Engage Rocket

Chi-Tung Leong saw an opportunity in Southeast Asia's emerging HR analytics market. In late 2016, people analytics was virtually unknown in the region—there were no communities, no thought leaders, and no established players. Leong decided to build Engage Rocket to help mid-market enterprises (500-5,000 employees) leverage data to improve talent retention and productivity. Rather than launching with a finished product, he employed an unconventional strategy: start building authority before the product even existed.

Six months before Engage Rocket's product launched in October 2016, Leong committed to publishing a 1,500-word blog post every week, heavily optimizing for SEO. He and his team "hustled and pushed that content around everyone." The gamble paid off when Forbes Asia picked up one of their articles—"Five Great Opportunities HR Departments Can Take in 2017" (published December 12, 2016, which garnered 4,000 views)—and invited them to publish on the Forbes platform as well. This credibility became their most powerful asset.

With Forbes credentials in hand, Leong identified a gap: there was no HR analytics community in Singapore on Meetup.com. He created one and used Forbes as a "credibility device to rally people around that community." The results were striking—the group grew from zero to 700 members in less than six months. At their first in-person meetup, they expected 8 people but 40+ showed up. While the exact attribution is unclear (some came from personal contacts, some from email blasts, many from Meetup.com's own platform discovery), the community became a pipeline for their first two paying customers. The most effective SEO keyword for customer acquisition became "Employee Engagement Software Singapore," which converted within months.

Engage Rocket's CAC of approximately $11,000 SGD ($15,000 USD) breaks down into two main channels: PR and in-person events. As Chi-Tung explained, "PR helps us drive certain SEO keywords that we want to rank for. And it also does social proof for us in a market that's quite conservative." Digital advertising, by contrast, hasn't been a major focus. By the time of this interview, they'd grown to 40 active customers out of 100+ total (indicating 25% gross revenue churn). However, expansion revenue of 25% among ideal customer profile accounts gave them a 101% net revenue retention rate—a strong signal of product-market fit. The payback period of 8.5 months on their $1,500 USD annual contract value was healthy for a B2B SaaS business in Southeast Asia.

Three years after launch, Engage Rocket reached $60,000 MRR ($720,000 ARR)—more than double their revenue from a year prior (they had ~$30,000 MRR twelve months earlier, representing 2.5x growth). The team had grown to 18 people spread across five countries: engineers in Vietnam, SDRs in the Philippines, customer success in India, and leadership in Singapore. With $1.1M in seed funding raised in September 2017, they were actively fundraising for a Series A round of $3-5M USD on a hoped-for $15-20M pre-money valuation. Despite burning ~$15,000 USD per month (20% of revenue), they maintained a lean operation and were confident in their path to profitability. Their next growth targets were mature markets (US, Australia) where similar products had already proven demand, and expansion within Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Thailand), where HR analytics remained largely untapped.