went to classes 60 times a month. At roughly $10 per visit, that investor alone was costing them $600 on a $99 subscription.

The math was brutal: people who exercised frequently cost money. People who didn't exercise cancelled. The only profitable customers were those who went four to eight times a month.

But here's the insight that changed everything: they discovered their real customer wasn't fitness enthusiasts. It was people looking for dating activities.

When someone is trying to impress a potential partner, they don't go to the same gym repeatedly. They go to yoga on Monday, pilates on Tuesday, Zumba on Wednesday, boxing on Thursday. They want variety.

Their best digital marketing target? People who had just changed their Facebook relationship status.

In a relationship to single? Time to mingle with fitness classes.

Micro-Details That Cut Costs in Half

In 2016-2017, mobile data was expensive in Southeast Asia. Most people carefully watched their data usage.

Chen Chow realized that targeting only people connected to WiFi would dramatically reduce advertising costs. When someone's on WiFi, they're not worried about data charges. They're more relaxed, more likely to engage.

That single targeting change cut their advertising costs by more than half.

"Each industry is different," Chen Chow emphasized. "What are the nuances in what you do that will be the trigger?"

He pointed to other examples: Dropbox scaled by creating competition between universities, where more signups from your school meant more free storage for everyone. Gmail made invites scarce, turning them into status symbols.

The question for any founder: what's your version of that trigger?

Build for the Mass Market, Not the Geeks

Chen Chow has a blunt take on what actually matters to customers.

"The deep community, the tech community — we care about technology. But in the outside world, millions of people out there, generally, don't care. Unless they're geeks themselves, they don't care what technology you use."

The question isn't whether your solution uses AI or blockchain or whatever's trending. The question is: are you making their lives easier, cheaper, better, or faster?

A good test for whether you've built something that matters: shut it down for a few minutes. See how fast you get bombarded with complaints. When Grab went down once, people posted on social media saying they didn't know how to get home.

"If you're down and no one cares, that's bad news. If you're down and people are desperate, you mean something to their lives."

The Pivot to Fave

KFit scaled across every city they entered, but it only captured upper-class customers. The mass market wouldn't pay that much for fitness subscriptions.

Meanwhile, Chen Chow's co-founder kept pointing at him — seventeen kilograms heavier than he is today — calling him the irony of running a fitness startup while barely exercising himself. In the entire year-plus of running KFit, Chen Chow completed exactly ten minutes of exercise. He once had to end a class early because he couldn't continue.

They didn't kill KFit outright. That would require effort. They just stopped investing in it, moved from a hundred employees down to two, and let it run as a small profitable side business while they built something new.

The Groupon Acquisition: WhatsApp Deals and Tax Surprises

Groupon Asia was struggling. The company had moved its Asian leadership to Brazil and the US, leaving no one who truly understood the region. When you sit in Brazil looking at Asia, you think of Japan, Hong Kong, maybe Singapore. You don't understand the rest. Business dropped 50-70%.

Groupon approached them about selling. Chen Chow had never acquired a company before.

The entire negotiation happened over WhatsApp. "We said, 'This feels like the right price.' Literally, it was that simple."

Two weeks after closing, they discovered they hadn't paid withholding tax to the government. That was a $150,000 surprise bill they had to scramble to cover.

"There's a lot of these things. When you don't know enough, you're not scared. We just went. We just tried. Worst case, fix again."

Navigating Regulators: Show Up and Apologize

The naivety that helped them move fast also got them into regulatory trouble — repeatedly.

When Malaysia introduced service tax for e-commerce, no startup knew how to handle it. The tax authority came knocking. While other companies hired lawyers to fight, Chen Chow and Joel walked in, apologized, and paid. Around $250,000.

After they paid, the government used them as precedent. "Since they paid, you all pay." Other startups were furious.

They sold medical checkup packages without realizing they needed a healthcare license. The Ministry of Health raided them. Same approach: show up, admit ignorance, negotiate. They worked out a system where they'd submit products for approval, and if the ministry didn't respond within three days, it counted as automatic approval.

"Can we use your logo on our website?" they asked. The ministry agreed.

"A lot of times, being young — don't do evil, don't do bad things. But just do it. If you get into trouble, likelihood is you're small enough that they won't crush you."

Investors Who Wouldn't Take No for an Answer

Early funding came with its own pressures.

At one fitness center pitch, Chen Chow met an elderly man who turned out to have just sold Fitness First for a billion dollars.

Their former boss from Groupon, who later joined Lazada, sent them an email: "You better take my money, or else I'll compete with you."

The guy they used to report to directly told them: "Take my money. You're on my side. If you don't take it, I'll find a way to do this myself."

"What do you do when the person you reported to says that to you?"

A lot of the early journey was right place, right time, combined with people who believed in them — sometimes aggressively.

Learning from China: 30 Meetings in Two Weeks

After acquiring Groupon Asia, they flew to China to study the payments space. They cold-messaged over 100 VP and SVP-level executives on LinkedIn with a simple offer: "We'll tell you about Southeast Asia for forty-five minutes. If that's valuable, tell us about China for fifteen minutes."

They got 30 meetings.

From those conversations, they built Fave's core model: platform-agnostic, merchant-specific cashback. Customers could pay with any app — DBS, Google Pay, Alipay, Touch 'n Go — and still earn cashback tied to that specific store.

For the user interface, they printed twenty login pages from apps they admired, stuck them on a wall, and walked around with markers. "I like this part. Hate this part." No fancy user testing software. Just paper, walls, and honest reactions.

From $3 Million to $27 Million a Month

After acquiring Groupon's Southeast Asia operations, Fave's monthly revenue grew from $3 million to $27 million in two and a half years.

They signed 14,000 merchants. They scaled from zero to 120 employees in five months. They launched eight countries and twelve cities.

Chen Chow tracked 200 metrics every hour, comparing today to yesterday to the same day last week. When something dropped, he knew exactly which location and which merchant category was responsible.

For physical expansion, they plotted maps and picked hyper-specific battles. Instead of trying to compete everywhere against companies with forty salespeople when they had three, they focused on F&B in just three neighborhoods.

"In these three spots, F&B, I need to beat them. Triple them."

Once they dominated those six spots, they could expand to twenty-four. Then everywhere.

For mall promotions, they stationed human promoters at different spots based on time of day: coffee shops at 10 AM, fast food restaurants at noon, different locations by 2 PM. The metric that mattered was new customer signups — not foot traffic, not conversations, just new customers. Any location that didn't deliver got cut immediately.

They also analyzed which merchants produced higher-quality customers. A coffee shop might bring lots of new signups, but if those customers never returned to use the app elsewhere, that location wasn't worth the investment. They doubled down on merchants whose customers had high lifetime value.

The Taiwan Turnaround

When Groupon sent Chen Chow and Joel to Taiwan after the Malaysia success, they arrived as two young kids who barely spoke Mandarin, knowing nothing about the market.

The Taiwan team had 250 people. In their first two days, they conducted 41 one-on-one meetings, each lasting half an hour. Their translator was crying by the end — forty-one sessions of back-and-forth, with Chen Chow furiously taking notes and Joel asking follow-up questions.

Every time someone mentioned another person's name — "he's good" or "she's problematic" — they'd call that person in next.

By day three, they had a diagnosis. They couldn't fix everything with such a small leadership presence. So they picked their battles: sales (fifteen people) and customer service (twenty-five people). Forty people total, split between them. Joel took one group, Chen Chow took the other. The remaining 200+ employees were told to keep doing what they were doing.

Customer service was missing 40% of incoming calls. Chen Chow told the team: "If we miss more than 15% by Friday, the whole team is fired."

He didn't know local labor law. He didn't know if he could actually fire anyone. But he sat with them day and night fixing the problem.

The first fix was simple: lunch and dinner were split into four staggered shifts instead of everyone leaving at once. Call capacity immediately jumped to 75%.

They repeated this process across different parts of the business, fixing one thing at a time, then moving to the next.

The Langkawi Offsite: Playing with Fire

After successfully migrating all Groupon users to the Fave platform, the team was riding high. Social media congratulated them. Everyone was celebrating.

Chen Chow saw danger. The team had accomplished their mission and had no clear direction for what came next. They were comfortable. Comfort kills startups.

He brought the team to Langkawi for an offsite. Day one was celebration — yachts, beaches, relaxation. Day two morning, the tone shifted.

They needed to reignite the fighting spirit. They brought in high-potential young employees to grill the leadership, challenging decisions and directions. The goal was to make everyone feel passionate and maybe a little angry again.

It worked too well. That night, people were on the beach throwing things into the sea, furious. Some were cursing Chen Chow and Joel.

"Are we the right leaders?" they asked each other that night. They'd played with fire, and now the fire was burning out of control.

The next day, they had to provide answers they didn't fully have. They hadn't slept. They didn't have a perfect roadmap. But they needed to channel the energy they'd unleashed into something productive.

They survived it. The objective — getting people out of complacency — was achieved. But it was a reminder of how delicate team dynamics can be. Sometimes the medicine is almost as dangerous as the disease.

The COVID Crash

By early 2020, Fave had around $56 million in cash. Chen Chow thought that was enough buffer.

Then COVID hit.

Monthly revenue dropped from $27 million in February to $20 million in March to $6 million in April. But the cash problem was worse than the revenue problem.

When businesses shut down, three things happened simultaneously: new money stopped coming in, customers demanded refunds for prepaid services they couldn't use, and Fave still had to pay merchants for the days of lag between collection and payment.

That $56 million evaporated to a few hundred thousand dollars.

Two existing investors were willing to invest more at the Series B valuation — if every other investor also participated. They couldn't get consensus. Some investors had been hit by their own portfolio problems.

Eventually, the two willing investors offered to invest at a much lower valuation, with terms that would heavily dilute founders and other investors who didn't participate.

Fave sold to Pine Labs for $45 million. On paper, that sounds reasonable. But they had raised $40 million and done other acquisitions. The math didn't work in the founders' favor.

Chen Chow, Joel, and 150 employees with stock options together held about 20% of the company by the end.

What He'd Tell Himself Now

"Enjoy the journey. Not the destination."

There will be days of feeling up and days of feeling very dark. On the good days, remember that bad luck can strike. On the dark days, remember that people care about you and that you're closer to bouncing back than you think.

Be good to others. Chen Chow now mentors over 30 startups. He tells founders: "Your company. Don't worry about me. Do the right things for you, for the company, for the employees."

What he asks for in return is fairness. If the company makes money, he should make money. If everyone loses, he's okay losing too. But fairness.

The real question to ask yourself: "When you have no title, no money, who still cares about you?"

And for anyone at an inflection point in life, try this exercise: Assume you don't owe anyone anything and don't need to worry about money. What would your life be?

Start completely open. Then add constraints. Don't start from what feels impossible and try to open up — you'll stay stuck.

The Test That Matters

Don't fall in love with your product. Don't fall in love with your technology. Fall in love with the problem you're trying to solve.

Build something that makes a small group of people really love it — even if others really hate it. That polarization is a sign you've found something. Indifference is the real danger.

"If a bunch of people really love it and a bunch of people really hate it, you've hit something. How do you get more people to love it? That's the question. But if everyone just says 'okay, whatever' — that's when you should worry."

Chen Chow is Founder of 1% Advisory & Coaching and Independent Non-Executive Chairman of Foodie Media Berhad, which listed on Bursa Malaysia in November 2025. He previously co-founded Fave Group (acquired by Pine Labs) and served as Regional Operations Director of Groupon Asia Pacific. He is an Eisenhower Fellow and Cornell University alumnus.

Postscript: The Other Side of the Table

Today, Chen Chow sits on boards and advises startups rather than running them. The perspective shift has been instructive.

As chairman of Foodie Media through their IPO, he worked with young, passionate founders who moved fast and needed guardrails. His job was to slow them down just enough to add structure without killing their energy.

His next IPO, scheduled for mid-2025, is with a 29-year-old company. Traditional. Methodical. There, his job is the opposite — pushing them to be more aggressive, more willing to take risks.

"At Foodie, I'm the old person trying to add control. At the other company, I'm the kid trying to make them rebel."

The skill isn't knowing one way of operating. It's reading what each situation needs and adjusting accordingly. Joel was always the visionary, the one who charmed rooms and connected dots. Chen Chow was the details person — the one who knew every number in the business, who read every line of every prospectus.

Different superpowers for different situations. The key is knowing which one to deploy.