Startup advice young Asian entrepreneurs need to hear

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I’m Alan ,  a Vietnamese-American entrepreneur and the founder of a software company called CrewFire ,  a word-of-mouth marketing platform for businesses. We bootstrapped and are profitable, with a small team of six full-time and three part-time members.

Team CrewFire: Minh Tran, Vuong Nguyen, Oscar Jesionek, Thang Vo Thanh, Alan VanToai, Mike McCabe (missing Susheel Thakur, Ngan Nguyen, Thuan Nguyen).

We’ve benefited greatly from a few pieces of non-traditional startup advice from entrepreneurs who came before us, notably DHH and Jason Fried of Basecamp/37 Signals. Thanks to these guys and the others, their advice has found its way into the conversation in Western startup and tech communities.

But in my three years living in Vietnam, I’ve noticed that such wisdom is missing in the conversations in the Asian startup and tech communities, a disservice to the next generation of young, hopeful startup founders in the region.

Indeed, this post could just as well address any hopeful entrepreneur ( the lessons are universally applicable ). But  I just want to speak to young Asian entrepreneurs in particular, since nobody else in Asia seems to be talking about this stuff yet.

That’s a glaring and unfortunate omission, in my opinion, so let’s do this.

1. Build a product people pay for

Brilliant, right? This idea is so simple it almost feels silly saying it.

But in my experience engaging with local startups, universities, code schools, and accelerators in Vietnam, I’ve encountered many young entrepreneurs with ideas for startups that don’t follow this simple rule.

Examples of startup ideas that aren’t “products people pay for” include marketplaces (connect buyers and sellers of X, Airbnb for Y, Uber for Z, etc.), social networks, games, and any idea where the business model involves ads.

The reason these types of startup ideas are popular is obvious: most of the big, multi-billion-dollar unicorns of our time fall into these categories (Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Uber, and Snapchat). In Vietnam in particular, the runaway success of Flappy Bird has lured many young developers to the siren call of mobile games. These hits dominate the headlines, our screens, and our mindshare, so it’s only natural that young entrepreneurs take stock of the products they see, use, and hear about daily and think of similar ideas.

While these types of businesses can clearly grow massively, the problem is that, ironically, it’s harder to build sustainable, profitable businesses with them.

With marketplaces, your business makes money by taking a small percentage of every transaction or by charging listing or advertising fees to sellers. The big challenge with marketplaces, then, is that you need to facilitate a huge number of transactions before your small percentage adds up to meaningful revenue for your business. So, marketplaces need to reach scale (a hard problem in itself) just to have any chance of working. And then, even at scale, you might realize you can’t make the business work.

2. You don’t have to raise money (and you probably shouldn’t)

3. Don’t stress yourself out

Living a good life