As 2025 kicks off and we start executing on our growth plans, this year marks the 8th full year since founding Aonic – not a long period for a business, but long enough to not be a young “startup”, or I like to call ourselves “upstart” anymore. We have grown from a two-person team based out of a co-working space in Penang, to a team of over 200 across the Southeast Asia region.
Growth is often the ultimate goal of a startup’s existence. Be it growth in revenue, customer base, locations, profits, we realized one common factor, in that growth is rarely linear, and we tend to vastly overestimate our short-term growth, yet surprisingly underestimate our longer-term growth numbers.
As we scaled Aonic one step at a time, here is what we found critical to longer term, sustained growth.
In our earlier days, we saw potential within the commercial drone space. Drones were clearly able to provide value through analytics and automation, yet adoption rates are severely behind other regions due to the availability of cheap and low skilled labour. However, we were confident that being able to make business decisions with a data driven approach and improving work efficiency through automation is the only way forward.
We were challenged on multiple occasions on the viability of drone usage, from basic disbelief that drones can even fly to unit economics on the operational costs. By sticking to our beliefs and making decisions aligned to this, it has guided us through uncertainties, navigate through naysayers to find the early adopters that shares the same vision as us.
As one of the earlier drone companies in Malaysia, it is common for us to receive ALL types of requests for drone applications. It was important for us to figure out what makes sense, on a technical, operational, and commercial level. We were extremely disciplined in not pursuing once off marketing stunts, technically impossible, illogical, especially hype focused project and focus all our resources with scalable applications that provides real impact and value to our bigger vision.
It took a lot of willpower for us to ignore the fluff, especially when multiple competitors are working on what we deem impractical, and our own team are questioning why we are not taking actions. Correction will come naturally, and we have observed competitors that took the quick pathway for unsustainable growth shutting down operations.
From the get-go, we wanted our customers to be more than buyers. Being a new growing industry, we needed our customers to be more like our partners, working together in a community to learn, explore and grow together. Hence, our strategy was simple, to focus on increasing the industry market size, finding values to provide more value, more applications; instead of competing on short term market grab from competitors. Through this, we can build a harmonious community of suppliers, partners and even competitors that aligns with our values and often even campions our growth.
As we grew beyond the first initial phase of growth, we started facing very simple yet threatening operational issues. Things like team communication was easy when everyone was in the same room, but once we grew to a larger team and multiple locations, it became important for us to invest in building clear and efficient processes to ensure the team are aligned on our growth plans. We took a very conscious, and often (from our investors perspective) conservative approach towards growth, being extremely realistic and even slowing down growth at times to ensure our foundations are solid before pushing for the next phase.
Ultimately, growth goes back to allowing us to discover who we are. All growing businesses are continuously evolving, changing. Amid this dynamic landscape, we had to continuously question ourselves: “Who are we and what do we stand for?” Are we just a drone solutions company? An “AI” startup enabled by drones? An agriculture ecosystem company? Or something else completely?
In truth, we are still discovering who we are, and we are ok with this. We have learnt that growth is not about having all the answers; but rather, it is about embracing the journey, staying aligned with our core values and being always curious about everything.
So, what does growth mean to you?
