Eric Chia is the founder & CEO of Advocado, a multiaward-winning cloud consumer engagement CRM Software which empowers B2C businesses big or small to generate additional revenue while retaining & engaging their customers.

1999
The then 2nd year NUS undergraduate, Eric started working on his first brainchild in the tech realm - in the very comforts of his dorm room.

Eric has been an ambitious individual since his younger days, coupled with his creativity and willingness to learn anything & everything, school soon became just a vehicle to drive him on the road to entrepreneurship.

While everyone went slogging for aces & good job placements, Eric’s first business miracle took flight along with the 99’ .com boom. Imagine, a 23-year-old student who owns a lucrative tech business worth more than USD 10 Million in valuation!

19 years & 5 start ups later, the now 41-year-old Eric’s take on entrepreneurship had taken a 180 turn. Certain business adversities made him a believer of strong business foundations: Forget about chasing after hype & novelty and focus on solving real problems that matter, while creating traction and revenue.

In this case, his 5th brainchild - Advocado was birthed alongside co-founder Joval Gan, while entirely bootstrapped from the start and with a focus for delivering solid tangible value to their customers while elegantly solving issues that occur daily.

Advocado: Empowering SMEs
Advocado was love at first thought for Eric back in 2014. He had a hunch it could be a game changer, starting with SMEs; when the market became more receptive to semi-personalized digital loyalty softwares, but for some reason, most of them are failing, in epic proportions.

While not being hasty to chase after an amazing idea, Eric spent more than 18 months to validate and refine the business model before going to market. And after enrolling another formidable rival-turned-co-founder, Joval, who has rich new market experiences, excellent interpersonal skills and spectacular sales prowess, Advocado took her first steps in May 2016.

Advocado’s mission was simple: Delivering the most elegant & flexible cloud engagement solution there is, one that merchants love; robust, groovy, agile, adaptable to all kinds of changes in business climate. Loyalty, customer engagement & revenue generation with just a mobile number in a few seconds without the need for physical cards or downloading of any apps.

The ultimate driving force for Eric is value creation: reducing friction, boosting efficiency and productivity in operations & management, leading to traction and inevitably, profit. No business should be at the mercy of an expensive, emotionless software which is unable to reduce operational pain points yet leave its users at a loss of how to effectively utilize it.

Imagine the power of robust consumer engagement software only previously available to MNCs, now available to businesses of any size, from the small retailer to midsize chains, kickstarted in just under 24 hours and at the affordable cost of under USD$3 daily.

Bootstrapped: Certainly not easy & there’s NO TURNING BACK!
As with any bootstrapped startup, resources are extremely limited. Hiring industry experts at market rates were impossible. Other than delivering seamless UX & UI for the best customer experience, having a robust and scalable technology framework and infrastructure is absolutely mission critical. It can make or break a tech startup, no matter how brilliant the business idea. Thinking out of the box on how to build Asia’s leading tech innovation team in Advocado, Eric managed to enroll Ron Lee, a seasoned tech entrepreneur, whom with his team of young yet experienced developers, worked on Advocado 2.0. The synergy and chemistry while working together was spectacular and Ron soon joined the leaderboard as Chief Technology Officer, creating waves of tech innovation alongside Eric & Joval.