B2Bアウトソーシングのマーケットプレイスを構築し、業界を変革する
月商 — · 創業者3人 · 従業員5人 · Singapore
Wouter Delbaere（Founder, Mangtas）· 創業 May 2021 · 記事掲載 — · home.mangtas.com · 元の記事
2021年5月に創業者3人が自己資金で立ち上げ、創業から1週間でプロトタイプを構築し、2週間で最初のプロジェクトがスタートした。クライアントからの需要が殺到し、初期段階では供給が追いつかないほどだった。集客は100%オーガニックで、戦略的パートナーシップが中心。2022年初頭時点で従業員5人（数名の正社員と複数のインターンを含む）。
売値の出典: 売値は確認できず（2026-10-13 取得）
The success of a startup lies completely in having the right balance of fully committed people with complementary skill sets, experience, and networks.
会計: Xero
crm: Pipedrive
デザイン: Canva
メール配信: SendGrid
その他: Loom
podcast: Anchor
業務: Jira, ClickUp
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stock images: Shutterstock
I used to run a regional FinTech business as part of a larger parent company. It was a stable and well-paying job that involved working together with 200 people, 10 products, and 10 different markets. However, I decided to leave this all behind smack in the middle of a pandemic to follow my dreams. For some people, quitting this type of job may seem crazy. But adding the looming uncertainty of a pandemic plus having a pregnant wife to the mix? Let’s just say pretty much everyone in my circle thought I was a nutcase. But I saw things differently. A crisis like Covid-19 requires businesses to innovate if they want to stay in the game. I made it my mission to find a way to help deliver solutions for this type of problem and make a difference. I initially felt this pain point while I was working on another business idea in the SportsTech space (but that’s for another starter’s story). I experienced firsthand how unreliable outsourcing can get when I was looking for extra help with building my tech. It proved to be unbelievably difficult to find and attract the right talent and if I did find some, it was often unaffordable. Freelancers also often proved to be a hit-and-miss exercise, with people coming and going, making the process unsustainable and time-consuming in the long run. In the end, I found that agencies, on the other hand, were the best strategic solution for the long haul, however, I again, found myself in a crux: I didn’t have a good place to start. For freelancers, I knew which platforms to turn to, but for agencies, my only available option was Google. As I was discussing this over a beer with one of my co-founders, we realized that there is a massive opportunity to disrupt a 700 billion dollar outsourcing industry. During the pandemic, businesses have had to embrace remote work, while also experiencing a massive shortage in access to qualified talent pools which started paving the way for a boom in outsourcing. With the majority of B2B services vendors still scattered across the globe and only discoverable via Google, now became the best time to disrupt that space and effect a big change. Where that was the exact scenario for freelancers 10 years ago, became the case now for vendor agencies and businesses aching to connect with them. And so our journey began. I, together with a great set of co-founders that have known each other for decades, pooled our resources for our self-funded startup. Having done B2B outsourcing for most of our adult lives - both as clients, as well as vendors – coupled with my knowledge on how to build software myself, gave us all the ammunition we needed to immediately get started and quickly validate the idea. Within a week we had a prototype built and 5 vendors signed up. 2 weeks later our first outsourcing project kicked off - earning our first bit of revenue on our B2B marketplace. Since then, we never looked back.
If we would have built exactly what we originally envisioned, our platform wouldn’t have been fit for purpose. It would have had all bells and whistles but it would not have been aligned to our fine-tuned positioning and what the market needs. So instead, early on, we’ve adopted a rapid prototyping approach - in partnership with our early adopters - which enabled us to validate, learn & evolve in an agile manner. This allowed us to verify critical hypotheses throughout our startup journey, including our business model, growth strategies, product-market fit, our ability to execute as a team, and much more. The initial version of the platform (web app) was built by myself out of my home office. As months passed we started forming partnerships with universities and talented interns started pitching in. As of the start of 2022, we finally have a full-time CTO…and I can finally hand over that hat and focus on being a full-time CEO. We brand ourselves as “Mangtas”: I grew up, together with 1 of my co-founders, on an island in the Philippines called Negros Oriental, where the term “Mangtas” means exceptionally skilled & talented. We found this not only represents our roots, but also the quality of our people and the vendors on our marketplace.
Mangtas, as of this writing, is 100% self-funded. We are a lean team: run by co-founders, a couple of full-time hires, and a handful of interns. We also partner up with several agencies that support us with software development, digital marketing, and lead generation (all vendors on our platform of course!). These allow us to keep our costs at bay. The success of a startup lies completely in having the right balance of fully committed people with complementary skill sets, experience, and networks. We took the approach of launching a BETA version of what we had built as soon as possible - gaining early traction and immediate feedback. We launched our platform version one a couple of days after we came up with the idea, and evolved from there. Eventually, it took about 2 months for our platform to mature, and for the vendor, sign-ups to start growing exponentially. On the contrary, for our project pipeline, after just 1 week we, unfortunately, had to stop our outreach. The demand from clients became too overwhelming to handle - which was a truly fantastic validation of our business idea. However, this also highlighted the fact that organizationally & technically, we weren’t ready yet to scale. Old version of the site
As mentioned previously, we currently have a 90% repeat purchase ratio. Once our clients experience dependable outsourcing services from our vendors, purchases organically occur in a self-service manner. The key for us is to ensure that the overall experience remains trustworthy. While we certainly have ambitious growth targets, we carefully control the rate at which we scale up to ensure the reliability of the matching and vendor selection and that the service delivery & overall user experience isn’t compromised. We do this by being hands-on in our vendor selection, vendor vetting, and match-making process. This helps us understand all the critical aspects of the business, and use this deep understanding to fine-tune our internal workflows and automate the right processes. As a business, this is also why we are currently hyper-focused on a couple of core outsourcing services; while clients continue to come to us for outsourcing across Software & Tech, Digital Marketing and Lead Generation services, there are some very specific, high-demand services to build tech platforms of the future (scaled microservices, blockchain, virtual reality, metaverse, etc.). Here, we have seen a scarcity in reliable supply, and we have recently decided to give this gap our full attention. So far, our growth has been 100% organic, with strategic partnerships at its core. I am glad to share that Mangtas now covers 30 markets worldwide.
Like all businesses, we have a steady yet evolving set of goals and objectives. Our humble startup plans on growing 10 times more in the coming years and we do this by leveraging on strategic partnerships, as well as, rolling out an AI-based match-making strategy for more streamlined and efficient collaborations on our platform. Additionally, we also plan on doing a deep dive into outsourcing services that help deliver the Tech of the future such as virtual reality, metaverse, blockchain, and scaled microservices to name a few. In the long run, we at Mangtas aim to create a complete outsourcing ecosystem by seamlessly integrating our outsourcing solutions into businesses around the globe. The more we learn from our agile approach, the better a platform we can build, incorporating integrations like financing, metaverse-based collaborations, upskilling of talent, donations to charitable institutions and so much more. In a nutshell, our goal is to become your 1-stop-shop for reliable and quality B2B outsourcing across all deal sizes and project complexities.
Throughout this journey, I have learned some valuable lessons. When it comes to being a part of a team, my experience has taught me that having the right team in place is ultimately what matters the most. However, this is also by far the hardest thing to get right. The success of a startup lies completely in having the right balance of fully committed people with complementary skill sets, experience, and networks. When it comes to timeliness, as difficult as it may be for us to currently find competitors to benchmark on, I know we are not the first to think about this. But I also know that the timing is right. Outsourcing boomed as a result of the pandemic - with freelancer platforms growing up to 700%. We do possess an unfair advantage of being able to use the freelancer platforms as templates and adapt them to meet the unique needs for B2B services. All in all, I approach starting a business the same way as I do endurance sports: gradual, balanced progress, and always with an eye on the prize.
To support our business, we love nothing more than to use 3rd party tools for collaboration, communication, virtual office space, video messaging, customer relationship management, product development, analytics, content, etc. – we live in an age where cloud-based subscriptions are extremely cost-effective – and we certainly aim to maximize this. For internal and some external communications, we mainly use: Office 365 Gather in partnership with Virtual Chair For our Dev Team: Bubble Bluehost Sendgrid Jira Loom For our Sales Team: Pipedrive LinkedIn Sales Navigator For our Marketing Team: Clickup Google Tools Ghost Envato Elements Adobe Stock Shutterstock Canva Adobe Tools Riverside Matchmaker Xero
My inspiration comes from trusted entrepreneurs around me that are building something out of nothing; I regularly catch up with founders who I admire - not only to share notes but also to have a sounding board throughout this rollercoaster of a journey.
Every day, I find that I learn something new. For aspiring entrepreneurs, my top 5 tips would have to be the following: Make it your priority to form the right team. Always validate your assumptions ASAP. Forget perfection; speed matters more early on. Grit and drive will get you far. Do what you do best, outsource the rest.
We are a fast-growing start-up and we are always on the lookout for talented people who can help drive our product development, marketing, and sales forward. Please don’t hesitate to send your resumes to hr@mangtas.com if you’re interested in joining our team!
We are currently present on several channels. Feel free to check us out, follow us and engage with us! Website (sign up as a client to find services, or as a vendor to deliver services) LinkedIn Facebook Instagram Twitter Pinterest Blog YouTube Podcast Or you can always get in touch with us at info@mangtas.com!