On 4 August 2026, I attended Ecom North in Singapore with my intern Aleem and one of my e-commerce clients. One day, two stages, and a lineup of founders and operators with wildly different paths to success. From building brands past $200M to scaling past $2M in sales from TikTok alone, here is what we walked away with.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to Ecom North 2026 by Joshua Chin
• Alvin Huang: The 5 Pivots That Built $200M
• Mao Ting: AI-Native Growth on Half the Headcount
• Panel: Competing Beyond Price with Omnichannel
• Delugs: The Data Behind Going Physical
• Roy Ang: Scaling the Triple Complexity
• Danny Tan: Reflections Post-Exit. The HipVan Story
• Alvin Lim: Building a Multi-Million Dollar TikTok Sales Engine
• Sant Qiu: How I’m generating $150M with 51 Employees
• Ivan Ong: Building a $125M US Brand from Singapore
• Julian Artope: How I Scaled Zenyum
• Joshua Chan: How to Sell Your Brand for Millions
• Would I Recommend Ecom North to Business Owners?

Introduction to Ecomm North 2026 by Joshua Chin

Joshua Chin, Founder of Chronos Agency and Co-Founder of Ecom North, kicked things off. He wasn’t just there to open the event. He moderated panels, interviewed founders, and closed out the day too.

Why Ecom North exists

Josh has worked with hundreds of founders. His conclusion: most don’t fail from lack of motivation or intelligence. They fail because they don’t know what to work on next. So they watch YouTube videos, buy courses, jump between tactics, and copy brands without understanding why those strategies worked. 

Result: Information overload, not progress.

The internet gives you information. It doesn’t give you direction. The real challenge is knowing which advice applies to your business, which strategy is worth testing, and which problem deserves attention first.

Learn from operators, not gurus

Josh was blunt: there are too many people teaching entrepreneurship who’ve never built anything real. They’re good at selling courses, not running companies. Learn instead from operators. People who’ve scaled, lost money, made hiring mistakes, and solved real logistics problems. They can tell you what actually happened, what failed, and what they’d never do again. That’s worth more than theory.

Build systems

You can’t scale a business on one person alone. Founders who improvise daily instead of following a process create chaos, and make the business dependent on them instead of scalable. Systems cut confusion and decision fatigue. 

The goal: make good decisions repeatable.

Find your community

Building a business is isolating. Most founders don’t have anyone around them who understands the ad problems, cash-flow pressure, or hiring calls they’re facing. Surround yourself with other founders, someone in the room has already solved your problem.

Takeaways from Joshua Chin: 

• Stop consuming more content mindlessly. 
• Find operators who’ve actually done it. 
• Build systems so the business doesn’t depend on you. 
• Get in a room with founders who’ve solved the problems you’re about to face.

Alvin Huang: Uncharted Scale. The 5 pivots that built $200M

Pivot 1: Pivoting From The Personal Development Space To A Global Health Supplements Market

Alvin Huang started off his career in the personal development space selling digital products on Ebay and clickbank. While he managed to scale his business to 3 to 4 million dollars using his skills in marketing, he was not able to break through the ceiling after that. 

So he decided to pivot into the global health supplements market which was worth tens of billions of dollars. Even capturing a small percentage of this market would mean a huge business. For an e-commerce business aiming to reach the same level of scale that he did, Alvin advised to first dive deep into the size of one’s Total Addressable Market (TAM).

Before entering a market, he suggested asking questions like:

• Is demand in my market increasing?
• Can customers buy repeatedly?
• Can I expand internationally?
• Is this problem painful enough?
• Does the product have a strong or growing profit margin? 

A mediocre business in a massive market has more scope to grow than an amazing business in a tiny market.

Pivot 2: Buying Proximity To Successful Business Owners In Your Space 

Instead of spending most of the money he made in his early days carelessly on the things he didn’t need, Alvin remained financially very disciplined. He reinvested a significant portion of his money into proven masterminds and coaches who were way more successful than him. Based on Alvin’s own experience, he shared that the higher the price he paid for a mastermind, the more he benefited from it. After every mastermind that you attend, Alvin suggested to ask yourself:

• Which idea out of 10 ideas discussed and brainstormed during the mastermind would make the biggest impact on my business? 

During one of the masterminds he attended, Alvin also got the idea of doing more of what was already working in his business. Instead of 3 product launches a year with a 30% success rate, he decided to increase to 12 product launches a year. With his success rate remaining almost constant, Alvin could grow his business revenue tremendously simply by compressing time. 

Pivot 3: Having A Growth Mindset Over A Fixed Mindset

A growth mindset (in the context of a business) is the founder’s belief that his/her business can grow over time by 

• Improving on his/her skills, abilities and strategies through consistent learning and doing 
• Being proactive in getting help from others who have achieved what he/she wants. 

Your business growth can be faster if you engage business coaches or attend small group masterminds with other founders in the same business stage as you, extract the best learnings and apply them to your business with an open mind.

Pivot 4: Hiring Above Your Skillset

Many founders hire and try to train junior members but are afraid or have ego to hire team members who are better than them in a particular skillset. This can become a bottleneck to your business growth. 

Alvin shared his experience around hiring an experienced customer service manager who took charge of the entire customer service experience in his business. Previously, he had hired junior customer service managers who failed in their roles and caused the business to lose more time and money than he had imagined. 

Even if a business is bootstrapped, Alvin explained that it can often be “cheaper” to hire someone experienced as they can bring a lot more value to the business. One interview question that Alvin uses to separate real experts from people exaggerating their expertise: 

• Can you specifically tell me how you did it? Be as detailed as possible. 

Also, Alvin explained to make sure hires can understand the limitations of resources a startup has against a large MNC (and that the hires can be scrappy).  “There will always be risk and you may still end up hiring the wrong people. But that shouldn’t stop you from trying to bring in top notch talent into your business.” he emphasised.  

Pivot 5: Use AI to 10x your Business

Instead of just asking yourself, how AI can make processes faster in your business, it is time to start thinking about how AI can make outputs better and also how AI can make outputs that were once impossible now possible. 

• How can you utilise AI to 10x your business? 

“While one sees AI being used left, right and centre in recent years, you want to make sure you incorporate a lot of stories and emotions in your marketing, to separate you from the crowd.” Alvin emphasized. 

Mao Ting: AI-native growth. How I grew revenue 30% on half the headcount?

Mao Ting is Co-Founder of Sunnystep and Maxify AI. She cut her team from 37 staff to 10. Revenue grew by roughly 30% in the same period. The reduction wasn’t a cost-cutting exercise. It came from asking one question repeatedly across her business: “If AI existed from Day 1, how would we build this company differently?“

That question marks the difference between being AI-assisted and being AI-native. AI-assisted means incorporating AI into an existing workflow. AI-native means redesigning the workflow around AI from the ground up.

Her clearest example from her own company was from the merchandising department. It was absorbing a disproportionate share of her headcount. So she built real-time AI tracking that factored in her brand’s overbuy and underbuy signals. The AI now proposes exact stock quantities to purchase. It also decides exactly when to purchase them. This is a function that previously needed a full team.

1) Audit Your Team for the Biggest Repetitive-Work Function First

Don’t spread AI thin across every task at once. Find the single function eating the most headcount on repetitive, pattern-based work. For Mao Ting, that was merchandising. Solve that one function completely before moving to the next.

Start by listing your team’s roles. For each role, note how much of the week goes to judgment calls versus repeatable decisions, things like stock levels, ticket replies, or report formatting. The role with the highest repeatable-decision share is your first target.

2) Split Every Role Into “AI-First” and “Human-Only” Tasks

For each function, separate tasks into two buckets:

• Human-only: creativity, strategy, decision-making, customer relationships, innovation
• AI-first: research, draft writing, data analysis, summaries, documentation, reporting, internal knowledge retrieval, repetitive communication

Then flip the default question. Instead of “who should do this?”, ask “can AI do this first?” If AI gets a task 80% done, a human closes the remaining 20%.

This also changes the shape of the workflow itself. The old model looks like this:

Employee → Work → Finished

The new model adds a step:

Employee → AI → Employee Review & Refine → Finished

The human role shifts from doing the task to reviewing and refining it. That one extra step is where most of the productivity gain comes from — the human isn’t starting from a blank page anymore.

3) Build One AI Workflow Per Department, Not One Tool for the Whole Company

Mao Ting didn’t run a single company-wide AI rollout. She built department-specific AI applications instead:

• Marketing: SEO content ideas, social content ideas, ad copy, campaign analysis
• Customer Support: Instant replies, knowledge base, ticket summaries, suggested responses
• Sales: Meeting prep, proposal generation, CRM updates, lead qualification
• HR: Resume screening, interview summaries, job description writing, onboarding
• Operations: SOP creation, documentation, workflow automation, internal reporting
• Finance: Report summaries, forecasting, financial analysis, dashboard explanations

Pick the department with the clearest repeatable process first. Ship one workflow there. Then move to the next department.

4) Write Down Your Processes Before You Automate Them

AI can’t make judgment calls that only exist in someone’s head. It needs the underlying rule spelled out first. Before assigning a task to AI, write down the actual rule a human currently follows. For example: “reorder stock when inventory drops below X and lead time exceeds Y days.” Turn that rule into a documented SOP.

This is the step most businesses skip. They hand AI a vague task instead of a documented process. The result is vague output.

Mao Ting’s merchandising system worked for a specific reason. The overbuy/underbuy logic was defined clearly enough to hand to AI in the first place.

Josh Chin, Jamie Lim & Kai Jian: Competing Beyond Price. How Brands Win with Omnichannel

This panel ran at the same time as Mao Ting’s talk, on the Tactical Stage at 10.05am. It was moderated by Brenda Shee, Head of Outbound Sales at Airwallex, with panelists Josh Chin (Co-Founder & CEO of Chronos Agency, Co-Founder of Ecom North), Jamie Lim, CEO of Scanteak, and Kai Jian (KJ), CEO of HipVan. Where the Delugs session answered “when does retail make financial sense,” this panel tackled a related but distinct question: how do brands compete when price is no longer a differentiator anyone can win on?

1) Retail Removes Hesitation for Big-Ticket Purchases

KJ was direct: for big and premium purchases, consumers want to try before they buy. Showrooms exist to solve that hesitation. Scanteak backed this with their own data — offline consistently produces a larger average basket size than online.

2) Online Is Precise. Retail Is a Lagging Indicator.

All three founders agreed on this tradeoff: ecommerce gives clean, immediate tracking. Retail doesn’t. Data lags and attribution gets murky. Ecommerce-only, without a showroom, also comes with real cost savings, which is why it still wins at mid-market and lower price points. Retail earns its cost back at higher price tiers, where the in-person experience changes the buying decision.

3) Stress-Test the Downside Before You Commit

Before opening a store, the panel’s filter: “If everything goes wrong, can you still cover your costs?” It forces founders to underwrite retail as a financial decision, not a milestone.

4) Use Low-Cost Products to Bridge Customers Into Premium Ones

A tactic discussed by ecommerce brands on the panel: sell cheap, low-commitment products at pop-ups purely for brand recall and awareness, then convert those same customers at higher price points once they’re inside the retail store. The pop-up isn’t the sale, it’s the introduction.

5) Diversify Your Acquisition Channels Across Content, Paid, and Partnerships

KJ named these as the biggest drivers for HipVan’s business:

• Organic Instagram content: Products shown in real home living environments, captured as reels
• Paid Facebook and Google ads
• Partnerships with retail department stores

If your business leans on just one acquisition channel, that’s a dependency risk. Diversify your marketing across organic and paid channels, and use partnerships to accelerate your product sales.

6) Add More Touchpoints as Ad Performance Plateaus

Josh flagged this as part of a broader shift in ecommerce: roughly 80% of ad budget still goes to Meta across the multi-million dollar brands he works with, but CTRs have been climbing while conversion rates are falling. In his view, this is the evolution of ecommerce. Attention is getting easier to buy, but converting that attention into a sale is getting harder. The old playbook of “just spend more on Meta” doesn’t scale the way it used to. 

His advice: brands need to show up at more touchpoints and invest in storytelling to stay top of mind, rather than assuming more spend on the same channel will close the gap.

7) Build a Story Customers Will Pay More For

Consumers always have access to cheaper alternatives. Platforms like Taobao guarantee that. Josh’s own example: he chooses Community Coffee’s beans over cheaper Taobao alternatives, specifically because of the brand’s story and values. If a brand competes purely on price, it’s competing on the one axis where a platform built to be cheap will always win.

Actionable Steps from Josh, Jamie & KJ

• Reserve retail for premium products people need to touch, feel, or compare in person
• Stress-test retail economics before committing, assume the downside case
• Use low-cost pop-up offers to acquire, and retail to convert at premium price points
• Invest in brand storytelling as CTRs rise and conversion falls, attention is cheap, trust is not.

Pei Qi & Kenneth Kuan (Delugs): Should I Go Into Retail? The Data Behind an 8-Figure Online Brand Going Physical

Kenneth Kuan is Founder & CEO of Delugs, one of the world’s leading premium watch strap brands, serving customers in over 100 countries. Pei Qi, Co-Founder, oversees operations, retail strategy, and customer experience. Together they took Delugs from a purely online DTC business into physical retail, and their talk was less about the decision to open a store and more about the math behind it.

Instead of asking “should I open a retail store?” they reframed the question: “When does retail make financial sense?” For them, retail was never about prestige. It’s about economics.

1) Retail Is Not the First Step

Retail should only happen after you have already proven demand online. Your online store hands you customer data, purchase behaviour, best-selling products, average order value, customer acquisition cost, and repeat purchase rate. Without that, opening a store is guesswork. Retail should validate an expansion once your product is selling profitably, and not be the place you go to discover whether demand exists.

2) Retail and Ecommerce Solve Different Problems

Your website wins on convenience, speed, reach, and low operating cost. Retail wins on product experience, trust, and premium positioning. For something like a luxury watch strap, customers want to feel the leather, compare colours, and match it against their own watch before they commit. Retail removes that hesitation in a way a product page can’t.

3) Every Touchpoint Has to Sell the Same Brand

No customer thinks “I’m buying online” or “I’m buying in-store.” They think “I’m buying from Delugs.” Website, retail, social, packaging, and customer service all have to communicate the same brand consistently. One off-brand touchpoint can weaken the rest.

4) Retail Gives You Insights Analytics Can’t

If customers keep asking the same question at the counter, your FAQ is missing something. If they hesitate at one product, pricing might be off. If they keep comparing two product types side by side, that’s a signal to build comparison content online. 

Train retail staff to log objections, FAQs, and comparisons. That data can feed directly back into your marketing, product development, and website.

5) Measure Retail Like You’d Measure an Ecommerce Business

Store conversion rate, walk-ins, sales per visitor, average order value, repeat customers, customer lifetime value. Delugs’ stance: retail decisions should be as data-driven as a Meta ads campaign, not run on gut feel or because “it’s physical, it’s different.”

Delugs didn’t break down the exact tooling on stage, but here’s how most retail-to-ecommerce brands typically pull this off:

• Walk-ins: Footfall counters at the entrance (infrared or camera-based), often built into modern POS systems
• Store conversion rate: Walk-ins measured against actual transactions from the POS
• Sales per visitor: Total store revenue divided by footfall over the same period
• Average order value (AOV): Pulled straight from POS data, same as ecommerce
• Repeat customers & LTV: The hardest one to pull off. It requires capturing customer identity at checkout (loyalty program, phone number, email, or membership app) and linking it back to a CRM or ecommerce account. Otherwise repeat walk-in traffic is invisible to you.

Actionable Insights & Steps from Delugs

• Online validates demand. Retail amplifies trust. Omnichannel compounds growth.
• Build a profitable online business first, before you consider a lease.
• Know your best-selling products and unit economics before opening a store.
• Track every retail KPI as closely as you track your Meta Ads.
• Use physical stores to strengthen your brand, not to make you feel good about yourself. 

Roy Ang: Scaling the Triple Complexity. Multi-Market, Multi-Channel, Multi-Brand

Roy Ang is Co-Founder & CEO of Evo Commerce. He’s built and scaled multiple ecommerce brands across different countries, operating across numerous sales channels while managing several brands at once. His core focus: building systems that let a business scale without becoming dependent on the founder.

1) Check If Your Business Can Run Without You Before Expanding

Before entering a new market, ask: “Can my current business run consistently without me?” If the answer is no, don’t expand yet. You’ll just duplicate the same problems across multiple countries. Standardising your existing operations has to come before you multiply them.

Practical Framework for Expansion

Before entering a new market, ask

• Is our existing business stable?
• Are our SOPs documented?
• Can our operations handle increased demand?
• Do we understand local customer behaviour?
• Can we support customers effectively in this market?
• Are we financially prepared for slower initial returns?

If several answers are “no,” strengthen the foundation before expanding into a new market.

2) Replace Founder Knowledge With Documented SOPs

Founders often become the default solution to every problem, which becomes a bottleneck the moment you try to scale. Roy’s fix: document the processes that currently live in your head. That means customer support SOPs, inventory management SOPs, marketing campaign checklists, product launch processes, and hiring frameworks. A business that runs on documented systems can scale; one that runs on a founder’s memory can’t.

3) Audit Local Differences Before Copying a Strategy Into a New Market

What works in Singapore won’t automatically work in Australia, Malaysia, the US, or Europe. Before expanding into a new market, check pricing expectations, shipping costs, customer preferences, local competition, payment methods, and cultural buying behaviour. Don’t assume a strategy that worked in one country will work in another without adjustment.

4) Evaluate Each Sales Channel by Profitability, Not Presence

Being everywhere isn’t automatically a strategy. Roy’s advice: evaluate each channel: Shopify (DTC), Amazon, Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, physical retail, wholesale based on profitability, customer acquisition cost, brand control, customer data ownership, and operational complexity. Each channel serves a different purpose; don’t add one just because competitors are on it.

5) Prioritise Channels That Let You Own the Customer Relationship

Marketplaces generate sales, but they usually own the customer relationship, not you. Direct-to-consumer channels give you email addresses, purchase history, customer lifetime value, remarketing ability, and brand loyalty. Owning that data compounds into long-term value that marketplace sales alone can’t give you.

6) Manage Inventory Like Cash

Fast growth often pushes founders to buy larger amounts of inventory to keep up. But more stock means more cash tied up, higher storage costs, and greater forecasting risk. Roy’s framing: manage inventory the way you’d manage a financial asset, not just a warehouse problem.

7) Define Ownership and KPIs Before the Team Gets Too Big to Manage Informally

As the business expands, communication gets harder by default. Roy’s fix: define clear responsibilities, department ownership, KPIs, and decision-making authority explicitly, rather than letting it stay informal. A clear structure reduces the back-and-forth that eats time as headcount grows.

8) Build Dashboards Across Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Customer Metrics

Good decisions come from reliable data reviewed consistently and not gut feels. Roy’s recommended metrics to track:

• Sales: Revenue, gross profit, net profit
• Marketing: CAC, ROAS, MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio)
• Operations: Inventory turnover, fulfilment speed, return rates
• Customer: Repeat purchase rate, customer lifetime value, NPS

9) Delegate Deliberately as You Scale

Founders often struggle to let go of daily operations. Sustainable growth requires hiring capable people, trusting managers to run things, and empowering teams to make decisions without the founder in the loop. Roy’s framing: your role has to evolve from operator to business builder, or your own bandwidth becomes the ceiling on growth.

Actionable Insights & Steps from Roy Ang

• Systems outperform individual talent. 
• Customer ownership creates long-term competitive advantage. 
• Document all core business processes before you scale.
• Plan expansion methodically rather than chasing rapid growth.
• Review whether your business depends too heavily on you personally.
• Evaluate each sales channel based on profitability.
• Build dashboards to monitor operational and financial metrics regularly.

Danny Tan: Reflections Post-Exit. The HipVan Story

Danny Tan co-founded HipVan and built it into one of Singapore’s best-known online furniture and home lifestyle brands. He scaled the business through rapid growth, fundraising, expansion, and shifting consumer behaviour, before eventually stepping away. His session focused less on tactics and more on what founders face after years of building a company, and what comes after.

1) Match Your Skillset to Your Company’s Current Stage

Early stage is about selling the vision, finding product-market fit, and doing everything yourself. Growth stage shifts to hiring leaders, building systems, and raising capital. Mature stage moves into strategic thinking, governance, and capital allocation. If you’re still operating like an early-stage founder past that stage, you become the bottleneck.

2) Understand the Investor’s Model Before You Take Their Money

Raising money is like bringing a partner into your business. Understand what drives the fund investing in you before you take the cheque. The venture model works well when you have real tech leverage; without it, it’s hard to generate the outcomes investors expect. If you can’t acquire customers profitably, you shouldn’t be thinking about raising funds yet.

3) Get Clear on Why You’re Raising Before You Raise

If you can acquire customers profitably, be clear about what you want to use the money being raised for. Danny observed this common mistake: founders try to raise without clarity on why they need the money, what their exit plan is (if any), and what they want to do after an exit.

4) Expect New Problems at Every Revenue Milestone

$100K problems are different from $1M problems, which are different from $10M problems. Growth doesn’t reduce the number of problems, it changes what kind they are.

5) Protect Cash Flow, Not Just Revenue

Manage inventory carefully, plan expenses ahead, maintain runway, and cut unnecessary spending. Fast-growing businesses can still fail if they run out of cash.

6) Prepare for the Emotional Reality of an Exit

Exits often come with a loss of identity and real uncertainty about what’s next. Success doesn’t automatically create fulfilment.

7) Define Success on Your Own Terms

Success isn’t only revenue or valuation. For some founders it’s freedom, family, health, or impact. Don’t inherit someone else’s definition of it.

Actionable Steps from Danny Tan

• Identify your business’s current stage, and whether your role still fits it
• Build a cash flow buffer before growth targets outrun runway
• Write down your own definition of success before you are mid-exit

Alvin Lim: How We Built a Multi-Million Dollar Sales Engine on TikTok

Alvin Lim co-founded SGPomades, one of Singapore’s leading men’s grooming brands. After a decade in ecommerce spanning Qoo10, Carousell, Shopee, and Lazada, he built TikTok into a channel that’s generated over $2M in sales in the past 12 months, starting from a first livestream that made just $100 in 3 hours.

1) Stop the Scroll Before You Try to Sell

People don’t open TikTok to shop. They open it to be entertained, learn something, or kill time. Shopping happens after attention is earned, not before. Your first 1-3 seconds have to hook the viewer before the product ever gets mentioned. Strong hooks often include scroll stopping phrases like “Stop buying this until you know this” or a surprising demonstration. Without that hook, nothing after it matters.

2) Sell the Problem, Not the Product Specifications

Don’t say “this hair styling product has a strong hold.” Show messy hair, humid weather, hair collapsing during the day, then demonstrate the product solving it. Viewers connect with a relatable problem faster than they connect with a feature list.

3) Film Conversations, Not Advertisements

Alvin’s single biggest lesson: a polished influencer video he paid a few thousand dollars for barely reached 14,000 views. Two years later, once TikTok’s GMV Max tool started optimising for sales, that same untouched video suddenly converted. Why? It wasn’t scripted like an ad. It was strangers on the street reacting genuinely to the product. People don’t watch hard-sell ads. They watch conversations. If a video feels like a TV commercial, it will underperform no matter how much was spent producing it.

4) Post Volume Over Polish, and Let Data Decide What Works

One high-production video a month loses to many rough, authentic ones. Alvin’s team filmed street interviews with a DJI Pocket 3 and a backpack of product, no studio required, and got rejected 9 out of 10 times. That one yes was worth more than any scripted ad. Track watch time, completion rate, shares, saves, and conversion rate, then double down on formats that perform rather than guessing. Experimenting is key here. 

5) Build a Repeatable Content Engine (Not One-Off Ideas)

Instead of hunting for a new idea every time, create fixed content categories you can repeat: customer testimonials, product demos, myths vs facts, behind-the-scenes, founder stories, packaging orders, product comparisons. A system beats a search for inspiration every single time.

6) Use Livestreaming as a Structured Sales Channel

Alvin’s team studied hundreds of hours of successful Chinese livestreams and found a common structure beneath different personalities and products. What Alvin calls the five-step conversion framework: identify a relatable problem, amplify the pain point, introduce the hero product as the solution, explain why it’s better than alternatives, then guide toward the purchase. Structure, not charisma alone, is what makes livestreams convert consistently.

7) Hire Streamers for Competitiveness, Resilience, and a Drive to Improve (Not Looks)

Alvin found looks don’t predict sales performance. The streamers who consistently performed best shared three traits. They were

• Competitive: Often chasing and beating each other’s numbers
• Resilient: Never blaming TikTok, the algorithm, or the merchant when a session underperformed
• Always improving: reviewing their own scripts after every stream and testing changes in the next one

Hire and coach streamers for these traits specifically.

8) Let Your Best Content Drive Traffic Into Livestreams

Once Alvin’s street-interview videos started performing, TikTok kept surfacing them whenever the team went live. This pulled viewers from their street interview videos straight into the livestream and then into the shop. Content, live selling, and traffic aren’t separate channels. The strongest setup is one where each part feeds the next instead of running in isolation.

9) Pick One Hero Product Before You Try to Scale Everything

Alvin’s advice if he had to start over: focus on one hero product instead of promoting the full catalogue equally. A single product with a clear USP and problem-solution story is easier to build a repeatable content and livestream system around than fifty products competing for the same content slots.

Actionable Steps from Alvin Lim

• Build a hook library: test different opening lines on the same product to see what stops the scroll.
• Replace scripted ad-style videos with unscripted, reaction-based ones.
• Set up a repeatable content category list so you’re never starting from a blank idea.
• Structure your next livestream around the five-step framework: problem, pain, product, differentiation, close.
• Hire or coach streamers specifically for competitiveness, resilience, and self-improvement.
• Pick one hero product to build your TikTok system around, before spreading effort across your full catalogue. 

Sant Qiu: Hyper Lean Scaling. How I’m Generating $150M with Only 51 Employees

Sant Qiu is Founder of Maneuver Marketing, generating roughly US$150M in annual revenue with a team of just 51 employees. His core message: the goal isn’t the biggest team, it’s the most productive one. Growth should come from better systems and higher output per person, not headcount.

1) Track Revenue and Profit Per Employee

A large team often just means the business has become more complex and expensive, not more successful. Track revenue per employee, profit per employee, and output per employee instead. A smaller, highly capable team is often more resilient and more profitable.

2) Hire Only to Solve a Recurring Bottleneck

Don’t hire because you’re busy. Hire because a bottleneck keeps recurring, the work can’t be automated, and the role has a clear ROI. If software or a process fix can solve it, do that first.

3) Use AI to Increase Output Per Employee, Not Replace Them

Sant’s framing: AI should amplify each employee’s productivity. These may include drafting copy, summarising meetings, customer support, data analysis, research and much more. AI does not replace headcount outright. The goal is more output per person, not fewer people doing the same work.

4) Protect Founder Time for Strategy, Not Operations

Founders often get pulled into low-impact tasks. Sant’s recommendation: spend the majority of your time on strategy, hiring key leaders, capital allocation, product direction, and partnerships. Delegate or automate routine operational work so it doesn’t eat that time.

5) Give High Performers Context and Authority

Great employees don’t want to be micromanaged. They need clear goals, decision-making authority, and access to information, with accountability attached. Trust enables speed; micromanagement slows the whole organisation down.

6) Choose a Niche With Large TAM, Strong Margins, and a Clear Differentiator

Sant Qiu went deep on one category: supplements for women going through menopause, a fast-growing market with strong margins and a defensible angle. His filter for picking a product to scale: 

• A large and growing total addressable market (TAM)
• Strong profit margins
• A small but genuinely critical point of differentiation

Don’t spread across too many products, go deep on one category that meets all three.

7) Pair a Sharp Niche With Strong Copywriting and Paid Acquisition Skills

Sant Qiu credits much of his scale to being genuinely skilled at copywriting and Facebook advertising, not just picking the right product. A great niche without the acquisition skill to market it profitably doesn’t scale on its own.

8) Stay Financially Disciplined at Every Stage of Growth

Sant stayed disciplined on cash and margins even as revenue scaled. Healthy margins, controlled marketing and hiring spend, and inventory management, rather than chasing growth and vanity metrics (like headcount) at the expense of profitability.

Actionable Steps from Sant Qiu

• Calculate your current revenue and profit per employee as a baseline.
• Before your next hire, confirm it’s solving a recurring bottleneck that software or processes can’t.
• Pick one niche to go deep on, and check it against TAM, margin, and differentiation before committing.
• Audit where your time goes this week, and shift low-impact tasks off your plate.
• Set clear goals and decision-making authority for your best performers instead of directing every task.

Ivan Ong: Revealing the Roadmap I Used to Build a $125M US Brand from Singapore

Ivan Ong co-founded KeaBabies, generating over US$125M in revenue with a strong US presence, scaled primarily through Amazon before expanding into a broader omnichannel brand. 88% of his revenue still comes from Amazon, a business model he’s upfront about and focused on from the very beginning.

1) Build in a Category You’re Genuinely Invested In

KeaBabies came from combining Ivan’s passion for marketing with his wife’s passion for babies and baby products. That personal stake in the category gave them an edge in understanding the customer, not just the numbers. A founder who’s genuinely invested in the niche tends to catch product gaps and customer needs that pure market research misses.

2) Validate Demand on Amazon Before You Build the Product

Ivan’s formula: confirm there’s real demand on Amazon first, then move into product development, strong listing copy, and launch. Don’t build the product and hope demand shows up afterward. Check the marketplace data first.

3) Choose Products on Demand, Improvability, and Margin

Before committing to a product, Ivan checked three things: 

• Is there clear, provable demand? 
• Can we make it genuinely better than what’s already on the market? 
• Are the margins strong enough to be worth building around?

A product that’s missing any one of these three isn’t worth the launch, no matter how appealing the idea feels.

4) Use Competitors as Your Product Roadmap

Ivan treated competitors as role models, not threats to ignore. His running questions before launching or improving anything: 

• Is this made specifically for Amazon customers in the USA? 
• How can we do it better than our competitors? 
• How can we serve customers better than they currently are being served? 

Every product decision ran through those three filters.

5) Launch Fast, but Only With Real Margin

Ivan’s team launched around 25 products a year, but each one still had to clear the same bar. Genuinely better than what existed, and strong enough margins to justify it. Volume of launches only works if each one stays disciplined on quality and profitability.

6) Mine Reviews as Free Market Research

Reviews reveal pain points, desired features, common objections, and gaps competitors haven’t fixed. Read your own reviews and your competitors’ reviews regularly. It is a direct idea generation machine into what you can build or fix next, without needing to run new research.

7) Master One Category Before You Expand Into Another

Ivan emphasised going deep on one product category before diversifying. It builds stronger expertise, tighter operations, and clearer brand positioning than spreading across categories early. 

Actionable Steps from Ivan Ong

• Pick a category you have real personal insight into, not just one that looks profitable on paper.
• Check for real demand on Amazon before greenlighting a new product.
• Run every product idea through: demand, improvability, margin before committing.
• Before launching or updating a product, ask: is this built for the target market, how is it better than competitors, how are we serving customers better than they are now.
• Build a habit of reading your own and competitors’ reviews on a set schedule.
• Fully establish one product category before expanding into a second.

Julian Artope: From one hero product to a complete Smile Cosmetics brand. How I scaled Zenyum.

Julian is the founder of Zenyum, which scaled from one hero product (invisible aligners) into a full smile cosmetics brand. This session was structured as a conversation with Joshua, and covered fundraising discipline, AI-era validation, IP protection, and how his approach to competition changed over the years.

1) Plan Your Next Fundraising Round While You’re Still Closing the Current One

Julian secured friend-and-family commitments before Zenium was even incorporated, so funds were ready the moment the company was legally set up. But the bigger lesson was that founders shouldn’t stop at the round in front of them. While raising one round, define the milestones, product-market fit targets, and even the specific investors you want for the next one. Zenyum’s own goal was concrete: raise at least USD $3M from a Tier A VC fund, which meant working backwards to know exactly what had to be true before approaching those investors.

2) Use Milestones as a Checkpoint to Re-Test Your Assumptions

Set clear milestones, measurable targets, and strict timelines roughly a year in advance. If the company isn’t hitting them, don’t push through blindly. Ask why the assumptions from a year ago no longer hold, and whether you’re still building the right business. Treat missed milestones as a signal to re-evaluate, not just a delay to push past.

3) Validate Demand Before You Build the Product

Before Zenyum had a finished product, Julian spent roughly USD $10,000 on landing pages, ad creatives, and campaigns purely to answer one question: would enough people click and say they wanted invisible braces at that price. With AI tools today, that same validation experiment can be built in an afternoon instead of weeks. Spend on validation before you spend on building.

4) Test More Ideas Than Your Competitors, Not a Smarter Formula

Julian’s view: there’s no secret formula, just testing volume. Run more angles than competitors do, double down on what performs, and drop what doesn’t. AI-generated creatives don’t need to be polished. Speed to test and speed to real customer feedback matters more than production quality at the validation stage.

5) Don’t Prioritise Patents Before You’ve Proven You Can Sell

Joshua’s pushback in this session: founders under SGD $1M in annual revenue are usually not worth a factory’s effort to copy, and spending years on patent applications before proving the product sells is the wrong order of operations. Prove distribution and demand first. IP protection becomes a worthwhile investment once you’ve grown into a seven or eight-figure business. That is also the point where you have enough leverage to negotiate exclusivity with manufacturers.

6) Expect Manufacturers to Hold the Leverage Early On

In the early days, startups ordering small quantities have limited negotiating power and can’t easily switch suppliers, which makes IP protection genuinely hard regardless of intent. Once a company demonstrates strong distribution, manufacturers become far more willing to support exclusive arrangements. Recognise which stage you’re in before deciding how much to invest in protecting your design.

7) Category Expansion Is Easier Than Channel Expansion

Julian’s own framing: finding a new working acquisition channel takes a long time and a lot of experimentation. Opening a new product category is comparatively easier, and sometimes a new category even opens up a new channel on its own. If you’re deciding where to expand next, a new category is usually the faster, lower-risk move compared to chasing a new channel.

8) Win Through Selectivity, Not Just Volume, in Your Early Days

In Zenyum’s early days, they rejected 80% of prospective customers, a number that gradually dropped to 75%, then 50%, then down to 15% today. That selectivity meant they could deliver consistently strong results for the customers they did take on, which became the foundation of their brand’s credibility. Being selective early can build a stronger reputation than accepting every customer who’s willing to pay.

9) Get to Profitability in One Market Before Expanding to the Next

Julian’s advice: find product-market fit in one market, get it profitable, and only expand into a new market once you have free cash flow to fund it. Don’t split focus across markets before the first one is actually working.

10) Stop Obsessing Over Competitors. They Often Grow the Market for You

Julian described going through an aggressive, competitor-obsessed phase early on, including deliberately overspending on ads to make it harder for a fundraising competitor to acquire customers profitably. Looking back, he no longer believes that was necessary. His current view: entrepreneurship is a war of attrition, and competitors educating the same customer base often expands the total addressable market for everyone, rather than just splitting a fixed one.

Actionable Steps from Julian Artope

• Define the milestones and investor targets for your next fundraising round while still closing the current one.
• Use AI tools to build and launch a demand validation test before committing to full product development.
• Hold off on patents and IP spend until you’ve proven the product sells and you have distribution leverage.
• When deciding where to expand, default to a new product category before chasing a new acquisition channel.
• Get one market to profitability before expanding into the next.
• Build customer experience and product quality steadily, rather than spending energy competing directly against rivals.

Joshua Chan: How to Sell Your Brand for Millions

Josh Chan co-founded ErgoTune and eventually sold it for approximately USD $15M. He opened by pointing out that founders who successfully exit rarely talk publicly about it, which makes the acquisition process opaque for most entrepreneurs. So he walked through the mistakes he made so others could skip them.

1) Don’t Dismiss Opportunities That Don’t Announce Themselves

Josh almost lost the acquisition entirely. He picked up a call from an unknown number, assumed it was an insurance pitch, and when the caller said “I’m in the business of buying brands,” Josh replied “sorry, we’re too big for you” and hung up. That exact company later acquired ErgoTune for ~USD $15M. His takeaway: major opportunities rarely look like major opportunities in the moment. Stay open to unexpected conversations rather than filtering them out too fast.

2) Decide Whether You Will Sell Before Someone Actually Offers

Josh and his co-founders had never seriously discussed whether they wanted to sell, because founders default to dreaming about building, not exiting. Once the offer was real, emotions made the decision harder to think through clearly. His advice: have the “would we sell” conversation before an offer is on the table, when you can reason about it without emotional pressure.

3) Ask Four Questions Before You Sell

Josh’s framework for deciding

• Do you still believe the business can become very large? If conviction is gone, that’s a real signal.
• Are you becoming the bottleneck? Is the business still growing because of you, or is your own hesitation now the biggest constraint?
• Is your industry unusually hot right now? Acquisition windows during a category boom don’t stay open forever. If buyers are actively acquiring in your space, take it seriously.
• Is this your forever game? Referencing Zuckerberg’s reasoning for rejecting early Facebook acquisition offers, if this is the thing you would rebuild even after failure, selling may not be the right move.

4) Build a Finance System That Shows Your Numbers Daily

Since exiting, Joshua has focused on building AI systems that solve specific bottlenecks ecommerce founders face, rather than generic AI tools. Joshua’s first AI system tracks contribution margin, profitability, Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER), daily performance, and cash flow automatically, instead of founders checking spreadsheets manually. 

His reasoning: finance tells the truth about the business. Without knowing your numbers daily, you can’t tell how much you can safely spend, whether you’re actually profitable, or whether you’re really growing.

Note: this segment also built up toward Joshua Chan and Josh Chin’s USD $12,000/year group coaching program, so some framing leaned promotional. I’ve kept the actionable substance and left that context here for transparency.

5) Systemise Creative Output Instead of Guessing What to Film

His second system generates advertising angles, hooks, ad scripts, shot lists, and messaging ideas based on positioning and past winning ads, so founders aren’t starting from a blank page each time they need new creative. 

His view: the founder’s highest-value activity is creating better marketing. Everything else should be systemised so more time goes here.

6) Use Disciplined Rules for Scaling or Killing Ad Campaigns

His third system evaluates Meta Ads performance and recommends whether to scale, kill, or wait. In his opinion, one should never let these decisions be made based on a founder’s gut feel at the moment. 

Joshua’s observation: founders often kill ads emotionally, too early, before the data has had time to prove it out. A rules-based system removes that emotional trigger.

7) Don’t Judge Meta Ads Only by Meta’s Own Reporting

A common mistake: founders think Meta Ads aren’t working because the final purchase happens on Shopee or Lazada. In reality, customers often discover the brand through Meta first, and the marketplace only captures the last step. If you only evaluate Meta using Meta’s native reporting, you’ll systematically underestimate what it’s actually contributing to revenue. Build or use attribution tools that track the full path, not just the last click.

8) Treat Skill-Building as a Non-Negotiable

Joshua’s closing framing: know your numbers, understand marketing, master unit economics, and study customer psychology. AI can accelerate execution, but it doesn’t replace mastering these fundamentals yourself.

9) Get an Accountability Partner

His view on why most founders fail: not lack of ideas, but nobody consistently challenging them to execute. Surround yourself with operators who will push you, not just people who validate what you’re already doing.

Actionable Steps from Joshua Chan

• Don’t pre-filter unknown calls or messages as spam without a second look, especially during periods your business is performing well
• Discuss with your co-founders now whether you’d sell if offered, before an actual offer forces the conversation under pressure
• Run your business through the four-question filter: conviction, bottleneck, market timing, forever game
• Build or adopt a daily dashboard for contribution margin, MER, and cash flow instead of checking numbers ad hoc
• Create a repository of creative angles and hooks based on your past winning ads, so you’re never starting from zero
• Set explicit rules for when to scale, kill, or hold an ad campaign, and remove same-day emotional decisions
• Check whether your Meta Ads are driving purchases on other channels before writing the channel off
• Find or build an accountability structure that pushes you on execution, not just strategy

Would I Recommend Ecom North to Business Owners?

It depends on where your business is at.

If you are running a small-scale ecommerce business doing under $100K a year, Ecom North is worth attending for the clarity and inspiration alone. You’ll walk away with a clearer sense of what to focus on next, rather than the scattered, tactic-hopping approach Josh Chin warned about in his opening. Make sure to use the Slido app after each talk to ask questions directly. It’s the easiest way to get more out of the ticket price than just sitting and listening. 

For smaller brands specifically, I’d point to Alvin Lim’s TikTok growth talk as the most immediately useful session at Ecom North 2026. His content and livestream frameworks are things a small team can start testing the next day without needing a big budget.

If you are running a larger business, doing close to or over $1M a year, I would recommend going for the VIP or Brand VIP pass instead. That gets you into the room with speakers directly, including dinner, where you can bring your actual bottlenecks to people who’ve already solved versions of the same problem at a bigger scale. At that stage, the value isn’t in the general talks anymore. It is in the specific conversations you can only get access to with the higher tier.