My first startup made the papers. It still failed.

I was digging through old files this week and found the MaGIC alumni listing for RePark, the first real product I ever built. The idea was simple. Scan a car’s license plate, and you could reach the owner without needing their phone number, so you could ask them to move without leaving a note under the wiper or knocking on doors nearby. I was young, this was 2014, and it is also the year I met the person who became my co-founder on two later companies. He is now a chief business officer at a state government agency.

At the time it felt like it was going somewhere. The Edge wrote about it. Oriental Daily interviewed me for a feature, and the reporter asked a fair question, whether someone could use a stranger’s plate number to track them down and cause trouble, especially for a woman driving alone. I gave the answer that made sense to me then, that both sides stayed anonymous until they chose to connect, so it was safer than the phone number already sitting on the dashboard. A few smaller write-ups picked it up after that.

It never really worked, though. Looking back now, with twelve years in between, I can see the lesson was not just one thing. It was sitting in almost every part of the business at once, and I only understood one piece of it at a time.

The tech was never the hard part

Building RePark itself was not difficult. A plate lookup, a masked contact system, a simple app. Any competent developer could put that together in a few weeks, and we did.

What I did not understand yet was that the actual engineering problem was not the code. It was getting a stranger to trust an app enough to use it on the one day a year they actually needed it, which is a much harder thing to build than a plate lookup. I spent my effort on the part that was already easy and barely thought about the part that was actually hard. I have made a version of that same mistake more than once since.

The market never moved the way I hoped it would

RePark only worked if both the person blocked and the person doing the blocking already had the app installed. That is a hard thing to pull off even with money behind you. In 2016, Petronas tried something almost identical through McCann KL, a campaign called Double Parkr, a windscreen sticker with a QR code, good enough to get a Webby nomination. It still needed both sides to have the app, and it quietly faded too.

If a Petronas media budget could not make two strangers install the same app before either one needed it, two young founders with a small crowdfunding round were never going to manage it either. That was not a failure of effort. It was a market that was not ready to change a habit for an app it did not yet trust.

There was never really a business model underneath it

This is the one I am most honest with myself about now. RePark was free. It had no path to charging anyone for anything, and I had not thought hard about who was actually going to pay for it one day. I was building for usage and hoping the money would work itself out later.

Almost everything I have built since has the opposite shape. A state government paying for a platform because a citizen problem needs solving today. A company paying for compliance work because the law requires it. Somebody with a real budget and a real deadline, not a crowd I was hoping would show up eventually. That is the biggest single difference between RePark and everything that came after it.

Raising money for the first time taught me something the money itself did not

We ran a small crowdfunding round on pitchIN to get RePark going, my first time raising money from anyone. We raised RM6,454 against a RM5,000 goal, from 16 backers.

It is a strange feeling asking strangers for money in public for the first time. You learn quickly that people are not really buying your app, they are buying whether they believe you personally will do what you said. And once people have put money in publicly, you owe them an honest account of what happened, including the version where it did not work. I think that is part of why I am able to write this post plainly now instead of dressing it up. I learned that lesson early, even if it took me a while to actually use it.

The best thing that came out of that year was not the app

The part of that period that actually mattered long term was not RePark at all. It was the co-founder I met while building it.

We were both young, both working the same small circuit of accelerator programmes, both building something nobody had asked us for yet. A few years later he brought me in as CTO on a vehicle finance platform that Bank Rakyat eventually acquired. After that we built RocketValet together, a service that collected your car, took it in to be serviced, and brought it back. That one got further than RePark ever did and still taught me the same lesson a second time. None of it shows up if you only look at how many people actually used RePark, which was close to nobody.

I only recognise the pattern now, looking back. The product is rarely the whole return on a failed venture. Sometimes the actual return is the person you meet while you are both failing at something together, before either of you has anything to prove.

The part I could not have seen at the time

There is one more angle to this, and it took the longest to understand.

RePark stored a person’s license plate and their phone number together, permanently, so the two could be connected. In 2014 that was just how you built an app like this. Nobody I knew was asking hard questions about it, including me.

If I built that same app today, I would need to register a data protection officer before switching it on, because storing someone’s plate against their contact details at any real scale counts as exactly the kind of monitoring Malaysia’s data protection law now requires a DPO for. That was not true in 2014. It is true now.

I am not bringing this up to be hard on my younger self. I now run a compliance company, and the honest reason I understand this so well is that I once built the exact kind of product this law was written to catch, years before the law existed. I got away with it, quietly, because nobody was checking yet. I would not get away with it today, and it is a big part of why I now tell other founders to check this earlier than I did.

Putting it together

One year, one small failed app, and by the time I looked back properly there was a lesson sitting in the tech, the market, the business model, the fundraising, the relationships, and the regulation, all at once. I only ever saw one of them clearly at the time. The rest took a decade of actually running things to understand.

Being early with the right idea is not the same as building a business. I was early. I was not yet a business. It took a lot more failing after that to learn the difference.