When Evan Wong first started Checkbox, he didn’t have a little black book of corporate connections. Just a strong gut feeling that business software was too hard for the people who needed it most.
Jump ahead a few years and Checkbox is now a multi-award-winning platform used by firms like Deloitte, LexisNexis, and Telstra.
It’s helping professionals ditch email chains and Excel trackers by building their own internal tools – apps they create themselves with drag-and-drop blocks instead of lines of code.
But the road to get there was anything but simple.
The itch that wouldn’t go away
Evan Wong started his first business, Hero Education, when he was just 17. It was a tutoring service for high school students that he built while still in his first year at uni.
While running that business, he kept hitting the same wall: legal and compliance processes were slow and confusing. He’d spend hours trying to make sense of them and still feel stuck.
What made it worse was knowing he couldn’t fix the problem himself, because he didn’t know how to code.
“I hated that I couldn’t code,” he says. That frustration planted a seed that became the beginning of Checkbox.
Evan soon asked his good friend James Han to join him, and the pair, together with co-founder Paul Wenck, built Checkbox to give people the tools to create their own software, without writing a single line of code.
“We didn’t even have a product”
Like many startups, Checkbox didn’t launch with a polished app. In fact, there wasn’t even a prototype when they began reaching out to potential customers.
“People think you need to find the right idea before you launch a startup,” Evan said. “But it’s through a process of speaking with customers and understanding the market that an idea becomes a viable business.”
So Evan sent one email after another, asking professionals in law, finance and compliance to give him a moment of time to ask questions and get advice.
He’d take the meeting, listen closely, tweak the product idea, and, quickly, build with the team toward a solution.
When the first minimum viable product was ready, those early contacts were already invested in the outcome, and they became Checkbox’s first major leads.
Checkbox gives power back to the professional
Checkbox is a tool that lets professionals turn their slowest processes into slick, clickable workflows, without needing a developer.
That means a junior lawyer can build a self-serve tool or a legal HR lead can set up a digital onboarding form that kicks off an approval chain automatically, almost like magic. This has been a huge advantage for their customers:
“The Checkbox platform is very easy to use. It allows you to rapidly prototype and deliver value quickly to clients,” said Peter Campbell from Hall & Wilcox, one of Checkbox’s early enterprise clients.
Checkbox now supports teams in legal, risk, HR, procurement, tax, compliance – you name it.
The power of people
From day one, Evan believed that the people doing the work should have the power to control how it gets done. That idea didn’t just shape the product, it shaped the company too.
“People are the most important asset in a company. It is the one area where you can’t afford to cut costs, even in a startup,” says Evan.
But building a great team wasn’t easy.
*“Out of all the challenges we have faced, finding the right people has been the toughest,” *Evan admitted. “As soon as the business gets to a certain level you can't do it alone anymore, no matter how brilliant you are or how hard you work.”
He’s also brutally honest about the challenges they faced and the missteps they made along the way.
“We started off hiring through our personal networks, but we didn't know the right people,” he said. “Then we tried out some of the newer recruitment platforms. Again the quality wasn't quite there.”
It took time, but they eventually found their rhythm: working closely with a small group of trusted recruiters who genuinely understood their business.
“Using multiple recruiters was probably our greatest recruiting flaw when we started, as recruiters will save the best talent for the clients they have the strongest relationships with.”
That same belief shaped how Evan thinks about retention. Hiring is just the beginning. Keeping great people is the real work.
“How expensive was it to get them into the business? How much time did you have to spend convincing them to join? How much have you invested in them? Then why aren't you figuring out ways to make the person want to stay?”
What founders can learn from Checkbox
Evan Wong has plenty of advice for fellow entrepreneurs, but it starts with a mindset shift.
“If you want to sell your product you first need to build the right relationships,” he says.
“When you start out, you can't make the sale anyway because the product isn't there. The way to frame your approach is to always ask for advice and feedback. People are happy to help you out, especially if your product is in their space.”
It’s a lesson that helped Checkbox build early traction and one that still holds true today. Evan also cautions founders not to get carried away by corporate excitement, particularly in emerging technology.
*“There is a lot of buzz and excitement around startups and corporates are always willing to have discussions. But you must cut through that and understand quickly who your real customers are.” *
“The real customers are people who treat working with startups like a project implementation and have the intention of purchasing.”
When it comes to hiring, Evan’s advice is clear:
“You need to be very, very precious about who you bring into your team. When you are a startup every new addition changes the dynamic and culture, way more dramatically than it does at a larger company.”
Fight the fear and do it anyway
Even with early clients, Evan notes that it can still feel like success comes all at once:
“No one knew about us until we won Regtech of the Year at the 2017 Fintech Awards,” he reflects.
That win, he says, changed everything. A few months later, they took out the Westpac Innovation Challenge.
“Winning the challenge gave us at Checkbox even greater confidence that what we are building will improve the way we deal with regulation on a global level,” Evan said.
Even as Checkbox has grown into a national player, its roots in Australia’s startup local ecosystem remain strong. Evan was an early participant at Stone & Chalk events, pitching in front of a community that helped shape the company’s path.
That blend of big vision and grounded action runs throughout the Checkbox story. From their early days cold emailing execs, they didn’t wait to be discovered, they made themselves impossible to ignore.
And it’s paid off. Both Evan and co-founder James Han were named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. But for Evan, success doesn’t mean standing still.
“If you understand what you suck at, you can fix it,” Evan says. “That’s how you grow.”
Checkbox is looking ahead to the future
Checkbox started with a simple idea: what if everyday businesspeople could build their own software with no coding required?
Today, that idea is powering some of Australia’s biggest companies including Australia’s Big 4 accounting firms, Big 6 law firms and Big 4 banks.
“Right now is about laying the right foundations for scalable growth,” says Evan.
That growth is taking them beyond Australia. Checkbox is expanding across Southeast Asia, with major projects already underway.
It’s a fast-growing region, and the team sees a huge opportunity to bring their no-code platform to businesses that need smarter tools.
Evan’s long-term goal is to make Checkbox a household name in the business world. He wants it to become as common and easy to use as PowerPoint or Microsoft Word, a tool anyone can pick up to solve problems, streamline work, and build smart systems on their own.
It’s a bold vision, but it’s grounded in the same belief that sparked the company in the first place: Software shouldn’t be limited to people who can code; it should be available to everyone.
Final thoughts
For a company born out of frustration, Checkbox has become something far more powerful: a platform for possibility.
One that’s quietly transforming how work gets done. We’re looking forward to seeing what successes are in their future next.
