The CEO and co-founder of micro-influencer platform Spread-It reveals the unusual origins of his company and how he thinks AI will change the KOL sphere
If you travelled back to 2014 and asked economics student Timothy Ng for his Instagram handle, he’d politely decline, stating he had zero interest in social media.
Imagine the sheer disbelief Ng would have felt if he had known that less than a decade later, he’d be overseeing a platform connecting thousands of influencers and brands.
Ng, a 2023 Gen.T honouree, is the CEO and co-founder of Spread-It, the largest micro-influencer and KOL agency in Hong Kong, mainland China and Thailand. Influencers with as few as 1,000 followers can hop on Spread-It’s app and shop for brands to work with—and vice versa. The huge and authentic engagement these smaller accounts generate, compared to big social players, has given Ng’s influencer pool the bang-for-buck that marketers crave.
Here, Ng reveals Spread-It’s unusual origins, explains its enduring appeal, and ponders on a future for his company that’s just as surprising as the company’s very existence.
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If you’re too specialised in a particular area, you often don’t think out of the box
We started with something totally unrelated to influencers: a free postcard mailing service. Our idea was very simple. We loved receiving postcards and wondered if we could start a business that sent postcards for free. But because it was free, there wasn’t any business model behind it and we couldn't support it at all. So we tried to find sponsorship from brands.
Foodpanda was one of our first clients sponsoring the postcards, with its logo printed on the front and the back, as it was trying to reach university students. We thought this was a brilliant idea, and somehow, the marketing manager at Foodpanda thought so too. It turns out, it’s not. It’s a terrible, expensive way of reaching students. But it was then that we discovered there was something called Instagram, which was growing rapidly at universities.
It’s hard for smaller influencers to find jobs, so they were extremely happy to be on a platform where they could find campaigns or jobs and increase their exposure to marketers. That’s what influencers really like about us. We give them different opportunities that they probably wouldn’t have known about before our existence.