[How TechCircle Startups Stay Nimble During COVID-19 Times] – Cafe Bond
Name: Keyis Ng, Co-founder & CEO, 32yo, Singaporean
Technopreneur Circle member: Since June 2017
Company: CafeBond (E-commerce)
Website: www.cafebond.com
The company under 20 words:
Cafebond.com is a B2C and B2B freshly roasted speciality coffee beans e-commerce marketplace.
How has COVID-19 impacted the company / business?
Starting from 2019, Cafebond.com has focused heavily on our B2B market and counts corporate clients like DBS, Singtel, Circles Life, UBER and Sequoia Capital as happy customers. Since COVID-19 happened, we had to pause coffee supplies to our corporate clients and changed our focus back to our B2C online e-commerce business which is where our roots are.
What are some of the adjustments you had to make in order to minimize disruptions?
Our team had to conduct back-to-back meetings to brainstorm on the next steps to see how we can push for online sales to make up for our B2B business.
We came up with a new feature on our B2B e-commerce site called Cafebond.com Express, where we keep stocks of our best-selling coffee beans and offer free next-day express courier delivery, which is a breath of fresh air as many other competitors in the market are still using Singpost which seems to be facing significant deliveries delays due to the COVID-19 situation.
Name one technology / platform which you find useful in these times and why?
Good old Whatsapp. That’s what we use to keep in contact with our team and with hundreds of our B2B customers.
Are you currently working from home? If so, how has it been in terms of efficiency?
Yes – I’m more efficient! Nothing beats having full control of your time. Of course, discipline matters and plays a big part! 🙂
Any shout-outs / rants you would like to add on:
Let’s be responsible and play our part, things will get a lot better after this. It’s really exciting to see how the world will adapt and innovate after this pandemic blows over!
** This article first appeared on TechCircle’s Medium Page **