How our own shop did $120K in its first month
We opened this one ourselves. Before we asked a single owner to trust this system, we spent our own money finding out whether it actually worked.
Steamboat Charcoal Claypot Prawn · Toa Payoh Industrial Park
We had a system. The thing we could never say was that we had ever pointed it at our own money.
So we opened one. A halal steamboat stall in a Toa Payoh industrial park, run by two guys whose previous business was selling clothes. I was 23.
We opened in a place with no footfall. Not a mall, not a void deck, not a coffee shop on a main road. An industrial park, where the only people around in the evening are the ones who work there. Nobody was ever going to walk past and wander in. Every customer we got had to decide to come, find the address and make the trip.
And every owner reading this knows the next part. The food can be excellent and it changes nothing if nobody knows you are there.
This time there was no client to hand the risk to. If it did not work here, on our own money, we had no business selling it to anyone.
We marketed the shop before the shop existed. Most places open the doors first and start posting after, which builds the quiet first year straight into the plan.
So we ran it backwards. Two weeks before opening we posted as though the stall was already open: the chef, the wok, the prawns going into the pot, and the question our community actually asks before anything else, which is whether the place is halal. The eight videos we ran before opening have done 1.2 million views between them, for a shop nobody had eaten at yet.
The results
940K
276K
182KEight videos over two weeks, posted while the stall was still empty. The opening announcement, put up two days before the doors opened, has done 940,700 views on its own.
A hundred and twenty thousand dollars of sales in the first month, out of a stall in an industrial estate. It cleared six figures again the month after.
Before and after
Berita Harian ran the story nine days after we opened
We never pitched a journalist. The videos got loud enough that Berita Harian came to us, and on 20 July 2024 the paper ran the story: two young guys who went from selling clothes to selling claypot prawn. National press nine days after opening, for a stall nobody had heard of three weeks earlier.
The shop is closed. It ran for about six months, then the partnership broke and I walked away from a business doing six figures a month. It shut not long after that. Why it ended is a partnership story and it is not mine alone to tell.
This is on the page because you would find it in ten seconds anyway. What the launch proved is above, on receipts you can check yourself, and it stands whatever happened later.
It is also the reason this company exists. I built something that ran on me, and when I left, it left with me. That is the trap every owner reading this is already standing in.
Khai, co-founder of Offerly
So how did our own shop do $120K in its first month?
We built the audience before we built the queue. Two weeks of posting before the doors opened, 1.2 million views on those videos before anyone had eaten there, and a first month that most new stalls spend just trying to get noticed.
Your shop has a story like this too. You might just be too close to see it. That’s literally what the call is for.
What we run today: at least 500 new orders in 30 days, and every one is a code redeemed at your counter, so you can count them. Muslim-owned and halal F&B only.
See if we can do it for your shop →