AirAsia, from an airline to a super app

Few companies try to change what they are while they are still growing. AirAsia did it during a crisis, which made the attempt either brave or desperate, depending on who you ask.

When flights stopped in 2020, the company had something most airlines do not: tens of millions of customers who had downloaded its app and trusted it with their card details. The question was whether that relationship could survive without the planes.

The bet

The idea was simple to say and hard to do: turn millions of passengers who opened the app twice a year into customers who opened it every week, for food, payments and rides.

On paper it made sense. The hardest part of building a super app is getting people to install it and add a card. AirAsia had already done that. Everything else, the thinking went, was just adding services.

What worked and what did not

Some of it worked. Payments found real use, especially among travelers who already used the app abroad. Loyalty points became a currency people actually spent.

Other parts stalled against competitors who had done nothing else for years. Food delivery, in particular, is a logistics business with thin margins, and the incumbents had spent a decade building fleets and restaurant relationships.

Downloads are permission to ask for attention. They are not attention.

The second act

As travel came back, the company leaned back toward what it was good at. The app is still broader than an airline app, but flights are once again the reason most people open it. That is not a failure. It is a more honest version of the original idea.

The useful question for the rest of us is not whether the super app succeeded. It is what would have to be true for your own customers to come back weekly, and whether you are honest about the answer.

A few ways to test it:

• List the reasons a customer would open your product in a normal week. If the list is empty, frequency is not your strategy.

• Ask which of your services a specialist competitor does better, and how long it would take you to catch up.

• Look for the one adjacent need your customers already bring to you. Start there, not with ten.