Why Subscribe to Out of Scope?
The landscape of consumer startups in Asia is shifting dramatically.
Funding Crunch: Venture capital funding in Asia dropped 40% in Q1 2025, demanding surgical precision in growth strategies, not spray-and-pray tactics.
Regulatory Complexity: Asia’s regulatory environments are increasingly fragmented. What works in one market can break in the next.
Geopolitical Shifts: The escalating US-China trade war is reshaping supply chains and market dynamics fundamentally.
Unique Consumer Behavior: Asian consumer trends are diverging from Western patterns and vary significantly across markets.
In short: yesterday’s playbooks can’t keep up.
Out of Scope is a newsletter for founders and operators to get clarity on what actually works when scaling in Asia. Written by Eugene Cheang—a founder, operator, and advisor to high-growth startups in the region—it shares hard-won lessons, field-tested strategies, and practical systems from people who’ve built through the messiness of scale.
It’s where I question theories, frameworks, and tactics. You can think of it as the kind of sharp, pattern-matching intel you'd trade between operator friends after work, packaged with the structure and data you wish you had earlier.
What You’ll Get
Each week, paid subscribers get a strategy brief focused on scaling smarter in Asia. You will also get full access to the publication archive. Each strategy brief features one of the following:
Deep Dives: Real-world analyses on go-to-market tactics, localization, hiring, growth loops and more.
Contrarian Playbooks: Step-by-step guides to entering new markets, building defensibility, and avoiding costly mistakes.
Candid Interviews: Honest conversations with operators who’ve successfully scaled across Southeast Asia, India, China, and beyond.
Practical Tools: Immediate takeaways, checklists, and actionable tactics you can apply this week.
Free subscribers get a weekly digest of micro-tactics and macro-shifts in Asia’s consumer market.
Author’s Note
Out of Scope started out of frustration.
After years inside fast-scaling companies, I was less struck by the complexity of the work than by how little organizations paused to learn from it. Projects would end, and teams would lunge into the next challenge. Rarely did anyone stop to ask: What actually worked? What failed? And why did an unexpected factor make all the difference?
In most cases, no one captures the answers. Progress is individual, not institutional—driven by lone operators who learn to navigate chaos, not by shared lessons that raise the floor for everyone else.
As an operator, looking outward didn’t help much either. Most resources for operators were either too polished to be useful or too generic to work in Asia. I wasn’t looking for theory. I needed visibility into real decisions: the tradeoffs, the decision trees, the gritty, unsexy systems holding it all together. I wanted to understand what “good” actually looked like inside a messy, fast-growing company. I was looking for thinking clarity.
So I started taking notes—not as advice, but as field documentation: experiments we tried, what broke, and what eventually worked. Because when you're deep in operations, you don’t need frameworks. You need reference points. You need to see how someone else navigated the precise problem you’re facing now.
Over time, those notes expanded beyond my own experiences, incorporating insights from operators tackling similar challenges across Asian markets. What began as personal records evolved into this newsletter: an insider’s guide to scaling startups, rich with situational detail most playbooks overlook.
This is the resource I wish I'd had—and now it’s yours.
