Kleii, A Vietnamese Cloud Service Goes Global

I recently sat down with Nguyen Tuan Son, co-founder and CEO of Kleii, a cloud storage service that launched just six months ago. He was proud to announce that within that time period, Kleii has already amassed 320,000 new users worldwide. This indicates a particularly fast growth rate as compared to Dropbox, which grew to four million users in 2010 in the two years since its launch in 2008. Today, Dropbox has over 100 million users but the global market is getting crowded with other consumer-oriented cloud services like Google Drive, SugarSync, iCloud, Box, Wuala, TeamDrive, and many more. Kleii is a Vietnam’s answer to this wave of services.

At Kleii’s current growth rate, it is getting five to six thousands sign-ups on average per day and is handling 4–5 terabytes of data per day. The basic freemium account gives 2GB, after which users will have the option to expand their online storage space.

Tell me a little bit about your team.

Nguyen: Most of us started working together at Kusto, an investment and management solutions company. Our current CFO, Yerlan Tasbulatov, was great with finances and I had an idea to come together to do cloud services. Most of our team came together from Kusto and we worked well together. In total, there’s now 11 of us.

Why cloud services?

Nguyen (pictured): I think cloud services are still a growing global trend that will greatly impact our lives in the future. We wanted to compete globally because I think there’s still a lot of space for this market to grow, and although Dropbox has been dominant worldwide, there’s still a lot of space. Dropbox penetration in Vietnam is still low thus the Vietnamese market is still new to the idea of cloud services. In fact, for many Vietnamese users, we are their first encounter with a cloud service, so we’ve had the privilege of educating our users.

How did you get to 320,000 users in just six months?

Nguyen: We didn’t spend any money on advertising or sales. In fact, most of the users that we got were totally unexpected. We spent most of our time on viral marketing. The drawback is that we have no idea where our users are coming from – by word of mouth or by our social media posts, we don’t know. Vietnam comprises 60 percent of our users but we’ve experienced a large growth in Japanese users and one of the people on our team had to translate our service in Japanese. It’s a good problem.

Why haven’t you moved into cloud services for businesses, where the money supposedly is?

Nguyen: First, there is a big market for consumers. Second, we wanted to solidify our brand name first. Third, our dream for Kleii is to be the network of content for families. We want to make it easy for our users to do personal streaming and personal multimedia. After we’re established in the core of what we want to do, we may look into business. But now we’re just looking at being the center of the families digital life. Soon, we’ll be looking at releasing a digital content store. Our dream is that in five to ten years, everything in your digital life can happen and be stored on Kleii.

Are you doing anything special for the Vietnamese market?