Nur Ahmad Faiz is a man on a Misi

Nur Ahmad Faiz Azmi spent about a month teaching himself how to build a delivery app. Getting someone to actually use it took considerably longer.

The idea for Misi Delivery took shape during the pandemic, when the former clothing-printing entrepreneur began paying closer attention to the complaints he was hearing from food delivery riders and merchants.

Riders spoke about low pay and the risks of the job, while food sellers were concerned about commissions eating into their earnings.

“During Covid-19, I observed that the only form of business that could survive was delivery. At the same time, I heard many complaints from riders about low pay, which was sometimes not commensurate with the work involved, on top of the various safety risks they faced,” he told Bernama.

“Then I learnt that merchants also had to pay high commission rates to service providers, which reduced their profits. All this motivated me to develop my app.”

The problem? Faiz had never built an app before.

An SPM holder who had previously spent two years running a clothing-printing business, he turned to the internet to teach himself what he needed to know. YouTube became part of the learning process, along with a platform that allows users to build applications without conventional coding.

The learning curve was not cheap. Faiz invested about RM30,000 of his own money, generated from his printing business. Mistakes during development pushed the cost higher.

“But that is part of the learning process. I kept trying different approaches and eventually succeeded.”

While building the app took about a month, convincing people to use it took eight. Faiz had assumed the social media following he had built through his clothing business would translate easily into users for his new venture – but the response was far slower than expected.

When the first order finally came through in Puncak Alam, Faiz delivered it himself. Beyond the sale, the moment gave him something more important: small proof that the system could work.

Slowly but surely, orders gradually increased and the service expanded beyond Puncak Alam into areas including Meru, Pulau Indah and Klang.

Nearly five years on, Faiz says the platform has around 200,000 registered vendors and some 40,000 riders across several states, including the Klang Valley, Perlis, Perak and Labuan.

His business model differs from some larger delivery platforms in one key respect: merchants are not charged a commission on each order, while riders are paid according to distance travelled. Customers instead pay a service fee when placing an order through the app.

“Through Misi, merchants can maintain the same prices as those offered at their premises and retain the full amount from their sales, while food delivery riders receive a minimum payment of RM5 for 5km, with the rate increasing according to the distance travelled,” he explained.

For Faiz, some of the most satisfying signs of growth are less about overall sales figures than seeing individual vendors build a steady stream of orders.

During a visit to Labuan, he met a nasi katok seller who told him the stall was receiving more than 3,000 orders a month through the app. “I was surprised,” Faiz said. “That is an extraordinary achievement.”

The transition from printing T-shirts to running a digital delivery platform also meant entering an industry he barely knew. That unfamiliarity attracted scepticism, particularly when he was trying to establish a new platform alongside much larger names in the sector.

But rather than abandon the idea, Faiz kept adjusting the service and expanding its reach as users slowly came on board.

Today, a team of 14 helps manage the operation. The platform has also begun extending beyond food delivery into other areas, including services offered by tradespeople such as electricians, plumbers and air-conditioning installers.

For Faiz, the most formative part of the journey may still be those first eight quiet months, when the app existed but almost nobody seemed interested.

This taught him that learning how to build something was only the beginning; the harder part was earning enough trust for somebody to click “order” for the first time.

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