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- 🤯 How Smilie went from nearly dead to $100K/month
🤯 How Smilie went from nearly dead to $100K/month
The untold story of corporate gifting’s comeback
Admond Lee
May 04, 2025
Hey Founders,
👋🏻 Welcome to The Runway Ventures (🎙️Podcast Edition) — where I interview founders and deep dive into their stories to help you become the top 1% founder by learning from their startup journey and mistakes with actionable insights.
Let’s get to it! 🚀
Today at a Glance:
🫡 1 Founder → Wenhao (co-founder of Smilie)
⚠️ 2 Mistakes → Hiring too fast
🧠 3 Lessons Learned → Validate demand before hiring
🔗 The Runway Insights → How Lovable went from $0 to $30M ARR in 4 months
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar → SquareX raises $20M (Series A) to protect your browser activity
🫡 1 Founder: Wenhao (co-founder of Smilie)
🌟 The Highlights
🇸🇬 Wenhao, a serial entrepreneur who started his first business at 19 after getting expelled from school twice, co-founded Smilie in late 2022 with Wee Leng. Their vision? To revolutionise corporate gifting in Southeast Asia.
The Problem — 🫣 Corporate gifting in Southeast Asia was outdated.
Think ugly mooncake hampers, zero personalisation, and logistics nightmares.
Companies spent budgets on gifts clients forgot instantly.
The Solution — 🎁 Smilie is a B2B corporate gifting platform that allows companies to send personalised gifts (like TWG tea sets or celebratory Prosecco) to hundreds of clients across multiple countries with one click.
It simplifies the gifting process, building “key impactful moments” and deeper client relationships along the way.
✨ But the real magic? Turning gifting from a cost centre into a revenue driver.
 | The idea caught on. By mid-2023 Smilie landed its first customers. 💰 Investors took notice too – Smilie secured pre-seed funding from Antler and angels like the founders of Circles.Life, Union Gas, and Pickupp, validating their model. Things were looking good, and Wenhao felt like Smilie was on the verge of changing the old-school gift scene. |
🌋 The Lowlights
I underestimated how old-school this industry was. They still use Excel sheets and fax machines. We had to become a gifting company first, tech second.
The journey wasn’t smooth. In mid-2023, Smilie built a tech gifting platform nobody used. Clients loved the idea but stuck to old habits.
🔥 Early 2024 brought a real crisis. Wenhao had aimed to sell 1,000 gift boxes for Chinese New Year – a make-or-break goal. Instead, they sold only about 10% of that. In other words, the idea sounded great but wasn’t clicking in real life.
🙏🏻 Vendors saw them as competitors, not partners. Confidence tanked as sales stalled and the runway shrank. By mid-2024, Wenhao made the tough call to reduce headcount drastically.
At its lowest point, Smilie was bleeding cash with little to show for it, and Wenhao was forced to reckon with how close they’d come to shutting down.
🚀 The Comeback
Be resourceful. Copy what works, adapt fast, and ignore the noise.
Then Wenhao flipped the script. Instead of chasing the next shiny feature or quick scale, he overhauled Smilie like a lean old-school business.
The pivot? Make gifting work first, then focus on tech later.
So, he stopped hiring, built tighter vendor deals, and aimed for healthy profit margins. This meant focusing on the core platform and the right kinds of gifts.
🚚 For example, the team used new packaging tech so clients could customise boxes cheaply (think $30 a custom box instead of $1,500), and they partnered with smart logistics (Ninja Van) to ship directly to dozens of offices at once.
🤑 That new focus slowly paid off. By late 2024 Smilie’s finances had turned positive, scaling to $100k monthly revenue in 5 countries.
Today, Wenhao and Wee Leng have steered Smilie onto a new path. The pressures that almost sank the startup are now guiding it. With a lean team, robust margins and a clear market fit, the company is standing tall again.
From nearly dead to $100K/month, Smilie has made the biggest corporate gifting’s comeback by chasing profit over hype, ready to revolutionise corporate gifting in Southeast Asia.
📌 Here’s the TLDR of Smilie:
Late 2022 — Smilie was launched.
Mid-2023 — 💰 Secured pre-seed funding from Antler.
Aug-Sep 2023 — Got the first sales but struggled with tech adoption to use their platform.
Jan 2024 — Lunar New Year crisis (10% sales target met).
Mid-2024 — 🥵 Burn rate forced layoffs and a full reboot.
Smilie pivoted to gifting infrastructure by making gifting work first, and tech came later.
Late 2024 — 🤑 The pivot worked. Smilie found its niche and scaled to $100k/month, expanding to Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand.
Fun fact — I’m also a happy customer of Smile (sent gifts to my clients and partners) 😜
Today — Smilie continues applying what it learned – moving fast, staying lean, and making customer-oriented tweaks.
In the end, Smilie’s story is a testament to resilience and fast pivots — even a near-failed venture can bounce back when the founders stay scrappy, focused on revenue, and ready to change course.
From almost shutting down to becoming SEA’s gifting disruptor, Wenhao’s lesson is clear → Solve the problem in front of you, not the one you wish existed.
🫡 Stay scrappy, stay lean, stay profitable — my friend.
Want to learn more about Smilie?
⚠️ 2 Mistakes
Mistake 1: Hiring too fast
We hired too fast, before we’d even figured out our market.
After raising pre-seed funding from Antler, Smilie quickly grew to 12 people within a few months before nailing product‑market fit, then scrambling to manage overhead when growth stalled.
🥶 The result? High burn, shorter runway left.
Watching salaries drain runway, Wenhao confessed he “felt stuck between wanting to grow and knowing we couldn’t afford it” .
Mistake 2: Tech-First vs Gifting First
We thought we’d disrupt with software. Turns out, clients just wanted us to stop sending ugly mooncakes.
At launch, Smilie tried selling software to old‑school vendors who saw them as “competitors” and dismissed digital gifting.
Clients and partners didn’t care about the tech.
🌏 The problem? Southeast Asia’s corporate gifting scene was still stuck in 1999. Vendors used Excel sheets. Clients wanted nicer cookies, not AI-powered dashboards.
They’d forgotten that in SEA corporate gifting, operations matter more than fancy tech. Without its own gifting infrastructure, Smilie couldn’t showcase its tech platform.
✌🏻 So, the founders realised “gifting first, tech second” was the way through. Smilie pivoted. And the rest is history.
🧠 3 Lessons Learned
Lesson 1: Validate demand before hiring
In Smilie’s early days, Smilie brought on a full team — operations, sales, dev — before the core product had real traction.
The fix? Only hire when you can tie each new headcount directly to confirmed revenue.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
🤝🏻 Slow‑roll hires
Only onboard roles directly tied to immediate revenue (e.g. ops coordinator for CNY campaign).
🧪 Run a “mini POC” (proof of concept)
Before drafting any job description, run a “mini POC” (proof of concept) that simulates exactly what that hire would do — using tools you already have.
Only when that POC shows ROI should you pull the trigger on payroll.
Use contractors for non‑core tasks until you see 3‑month sustained growth.
Lesson 2: Be problem-focused (never start from solution)
Early on, Wenhao pitched corporate clients on Smilie’s dashboard, AI gift recommendations, and multi‑country shipping portal — only to hear crickets and “We don’t need digital gifting”.
Why? Because he’d begun with a solution (tech) instead of a problem (chaotic, expensive gift ops).
🌮 Key Takeaways:
👂🏻 Listen for pain points
In your discovery calls, ask “What’s the single biggest headache you have right now?” and shut up. Let them vent.
🏃🏻♂️ Map the actual journey
Draft a simple journey map on a whiteboard with your team. Identify the top 2–3 friction points clients name most.
⚡️ Prototype the fix — manually
Do things that don’t scale to solve your customer's problems.
If that manual MVP soothes the pain, you know you’ve found the problem worth solving.
Lesson 3: Obsess over unit economics & margin
When Smilie was on the brink — tech built, team trimmed, orders trickling in — Wenhao knew one thing would make or break them: nailing the profit on every single box.
Without healthy unit economics, no amount of growth hacks or VC cash could save the business.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
🔖 Build a “Margin Worksheet”
List every cost element for your core unit (one box, one subscription, one service engagement).
Plug in real vendor quotes, not estimates.
Identify which line items you can negotiate or automate.
📈 Set margin gates before scaling
Define a hard rule — “We will not run paid campaigns or hire sales until unit margin ≥ 30%.”
Monitor this weekly. If margin dips (due to rising shipping rates, vendor price hikes), pause growth activities until you adjust pricing or costs.
💵 Reinvest margin wisely
Funnel excess margin into the next highest‑ROI lever — product improvements, top‑performing marketing channels, or strategic partnerships.
For example, Smilie used extra margin to build their custom packaging integration — further lowering ops cost and boosting perceived gift value.
🔗 The Runway Insights
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar
SquareX raises $20M (Series A) to protect your browser activity (Link)
Secai Marche raises $4M to elevate the fresh food supply chain in SEA (Link)
LenderLink secures $1.25M (pre-seed) to build a real-time credit bureau in the Philippines (Link)
Groundup.ai raises $4.25M (Series A) led by Tin Men Capital to fuel global expansion (Link)
🤝🏻 Before you go: Here are 2 ways I can help you
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Validating ideas & building MVPs
Tech & product development
GTM strategy & fundraising
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Growing & monetising newsletters
Attract customers & investors by building a solid founder brand on LinkedIn
Promote your business to 18,000+ founders: Acquire high-value leads and customers for your business by getting your brand in front of highly engaged startup founders and operators in Asia.
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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
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