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- 🤯 What Killed Jekyll & Hyde? It Wasn't COVID.
🤯 What Killed Jekyll & Hyde? It Wasn't COVID.
A S$1.6M Singapore cocktail bar survived the pandemic — then collapsed from exponential costs, problematic staff, and an expansion that backfired.
Admond Lee
March 22, 2026
P.S. One brand ran a single The Runway Ventures campaign and generated 250+ founder clicks that turned into inbound leads.
Hey Founders,
Welcome to The Runway Ventures — a weekly newsletter where I deep dive into failed startup stories to help you become the top 1% founder by learning from their mistakes with actionable insights.
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I also noticed one interesting pattern in our community.
They all want to connect with serious and ambitious founders from different industries. They don’t want to just live in their own bubbles. They want to gain different perspectives to take their business (and life) to the next level. They want to belong to a high-trust founder community for the next decade (not weeks, not months).
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If this resonates with you, and if you meet the criteria, apply here.
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Today’s story was made possible because Jekyll & Hyde’s owner (also my dear friend — Chua Ee Chien) was open to share his journey of building this F&B brand in Singapore and why he decided to close it after 10 years of operating. Thanks so much man!
🫡 P.S. If you want to share your failed startup story with us to help more founders learn from your experience, fill up the form here. If your story is selected, I can also promote your current business/brand to our 20,980 TRV readers.
Today at a Glance:
☠️ 1 Failed Startup → Jekyll & Hyde
⚠️ 2 Mistakes → Trusting people too much
🧠 3 Lessons Learned → Start small and do one thing really well
🔗 The Runway Insights → Why founders can’t delegate storytelling
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar → CARSOME raises $30M to accelerate its profitable growth in SEA
☠️ 1 Failed Startup: Jekyll & Hyde
🚀 The Rise of Jekyll & Hyde
🇸🇬 Founded by Shawn Tan, Justin Chow, and Wong Yijin in 2013, and later bought over by Chua Ee Chien in 2018, Jekyll & Hyde was one of Singapore’s pioneer bespoke cocktail bars — a quirky nail salon by day, cocktail bar by night concept that later evolved into an experimental restaurant-bar known for whimsical drinks and elevated local comfort food.
🕺🏻 Founders’ Story
Ee Chien didn’t set out to build an F&B business.
In 2018, while moving from Uber to Grab, he was casually browsing a business-for-sale website when he spotted a listing for an “established cocktail bar in Tanjong Pagar” — and immediately recognised it as Jekyll & Hyde, a bar he already knew and liked.
🍻 With some extra cash from selling his place in the US, he decided to take the plunge and bought it over, thinking it would be a fun and relatively easy side hustle. It turned out to be anything but easy.
But that impulsive decision was how his six-year Jekyll & Hyde journey began.
The Problem — 🤷🏻♂️ Too many bars served predictable drinks and predictable experiences, giving customers the same generic experience.
The Solution — 🥃 Jekyll & Hyde solved that by offering bespoke cocktails, a distinctive dual-concept brand, and later a broader cocktail bar + kitchen experience with elevated local comfort food.
During COVID, it adapted by bottling cocktails for delivery, running online cocktail classes, and launching food pivots like Curry Fried Chicken and Wagyu Char Kway Teow to keep customers engaged at home (more on this later).
💃 Jekyll & Hyde turned going for drinks into a more personal, playful, and memorable experience.
 Tailored-made cocktails for customers | Most people might think Jekyll & Hyde was just another bar in Singapore, but it was much more than that. 3 things that made them special:
|
Not just that, it had real revenue.
🏔️ At its peak, Jekyll & Hyde:
hit S$1.5–1.6 million annual revenue (COVID period)
business was profitable during parts of COVID
had dishes and drinks that people actively remembered and talked about
partnered with The Mandala Group to launch graft and DAGGER at 76 Neil Road
📉 The Fall of Jekyll & Hyde
Jekyll & Hyde did not fail because the cocktails stopped being good.
It failed because of a mix of bad timing, rising costs, expansion mistakes, and post-COVID shifts started stacking up — until the business that survived the pandemic ended up getting killed after it.
🥵 Maybe you might be thinking high rent was the culprit, but the real reason was actually much deeper than that.
📌 Here’s what happened to Jekyll & Hyde:
I thought it would be easy to run a bar. I thought it would be easy to run F&B. I thought it would be an easy side hustle.
🥃🥃🥃 Let’s go to Jekyll & Hyde bae…
6 Jun 2013 — 🍹 Jekyll & Hyde was founded as a nail salon by day and bar by night in Singapore, run by the people behind Manicurious.
2015–2017 — The concept continued building reputation as a bespoke cocktail spot.
The original founders increasingly shifted attention to other ventures.
Justin Chow later went on to co-found Fundnel, now Alta Group.
2018 — 🥃 Ee Chien Chua bought over Jekyll & Hyde after finding it on BusinessforSale while transitioning from Uber to Grab. He says he took on the challenge almost on impulse.
2018–2019 — 🚀 Ee Chien continued running the bar as a side business while working full-time in tech and finance, preserving its bespoke-cocktail identity and starting to think of it as a larger brand.
🥵 “Anyone who could afford S$25 cocktails and S$30 wagyu char kway teow could also afford to travel. So everyone left.”
7 Apr 2020 — COVID came, and Singapore’s circuit breaker began.
Dine-in halted islandwide and Jekyll & Hyde pivoted to bottled cocktail delivery and online cocktail classes.
Jun 2020 — 🙏🏻 Jekyll & Hyde shut Tras Street operations after landlord trouble and failed rental negotiations.
In the same month, the brand found a new home at 74 Neil Road through a partnership opportunity with café Cheeky.
2020–2021 — 😎 The Neil Road version of Jekyll & Hyde evolved into a two-concept-in-one space: courtyard dining downstairs, cocktail bar upstairs, and a bigger Mod-Sin food identity.
16 May–13 Jun 2021 — Heightened Alert shut dine-in again.
21 Jun 2021 — Dining-in resumed only for groups of 2 and recorded music remained banned in F&B venues. This became one of the hardest operating periods for the business.
😂 Ee Chien even told me this, “The two-people-and-no-music period was terrible because it was bloody awkward.”
18 Apr 2022 — In The Woke Salaryman, Ee Chien laid out the hard economics of the business: margins, costs, labour, rent, and the S$100k–S$120k monthly revenue needed for profitability.
2022 — ✈️ Borders reopened and the business faced a new, less visible problem.
Customers travelled again, local demand softened, and competition intensified. Ee Chien shared this as the point where the business truly started to deteriorate.
14 Dec 2021 / 2022 launch period — 🎉 Jekyll & Hyde and The Mandala Group announced graft and DAGGER at 76 Neil Road, including a new-form reopening of Operation Dagger.
2022–2023 — 📈 Costs rose sharply and labour remained difficult. Ingredient inflation worsened and the location’s late-night pull weakened.
Their locations were no longer a hot and trendy neighbourhood (most popular places had closed around the area) partly due to URA’s restrictions of nightlife in the area.
Basically, everything went downhill from there. Tough time.
30 Aug 2023 — 🥵🔥 Ee Chien’s later LinkedIn reflection described the expansion as a miscalculation, explained that the launch team was arrested for doing drugs on the premises, and recounted being left with rent on 2 locations and no team at graft and DAGGER (the new location).
28 Sep 2023 — Jekyll & Hyde announced on Instagram that it’d close.
31 Dec 2023 — 🙏🏻 Jekyll & Hyde’s final day of operations.
We were actually profitable during COVID. It was actually post-COVID… that is when we started to die.
⚠️ By this point, the problem wasn’t just one bad break anymore. Jekyll & Hyde was getting hit from every angle — rising costs, softer demand, operational issues, and expansion bets that backfired.
The business had done the hard part by surviving COVID, but came out into a market that had fundamentally changed.
Ee Chien took the lessons learned from this 6-year crash course of entrepreneurship journey and applied in his future venture. In fact, he recently invested in and supported a new cognitive performance brand called onflowLab™ to elevate cognitive function through clinically proven science with Jake Tan, co-founder of Ergotune. 587 customers already shows 94% improved mental clarity and 59% better sustained focus after 60 days. 😶🌫️ If you’re looking for brain food (energy and focus for your mind), avoid caffeine crashes, and poor sleep, check them out here. |  Ee Chien & Jake Tan sharing onflowLab™ |
Want to learn more about Jekyll & Hyde’s downfall?
⚠️ 2 Mistakes
Mistake 1: Trusting people too much
I just unfortunately had some employees that were not trustworthy. Everything from stealing money to doing drugs on premises.
One of Ee Chien’s biggest mistakes was trusting people too easily.
He trusted that people would do the right thing, that the team would operate responsibly, and that the business could keep running smoothly without tighter controls in place.
🤯 But in reality, that trust left the business exposed:
money went missing
the books fell behind
reconciliation gaps made it harder to spot problems early
staff misconduct issues (including people doing drugs on the premises)
In a business like F&B, where margins are already thin and operations move fast every day, that kind of internal mess can quietly do a lot of damage.
Mistake 2: Didn’t know when to quit
I probably would have cut it like six months earlier, seven months earlier.
🙏🏻 Looking back, Ee Chien felt he probably should have cut his losses earlier. But like many founders, he kept going — partly because of ego, partly because of responsibility to investors, and partly because of the hope that the business might still turn around.
But eventually, Jekyll & Hyde wasn’t just dealing with a rough patch. The economics had fundamentally changed. Costs were rising, demand was weakening, expansion had backfired, and the business model was no longer working the way it used to.
At that point, staying longer didn’t fix the problem. It just made the losses bigger.
🧠 3 Lessons Learned
Lesson 1: Low barrier to entry usually means low protection
Just because a business is easy to start doesn’t mean it’s a good business to be in.
In our interview, he said he would tell people not to start F&B. Why? Because too many people see restaurants, bars, cafés, and kiosks and think: “I eat every day, I drink coffee every day, how hard can it be?”
That’s exactly the trap. The category feels intuitive, so people underestimate how little margin for error it actually has.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
If a market is easy to enter, you need to assume your moat is weak unless you can prove otherwise.
The idea was to have economies of scale. If you’re running multiple F&B locations, probably a better approach is to have one central kitchen to server multiple outlets to lower costs.
🛠️ Operator Playbook:
If you’re building an F&B business in Singapore…
🤔 Run a “barrier-to-entry audit” before you sign your lease
For the next 14 days, score your idea on these 5 questions from 1 to 5:
How easy is it for someone to copy my concept within 6 months?
How easily can customers switch away?
How dependent am I on one location?
How sensitive is my model to labour cost increases?
How sensitive is my model to ingredient inflation?
If your average score is weak, you don’t have a moat. You have a concept.
🧠 Your real question is not “Will people like my food?”
It’s “What protects me when rent rises, labour tightens, and 2 similar concepts open nearby?”
Lesson 2: Start small and do one thing really well
In F&B, if you sell too many things, you increase menu complexity, and you increase almost everything bad at once.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
In F&B, when you make your business too complex by doing too many things, it becomes an ops problem and eats into your margin.
Prove that your core offer is repeatable, profitable, and operationally boring. Boring is good. In operations, boring is beautiful.
🛠️ Operator Playbook:
🍛 Build around one core product (not one broad theme)
Broad themes create broad menus. Broad menus create complexity.
Ask yourself, “What is the one thing customers will repeatedly come back for — and what can you deliver consistently at high margin?"
For example, Basil King sells only pad kra pao/Basil rice (chicken/pork/prawn). Nothing more. It’s so good that I keep going back to eat (lol). But yes, you get the idea. If I’m not wrong, they have 5 outlets in Singapore now just by selling pad kra pao.
Lesson 3: Track your numbers tightly
Ee Chien said one of the reasons they took longer to realise someone was stealing money was because they were behind on the books.
There were reconciliation gaps. The numbers weren’t being tracked tightly enough. And in that gap, money leaked out. By the time they spotted it, damage had already been done.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
A business rarely dies only from big dramatic mistakes. Sometimes it dies from small leaks that go unnoticed for too long.
If you don’t track those flows tightly, you won’t know where the business is breaking.
What you don’t track, you can’t control.
🛠️ Operator Playbook:
In F&B…
💵 Reconcile cash daily
Check:
what should be in the drawer
what is actually there
what was refunded
what was voided
Small gaps repeated daily become big losses.
🧐 Review supplier prices every month
If oil, meat, dairy, or packaging costs rise and you don’t notice for 2–3 months, your margin may already be gone.
🤓 Separate trust from control
Trust your team, but still build systems.
🔗 The Runway Insights
Why founders can’t delegate storytelling (Read)
The marginal cost of entrepreneurship is trending towards zero (Read)
I’ve spent over $1M on tech launches in the past year. Here's everything I know (Read)
Technical leaders make these 4 common storytelling mistakes (Read)
How to design a seed pitch deck investors actually read (analysis of 50+ Y-Combinator decks that raised $450M+) (Read)
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar
CARSOME raises $30M to accelerate its profitable growth in SEA (More)
MetaComp raises Pre-Series A+ round to enable global companies to conduct fiat and stablecoin cross-border transactions faster (More)
Mozark raises $40M (Series B) to help companies measure the real-world performance of their digital services (More)
Talino raises $7.5M (Series A) to power cross-border rails (More)
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That’s all for today
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope you’ve learned some actionable tips to build and grow your business.
You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.
See you again next week.
- Admond
Disclaimer: The Runway Ventures content is for informational purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed above belong solely to the author.
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