OpenMinds’ first customer made chocolate.
Jan Wong and his co-founder had no introduction to the manufacturer and no reputation to trade on, so they picked the business out, approached it cold, and handed over a few marketing ideas before anyone had paid them for anything. Then they asked for under RM1,000 a month.
The account ran four years. By the fourth, the monthly fee sat between RM1,000 and RM5,000, and the scope had widened from isolated tasks to most of the client’s marketing thinking.
Wong reads that arc as a pricing lesson: the first number gets a new company through the door, and what it does afterward decides how far the relationship travels.
Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2017, in media, marketing and advertising, describing OpenMinds Resources as a digital consultancy that had bootstrapped for five years. Wong now puts the firm at 51 to 100 people and annual revenue between US$1 million and US$10 million, advising larger organisations on marketing technology and analytics. The company still describes itself as self-funded, across four countries.
The interesting part is what a founder with no investors uses instead of money.
At month one there were two of them and no agreed equity. Within a few weeks the partnership had become five people, revenue was already arriving, and ownership was still unwritten.
Asked whether the rule was therefore to wait until every founder is in the room, Wong declined the summary.
“Not quite.” What he was optimising for, he says, was alignment: the split had to reflect who would carry responsibility rather than who happened to arrive first. His own formulation is to “settle it once you have enough clarity about the real founding team and before people begin developing very different assumptions about what they own and what they are entitled to.”
The window was weeks, and the paying client is what made it safe.
It is easy for everyone to say what they plan to contribute; it is more useful to see how people actually respond when there is real work, a real client and real accountability.
“It is easy for everyone to say what they plan to contribute; it is more useful to see how people actually respond when there is real work, a real client and real accountability.” The chocolate account gave five people a live environment in which initiative, follow-through and pressure were all visible before anyone signed anything.
He has watched the alternative. A founding team he knows let unequal commitment run while the paperwork still said everyone was equal; by the time they addressed it, some felt undervalued and others accused, the team broke apart, and friendships that predated the company went with it.
The same instinct governs how he hands out authority now. A decision that is operational and easy to correct belongs to whoever is doing the work; a decision that could move the client’s business or contradict a commitment goes up, and the test he applies is what the consequence is if the decision turns out wrong.
He paid tuition on that one. Someone with enough authority to run an account tried to fix a missed commitment before telling the client, and the client moved from disappointment to doubt about whether OpenMinds could be relied on. He had to earn back trust the firm had been given for free.
The bill for keeping control arrived somewhere quieter, in his own bank account.
Whenever the choice was between paying himself and reinvesting, Wong says the business won, which left him running a growing company on an income below what a conventional path would have paid. “The cost was postponing personal financial security so the company could have a stronger foundation.”
Ask what he wants operators to take from it and he does not reach for the scale.
Do not be embarrassed by slow progress when that progress is real.
“Do not be embarrassed by slow progress when that progress is real.”
The chocolate manufacturer bought that thesis first, for under RM1,000 a month, before there was any evidence for it. Wong is still declining the capital that would let him skip the argument.1
Footnotes
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Wong gave this interview to CÈ’s AI interviewer over text, completing it on 1 August 2026. Quotes lightly normalised for print, wording untouched, transcripts on file. The headcount and revenue bands are his own, given as ranges; the four-country footprint and the self-funded description are the company’s. ↩