Rama Mamuaya, Nguyen Viet Dung & Christian Walter on startups in SEA

Rama Mamuaya of DailySocial; Nguyen Viet Dung of TechDaily; & Christian Walter of BangkokStartup, give a heads-up on the startup landscape in Southeast Asia

(L-R) Rama Mamuaya, Nguyen Viet Dung and Christian Walter

Lately, there’s been a spurt of of startups in Southeast Asia, helped by capital power of big firms from East Asia countries – Japan, China, India and Korea. The space is getting hotter by the day. The founders of current leading tech startup portals in Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand - Rama Mamuaya, CEO, DailySocial.net; Nguyen Viet Dung, Chief Editor, TechDaily.vn; and Christian Walter of BangkokStartup.com, respectively, in a quick interview give a heads-up on the startup landscape in these countries.

Do you have any statistics about startups in your country?

Rama: Not really. No one does. :(

Dung: I don’t have official statistics.

Christian: Personally, I have no statistics. DTAC (one of the biggest telcos) however, estimates that there are about 2,000 startups in Thailand. Bangkok is obviously where all comes together, but you have a very creative community in Chiang Mai and around Universities.

Can you throw some light on some hot trends in the startup space?

Rama: Travel and payment are definitely the two most popular these days.

Dung: After a long period of putting high priority on consumer goods, electronic products, retail, and tangible products, many startups in Vietnam are moving to intangible products and services. Some prominent players that can be quoted include crowdfunding site iG9, travel site Triip.me, MyTour.vn, iVivu.com; or content site Haivl.com and cab.vn.

Christian: We used to have a lot of loyalty apps, but that has faded a bit even though Stamp made it to Echelon. I think that payment and shopping solutions will be quite big. Selling through Facebook is such a big deal here and the shops needs help to deal with these kinds of interactions and payments. That’s a big deal and needs to be fixed. Not everybody has credit cards. If you can fix that problem e-commerce will explode.

What are your country startups’ strengths and weaknesses?

Rama: Strength: resilient. They will do anything to keep their company afloat, typical hustler.

Weakness: most of them are young, first-time entrepreneurs. So, very little experience.

Dung: Weaknesses: I think, they lack the capability to master or they don’t wisely keep an eye on non-tech factors, especially management and finance. Most of Vietnam startups don’t have a good customer-oriented mind, so many products are copy-cat or inspired by international products but they are not well-customized to adapt with the local market.

Strengths: Passionate, self confident. Sometimes they can ignore all financial preparation, personal development, the pressure from society just to follow their startups. Also, many of them are open-minded, ready to change, and most of them have a business-motto of “don’t be evil”, focus on building a good product, and increase service quality to serve the community.

Christian: Strength and weaknesses differ from startup to startup, I think, generally, a bit more knowledge about business models and how to pitch in an engaging way wouldn’t hurt; but to be honest, you can learn that very quickly so I don’t think it’s a particular weakness. Maybe, there is a problem of vision. World domination fantasies are something you rarely see here.

Strength again differs. I think design – if you can find a designer to join your team – is something startups do very well here. When I went to the dtac accelerate pitch, only one app looked a bit so so, the rest were pretty.

What are their most difficult things to overcome?

Rama: Business model. Indonesia’s internet market is still very hard to monetise.

Dung: Defining the purpose of doing startups

Christian: I think, to get early seed funding is very difficult. There are so many potential angel investors here that have so much money to spend, but they don’t have a clue about the startup community or tech startups, however you want to phrase it. And then you have the other side, where knowledge about when to get funding is actually missing, and how to attract it.

How about the trend in next three years?

Rama: In three years, I think the e-commerce business will go upwards, dragging the whole internet industry along. Good times!

Dung: Three years is a bit long period to provide such a prediction in Vietnam, particularly about ICT startups. This period also helps to create a new generation of entrepreneurs who have gained enough knowledge, experience, power and ability to attract funding and talents from other regional and global market to Vietnam to strengthen for the next level of startup revolution.

Christian: I have no idea.

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