4 Asian founders on the challenges they faced in their home markets

Photo credit: Max Pixel.

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Being a startup founder has its own challenges—stress and anxiety, limited income, long work hours, and many more. But aside from these, founders also face a lot of market challenges. Here, we look at the difficulties startup founders in Asia have faced or are facing in their home markets.

We asked four founders based in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore to share their experiences.

Editor’s note: Answers have been edited for clarity.

Aakrit Vaish, co-founder and CEO at Haptik (India)

We started out in India only because we were already here and had the local market know-how. But we realized very quickly that the internet and technology growth in this market was going to far outpace any other for the next decade. So, we ended up staying here. But we are now at the stage where we are looking at outside markets.

We faced two major challenges building a startup here in India:

1. Getting the right people to help build advanced technology like conversational AI. While India has no shortage of talented engineers, we found that most of them are either at the larger companies or are working abroad. Getting them to buy the vision of an early-stage startup and being able to afford them had been tough.
2. For the most part, investors in India prefer betting on businesses that have proven themselves in other markets. This has definitely changed considerably over the last couple of years, but it was difficult at first to get them to buy the vision of an India-first conversational AI company.

I’m not big on giving advice, but my key learnings, which I think will hold true over time, are:

1. Any business in any part of the world requires great degree of perseverance. That’s like the biggest factor that determines success.
2. Hire fast, fire faster. Sometimes as founders, we spend too much time looking for the perfect candidate. This takes a very long time and may cause the business to suffer. It’s OK to compromise sometimes.
3. Don’t be negatively affected by glorified funding stories. Everyone has their own battles to fight. It’s best to focus on your own battle.

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