My boring start-up story
After graduated from college in 2001, I joined the Viet Nam R&D team of a Singapore start-up that built one of the world’s first hand-held mobile storage device/media player/NAS as an R&D engineer. “Start-up” was not that popular back in 2001, especially in Viet Nam, but I didn’t care much about anything else back then. I just liked the team because we could play Warcraft II together after work, plus working on Linux kernel and Windows Driver Model (WDM) sounded cool (the sound was cool, but the real “working” part was definitely not, trust me).
After it was obvious that the “all-in-one” product was not gonna be a hit, I went to the US for a post-graduate degree and worked there for quite a long time before returning to Viet Nam in 2011.
We started S3 in 2012 because we saw so many untapped potentials in traditional trades in Viet Nam (and hopefully, in other developing countries in the region). But we didn’t know that these potentials were there for a reason. Or many reasons. The market was highly fragmented. Business owners were very “low-tech”, some never used a computer before thus was very hesitated to move their operation from pen/paper to the “cloud”. The job of our salespeople were not simply selling software subscriptions. We were selling trust. In some cases, we helped our customers bought their first computer then showed them how to use “the mouse” for the first time. In many cases, we introduced the “internet” to them: the web site where you can listen to music, the web site where you can watch Korean soap series…
There was this one day, we received a call from a lady who said she was in the same business line as one of our customers for many years, and they knew the routines of each other so well that she noticed the changes:
Now they can sleep until 5:30 AM, and have time for a stroll after dinner at 7PM. I don’t know what you did for them, but I want to be able to do the same thing.
We had our ups and downs. We still do. As a B2B “software” (we don’t even call our product an application, or a solution — that’s just too complicated for our customers), it took time for us to find product market fit, and took even longer time to grow. What we are doing was not sexy, nor fancy and it was hard to find investors who share our values. The emotional roller-coaster was sometimes (ok, many times) unbearable. Yet the moment we see how our product actual makes the lives of our customers better, that’s worth everything.
From the Asian point of view of my family, friends and colleagues, it was unexplainable why I left a stable corporate job in the US for a bumpy, survive-another-day start-up life in Viet Nam and sometimes, I didn’t know why either. I still wanted to make a lot of money and I knew for a fact that doing start-up was definitely not the fastest (or safest) way to being rich. But it was simply an urge. I just knew that I had to do something in Viet Nam, something that created real values, and made me feel good every time I talk about it.
And as luck would have it, I’m still doing just that. Hopefully, the money will come. Or not. But as I once read somewhere:
I do not regret the things I have done, but those I did not do.
