Count to five. In those five seconds, somewhere across Asia-Pacific, someone just tapped checkout. And that tap brings a little money back into their account.

Five seconds, and it happens again for someone else.

Whether you're booking a flight, restocking the fridge, or grabbing lunch, these are all everyday parts of our lives. But sometimes, this spending doesn't feel great. I mean, do you know anyone who likes seeing their bank balance go down?

But it doesn't always have to be this painful and expensive. For a select few millions of people across Asia-Pacific, this everyday spending is made a little more rewarding. What's their secret?

They use ShopBack.

Founded in 2014, ShopBack has taken the most ordinary thing people do, spending, and turned it into something that gives you a little reward on the daily.

Now, millions of people remember to open ShopBack before a purchase. That habit now repeats every five seconds, across 50M users in 13 markets, making it an e-commerce platform driving more than $5.5B in annual sales.

It began with six young Singaporeans with their pooled savings, and two businesses that failed before this one worked. This is the ShopBack founding story.

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📝 The 20-cent hustle

Meet Joel Leong. In Joel's first week of primary school in Singapore, some classmates forgot their drawing blocks.

Joel had extras, so he charged them 20 cents per sheet. He sold several sheets and went home excited to share how much he made with his mom.

But his mom wasn't impressed.

Why didn't he just share with classmates who needed help? The words from that scolding session stuck with him. Still, that experience taught him at a young age that people (even kids!) would pay to solve their problems.

Fast forward many years later, Joel landed at the National University of Singapore (NUS) studying Arts and Social Sciences, then joined NUS Overseas Colleges, a program that sends students to work at startups in global tech hubs.

In Shanghai, he watched Chinese interns reject stable corporate jobs for scrappy tech startups. "It dawned on me that entrepreneurship is actually pretty interesting," he said.

China's startup scene was full of energy.

But Singapore's startup scene felt far more cautious. It was much earlier, after all. Yet, seeing what he saw in China gave Joel the idea that he might not need to follow the traditional path either, even in Singapore.

Meanwhile, another Singaporean, Henry Chan was finishing his Mechanical Engineering degree at the same university while hopping between product gigs and a brief stint selling Prudential insurance policies.

Both of them eventually landed at Zalora, a Southeast Asian fashion e-commerce startup.

They didn't know it then, but later, people would call this network the "Zalora Mafia"—operators who'd go on to build ShopBack, Gojek, Love Bonito, and Shopee.

As Joel later joked, "There's no special coffee served at Zalora that helped spawn these entrepreneurial bunch."

It was timing. The e-commerce industry in Southeast Asia was young, messy, and very, very wide open.

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🚗 The late-night pitch

Late one night in 2014, Henry and Joel sat in Henry's car, chatting back and forth about business ideas, as many friends and colleagues do.

They'd seen cashback models work brilliantly in the US with Ebates, and in China. Southeast Asia had nothing like it, even as online shopping exploded.

Retailers were burning cash to find customers, and shoppers had no unified way to discover brands or get rewarded. They decided to go for it, and that night marked the beginning of their journey to found ShopBack.

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⚡ The flash sale crash

In early 2014, they launched their first attempt as a flash sale site. It was one day of steep discounts, big traffic for retailers. The model had worked elsewhere, so why not here?

Within weeks, they hit a wall.

Flash sales couldn't sustain year-round operations. Merchants loved the traffic spikes but hated the feast-or-famine rhythm, and consumers wanted to see deals all year.

The economics were broken. Traffic came in bursts, then died. The bills they needed to pay didn't work that way.

Henry didn't tell his family about what he'd done. The decision wiped out his entire savings account.

He kept it secret for months, even as they scrambled to build something from nothing. The weight of that silence pressed down on him every day. He had bet everything on this.

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🔄 The discount trap

They pivoted fast. Now, they had version two, a three-month discount platform with better marketing. Surely sustained discounts would fix things. Shouldn't they?

They didn't. Merchants struggled to accept the deep discounts, despite improved marketing. The rates killed their margins.

And without merchant buy-in, there was no business. With that, they had two failures in under a year.

Then came another huge rejection. Their application for government funding was rejected.

Friends who'd stayed at Zalora were getting promotions. For Henry, with his empty bank account, the shame of potentially having to admit failure—to investors, to family, to themselves—hung over every decision.

Henry and Joel were running out of runway and ideas.

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💰 Ten merchants and a prayer

By attempt three, most of their pooled savings were gone. They rebranded as ShopBack and shifted to year-round cashback where shoppers get 3-6% back, a rate that lets retailers pay commission for sales.

It took 4 months to launch the website. They had 10 merchants on the platform. Ten. That's it.

One week before their first major campaign, many partners and merchants were still not confirmed. "We were so desperate," Joel remembered. "We even considered postponing the campaign."

Postponing meant admitting defeat to the few investors who'd backed them. It meant facing families who'd warned them about leaving stable jobs. It meant watching their last real shot at proving the model slip away.

The next day, their biggest partner came on board. "(Thank God!) and everything else fell into place," Joel said.

But they weren't safe yet. "When we almost could not make payroll," Henry admitted, "our initial campaign did not bring in sufficient traction to hit the milestones." They were days away from telling their small team—people who'd believed in them—that the money was gone.

Two hours after going live, their first real customer made a purchase. "I still remember his name was Edwin and he made a RedMart purchase!" Joel said.

He was a stranger, not a friend or test user. Someone who'd actually used the platform by choice. It wasn't much, but it was proof strangers would use this. They could breathe.

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🏢 The cramped incubator

ShopBack started in a small office at BLOCK71, a Singapore government-backed startup hub where Carousell and 99.co were also being incubated. The room fit 4 to 5 people comfortably. They squeezed in 13.

Elbows bumped keyboards and phone calls overlapped. It was chaos, but it was theirs.

The cramped space created an unexpected problem. Every time they did job interviews in that office, the conversion rate was terrible.

So, they started taking interviews at the nearby Starbucks instead, which proved to be much better at making people want to work with them.

They later learned that the environment shaped perception. "A lot of the time, people join a startup because of the startup idea itself, but also because of others who are in it," Joel explained.

"Why we were very successful in hiring—though we were early-stage at the time—was that people were coming because they trust the people that were inside."

The Starbucks interviews became their recruiting edge. People joined not because of polished pitch decks, but because they met the team over coffee and felt something real.

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🤔 "What's the catch?"

The technical problems were hard. The cultural and behavioral ones were harder.

When ShopBack launched, cashback was new to Asia.

"A lot of people were suspicious because they didn't get how ShopBack worked," Joel said. The first question was always: "What is the catch?"

"The hardest part is telling customers that you get free money, okay," Joel laughs. "Straightaway, they asked, 'What is the catch?'. We started small, with people we knew—sometimes, nothing more than ten orders a day."

They started with patience and proved it worked to one skeptical user at a time.

"We soon learnt that as long as people get to withdraw their cash, they will tell others about ShopBack—how credible we are and how it's true that you do get money back when you spend. And crucially, that there is no catch." Everyone remembers when they got a good deal.

Then they made their boldest bet.

They appointed members of the public as "chief shopping officers" and gave them 11,271 Singapore dollars (around US$8,151)—the highest amount a single customer had saved through the app in one year—to show how easy it is to shop and save through the app.

Think about that. Instead of paying for ads or celebrity endorsements, they gave real money to real users and said: show people this actually works.

The results "pretty much spoke for themselves," they explained, and the business saw "very fast growth" and strong customer feedback.

It worked because it flipped the script. They had proof, not promises with real money in real bank accounts. Users became believers, then evangelists.

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📈 One person, one problem

"Each person is in charge of one point," Henry explained. "He has his problem and I have my problem.

There is no duplicate, making every single person in this company important because no one else is going to do what you're doing."

This was survival architecture to them.

These points ranged from recruiting employees in the Philippines to fussing over technical details like getting more people to see their emails. Targets were broken into actionable, measurable goals "so that when you add them all up, the sum of it is… improvement."

Henry and Joel gave each other 7am wake-up calls to start the day. Joel often ran on snacks. They worked until 2am answering customer queries, pitching merchants, and refining the product.

When a complaint came in, they'd read it together, figure out what broke, and fix it that night. When traffic spiked unexpectedly, they'd trace back through the code to understand why.

Nothing was too small to matter.

Within a year, ShopBack leapt from 300 orders in Singapore in their first month to 140,000 monthly orders across four countries. The obsessive attention paid off. "Both an order and complaint is a customer validation: just that one is positive and one is negative," Joel explained.

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📱 Seven SIM cards and a new problem

By 2017, Henry had seven SIM cards taped to the back of his phone—one for each country ShopBack was expanding into, including those he intended to launch in next.

He kept them hidden during investor meetings. Why? "An investor once took a photo of the SIM cards and figured out which markets we were heading into," Henry explained with a laugh. Competitors were watching, and every signal mattered.

The expansion was relentless.

Malaysia and Philippines in 2015. Indonesia in 2016. Thailand and Taiwan in 2017. Australia launched in 2018 and became ShopBack's "most phenomenal market in terms of growth," with over 300,000 registered users and purchases growing by nearly 1,300% between May 2018 and March 2019.

Joel credited his time with Zalora for his expansionist thinking.

Managing regional partnerships for the retail giant, he realized that while Singapore is a good place to start, getting into all of Southeast Asia should be the target. That primary school kid who sold drawing paper for 20 cents had learned: if people have a problem, they'll pay to solve it. And if the problem exists in Singapore, it probably exists everywhere else too.

But rapid expansion surfaced a problem the founders hadn't anticipated. They needed engineers—skilled security specialists, backend developers, infrastructure builders—to handle exploding traffic and build new features.

The best talent lived in markets where ShopBack didn't have legal entities.

Setting up entities in each country meant months of legal work, hundreds of thousands in setup costs, and waiting while competitors moved faster.

The traditional path would've meant choosing between speed and compliance. Henry and Joel had already learned from two failed business models that speed mattered. But cutting corners on compliance could destroy everything they'd built.

Then they found a different way.

Deel's employer of record service let ShopBack hire contractors and full-time employees in countries without the legal nightmare of entity setup. What used to take months of paperwork, legal reviews, and administrative coordination now happened in days.

"The primary driver for our switch to Deel was the compliance capability," said Carolyn Choo, VP, People at ShopBack. "We needed a platform that could quickly facilitate hiring and onboarding in markets where we didn't have an entity."

The impact showed up immediately.

ShopBack could hire a security engineer in one country and have them onboarded and working within 24 hours.

A backend developer in another market. Infrastructure specialists wherever the best talent lived. "With Deel, we could hire skilled engineers in markets where we lacked local entities, allowing us to meet our technical needs efficiently," Choo explained.

For Henry and Joel, who'd built a culture around giving each person one problem to solve with obsessive accountability, removing operational friction meant their team could focus on what mattered: building features, serving customers, expanding the platform. Not drowning in compliance paperwork.

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🌍 Today

Today, ShopBack receives at least one order every five seconds from its members across 13 markets, who browse offerings from more than 20,000 merchant partners.

It's the app you check reflexively before buying anything. The reminder that pops up when you're browsing. The small thrill of watching cashback stack up.

The six people who started with their pooled savings and two failed business models built something that reshaped how Southeast Asia shops online.

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This article was written in partnership with Deel. ShopBack is a Deel client.

About Deel

Deel helps 40k+ companies, including Nike, Open AI & Klarna, on their global expansion —whether you want to hire worldwide without opening legal entities, streamline HR for your global team, or pay all types of workers anywhere with consolidated payroll—and they do it all with full compliance.