Azran Osman-Rani: How to succeed against all odds

"How does a tiny start-up in Mid Valley take on the big giants?"

Azran Osman-Rani, CEO of home-grown on-demand video streaming platform, iflix Malaysia, posed this question to a group of young and eager students at TalentCorp's #TheChiefSpeaks event. During a short but insightful 30-minute chat with the participants, Azran shared how iflix's efforts to differentiate itself from its competitors had helped to boost the company’s exponential growth. Here are some key points from his talk:

Part of what makes iflix successful is their ability to make their services accessible to different income brackets.

Our customer really is that new emerging middle-class in the mass market. So, affordability is a big issue."

Noting that the emerging middle-class market does not always have access to high-speed internet connections, iflix focused on innovating ways for content streaming to happen even when data is limited, as well as giving users the possibility to download content and watch shows offline. This works out to savings on data costs for the customer and service accessibility to iflix users, wherever they may be. 

One of the problems iflix had to overcome was the competition from pirated streaming services. It was a huge challenge to convince users to pay for services which are already widely available at no cost. 

“Malaysians being so ingenious, they would come up to me and say ‘Azran, I love the service! I’m on my 8th Free Trial!’… Not exactly what we had in mind,” he told the students in good humour. 

To solve this problem, iflix partnered with big data providers like Digi, Maxis, Celcom, and several others by selling iflix subscriptions directly to the corporations, for them to offer to their telco customers for free. The telcos were happy to partner with iflix, seeing the potential spike in data consumption that would come from iflix subscribers.

The idea is like ‘give your customers free cars, and then sell them petrol’.” 

“We think it is better to have 10 million customers to be giving you 1 dollar per month, than 1 million customers giving you 10 dollars a month.”

Focusing on the need to quickly scale the business, Azran highlighted the importance of market reach over chasing profit. It was important for iflix to concentrate on a long-term gain in order to create the platform it has today. 

If you want to make a margin on your first 1 thousand or 1 million customers, you’re so focused on making money there, you’re making it inaccessible to a larger market.”