A startup can have the perfect product, an interactive website, and a founder who can explain the business in one brilliant sentence. But the business can still struggle to pull its first thousand customers.
That is the slightly cruel part of building a business; it is raw, brutal, and never easy. People cannot buy what they never discover. The customer journey for APAC startups has become quite a maze. A customer in Japan might start on Google, then compare the findings in an AI-powered engine, check product reviews on YouTube, and finally buy it after seeing a trusted peer give the final nod. Another customer sitting in Indonesia may take an entirely different route.
Gone are the days when the old marketing funnel told the full story. Today’s product growth calls for a different strategy where APAC entrepreneurs meet customers exactly where they discover and buy products.
APAC Entrepreneurs Start Where the Customers Start Looking
The first growth tactic almost sounds too simple: find out what customers are already looking for. Google’s latest APAC research shows that customers now search the way they talk, combining their native languages with English and typing in long, specific sentences to find exactly what they need.
That creates a valuable opportunity for startups. Instead of spending primarily on clever advertising, founders can also create useful pages, FAQs, videos, comparisons, and product information that answer those specific questions.
Google’s June 2026 research found that 86% of Indian shoppers using Google Search were open to trying new brands or products, creating an important opening for smaller businesses competing against established brands. In other words, growth marketing starts with being useful way before it starts being promotional.
Customers Trust the Familiar Faces of Creators
A founder can explain their product down to a T and still struggle to make strangers care, while a trusted creator can sometimes do it in a few seconds. Across Southeast Asia, creator-led marketing has become a particularly interesting growth channel because audiences often treat creators as people they know rather than traditional advertisers they’re unaware of.
Google’s 2025 Southeast Asia creator research states that 86% of surveyed YouTube viewers in Indonesia said they trusted creators’ views and opinions about brands and products. Google also highlighted the Indonesian travel platform tiket.com, whose collaboration with four YouTube creators reached 9 million unique users within 11 days, achieving twice the engagement rate. For a startup, the lesson goes beyond ‘hire an influencer.’
Find a creator whose followers already care about the problem your product solves. Then give that creator total freedom to explain the product in their own voice. People trust recommendations from people they know, not corporate ad reads.
Watch It. Want It? But It.
Imagine finding a product and realizing that adding it to cart or buying it takes 10 seconds tops? A person watching a live demo on Instagram checks the comments for reviews, and decides then and there to buy it. That journey can happen without the customer ever opening a traditional advertisement.
A 2024 Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company’s e-Conomy SEA report reveals that video commerce grew from 5% (2022) to 20% of Southeast Asia’s e-commerce GMV. Because more than 40% of online shoppers in SEA rely on video to decide what to buy, new brands do not need massive budgets for short videos anymore.
APAC Entrepreneur Knows One Story ≠ Every Market
APAC is not one giant market. A campaign that works in China may fall flat in Australia. A message that feels natural in Singapore may sound different in Jakarta. That is why localization has become yet another growth tactic worth taking seriously.
Google’s January 2026 insights into Southeast Asian video campaigns cover three essential requirements: multiformat storytelling, creator partnerships, and clear ROI-driven branding. The good news is that a business does not need separate campaigns for every country. It can just keep the main theme but swap out the cultural references, humor, language, creators, and examples for each local audience.
The Best Growth Strategy Starts With Listening
There is one final growth tactic that sits underneath all the others: keep learning from customers. At the end of the day, it is the people who approach a brand and buy their product or service. And with the advancement of technology today, AI can be used to identify search patterns, while creators can introduce the products and take videos to demonstrate them. Localization sets the table by building cultural comfort meals, but the customer chooses whether to dine.
In APAC, smart startup growth is not about spending heavily on ads, making a lot of noise about the product, or chasing trends that last a week. It’s about matching real buyer habits. A successful startup won’t always be the one with the biggest advertising budget, but it will always be the one that listens closely and shows up where customers actually begin looking.
To read more, visit APAC Entrepreneur.