Building in Public #5
Aizat Rahim · CEO & Co-Founder, Borong
I sent a memo to my board this week. Not a shareholder update, not a fundraising deck. A genuine “here's where we are and I need help” message. That's a hard thing to write when you're supposed to be the person with the answers.
Borong has been through a real pivot. Not a marketing pivot, a survival one. We went from a scrappy FMCG marketplace to an enterprise B2B eProcurement platform serving some of the biggest companies in Malaysia: different product, different team, different everything.
But here's what nobody warns you about when you pivot hard: you carry your old problems with you at full speed. With the full AI at scale now, we were running on an outdated infrastructure, and we spent a year just trying to finish deploying. An SEO ban that quietly killed our organic leads for way longer than it should have. Legacy costs from a version of the company that no longer exists. All of it chasing you while you're trying to build something new.
We cut the burn significantly. We closed major enterprise contracts. We got to breakeven. And we're still fighting battles from three years ago at the same time.
The thing I keep relearning is that momentum and structural debt can coexist. You can be growing and broken at the same time, and both things are fully true. The market doesn't pause while you clean up the mess from your last chapter.
So what do you actually do with that? You write the honest memo. You ask for help directly without dressing it up. You stop performing confidence you don't fully have yet.
The founders who make it through aren't the ones who never hit the wall. They're the ones who stop pretending the wall isn't there.
Still here, still rowing, and still growing :)