Not so simple, simple request . . .

There are days at the end of the month when the money runs thin and the meal gets simpler. In Myanmar, on those days — and on many ordinary days too — families eat rice with potato chips. Not alongside a meal. As the meal. A bag of chips where the protein or the vegetable would be in a better month. It sounds improbable until you understand that food culture here was never built around Western categories of main and side, treat and staple. Potato chips with rice is a real meal for a real number of families. It is filling. It is affordable. And for the people who depend on it, the price and availability of those chips is not a trivial thing.

Nay Chi makes those chips. And the bean-based snacks that sit alongside them. Win Thu Aung built the business on a straightforward proposition: nutritious enough to matter, cheap enough to buy when money is short. No marketing budget. No campaigns. The products spread because they solved a real problem for real families, and word travelled the way it does when something is genuinely useful.

By the time he came to us, his products were everywhere. He just didn't know where everywhere was.

Win Thu Aung is a seasoned entrepreneur — the kind who has learned more from setbacks than from plans. He knew his business had reach. He knew products left his facility and ended up in homes across Myanmar. What happened between those two points was, to him, essentially invisible. He had distribution partners. Things moved. Beyond that — which wholesalers, in which towns, at what volumes, serving which communities — he couldn't say. The network his entire business depended on existed, from where he stood, as a rumour.

He came to us wanting to build an app. He had never spoken to a developer before.

That sentence is worth sitting with for a moment. A man who had built genuine market penetration across a country, whose products were on tables in homes he would never visit, who had constructed a business out of nothing — and he had never once sat across from someone who could build him the digital tool he was now certain he needed. The vocabulary of product development, the questions a developer asks before writing a single line of code, the basic grammar of how software gets made — none of it was familiar to him. He knew he wanted something. He didn't know what it would take to build it, how long it would require, what decisions he would be asked to make along the way.

Before we got to any of that, we asked him one question.

Do you actually need an app right now?

He didn't react the way people sometimes do when their idea gets questioned. He went quiet — genuinely quiet, the particular stillness of someone sitting with a question they haven't let themselves ask. Then he said: I don't know how to. I need help figuring that out.

We ran value chain workshops. Slow, methodical sessions that followed the business from production outward, asking the next question at every step. What surfaced wasn't complicated. Win Thu Aung didn't just lack control over his wholesalers. He didn't know who they were. Not by name. Not by location. An app for managing wholesaler relationships requires, at minimum, knowing which wholesalers exist. That knowledge wasn't there yet. Neither was the team to build it, the process to onboard them, or any of the human infrastructure the technology would need to function.

A different programme would have built the app anyway. Fixed window, predetermined output, technology delivered on schedule. It would have launched into a void — no wholesalers loaded, no area manager hired, no one to populate the map the platform was built to display. Win Thu Aung would have walked away with software he didn't know how to use, built on a foundation that didn't exist, developed through conversations he had no framework for following. The programme would have closed. The app would have sat there.

So we built the foundation first. A sales team, starting with a single area manager, going out by hand to find the wholesalers — meeting them, mapping them, bringing them onto the platform one relationship at a time. We walked Win Thu Aung through the product development process at a pace that matched his experience, not the developer's. Every decision explained. Every tradeoff made visible. For a man who had never spoken to a developer before, that wasn't a courtesy. It was the difference between owning a product and inheriting one.

Win Thu Aung can now open a map and see his network. Where his wholesalers are. What they move. The chain that was a rumour is becoming a fact, one node at a time. And when something needs changing — when the product needs to evolve, when a feature doesn't work the way it should — he knows enough now to say so.

He came in asking for an app. He needed someone to ask whether he was ready for one, and patient enough to wait while he became ready.

The families eating rice with chips at the end of the month don't know any of this. They just know the chips are there.