The last words from a dying Vietnamese ecommerce startup

Everyday, there are many people who launch a startup, and there are also people who shut down their companies. The openings are often loud and noisy, drawing so much attention from other people, whereas shutdowns always go in silence and sorrow.

However, the case for Beyeu is a little bit different. Yesterday, November 5th, before de-activating their service, Beyeu’s administrators decided to put their last words on their website – a word of wisdom, a word of warning, and a blessing to other startup fellow men:

Ecommerce requires lots of money. Many companies will decide to stop burning. Good luck to the rest who are still trying

This event really surprised a large part of the startup community in Vietnam, a part for their unexpected ending, but mostly for the things we think and do not say.

Beyeu’s interface after de-activation

This has also sparked a heated debate on a Vietnam startup forum called Launch on why they fall with different persuasive assumptions:

• Obviously, a weak financial base as we can implied from what they confessed. They ran out of money before the business actually showed positive signs.
• A highly-competitive market: The market is always a tough place and ecommerce in Vietnam is even harsher with strong brands such as Lazada, Adayroi, Chotot, and Vatgia.
• Ecommerce is not really their field of expertise. Web Tre Tho is a successful project because of the ample amount of content it provided for women, but it doesn’t mean the users will support and buy products that are promoted via their ecommerce platform.
• Inefficiency in logistics sector contributes to a high operation cost together with a lower profit.
• They are not prepared to scale. Bigger market means bigger rewards but it involves higher risk, and sometimes strategies or techniques for small markets do not work well in a more macro-market.

Whatever the reasons are, we don’t know yet until some of the insiders decide to let us know. However, I bet we all get something from this story for our own career.

Beyeu is an ecommerce website for baby and family products, which is backed by Project Lana. Project Lana claims that they were a leading internet company in Vietnam that owns Webtretho (WTT), the largest Vietnamese community online with 11M unique visitors per month, majority of whom are urban working women. Therefore, their line of products focus mostly on women and children.

Besides Beyeu, Lana has 2 other projects called Olivia – a video creator network and Foreva, which is also an ecommerce website for women intimates and fashion.

Although having WTT as the back bone of the whole company, their business doesn’t seem to run so well as in late 2013, they decided to cancel other projects, cut down on 60 percent human resources to refocus on WTT and Beyeu.

“The market has spoken: people want baby products.” – said David Tran, CEO of the ecommerce group of Project Lana.