Late November 2009
It was soon time to bid adieu to this lovely country. Our careers have taken us to many countries from the developed world and we always took joy in imbibing different cultures. But somehow Vietnam was more special. This country where basic communication was impossible without an interpreter and with its hot and sticky climes won our hearts and made us many lasting friends.
We never could put a finger on why it was so endearing.Was it the simple and trusting Vietnamese? Was it the hospitality? Was it because of the sheer intensity of their positive energy? Or was it their complete lack of any hangups or pretences? I think it was a combination of all the above points.
Our initial days in Hanoi were spent in a cocoon of splendor and luxury that was completely insulated from the real Vietnam. This paradise comprised 5 star living quarters, international brands for shopping, English speaking liveried staff and service of any kind just a phone call away. When we decided to stake out on our own we took a gargantuan leap to a different world comprising an incomprehensible staccato of Northern Vietnamese slang, crowded wet markets smelling of fresh meat and vegetables, a unique Vietnamese motorcycle transportation service called XE OM, ‘Made in Vietnam’ shops and so much more.
Our Vietnamese friends took it upon themselves to make this transition as easy as possible for us. They helped us find an airy and spacious house and made us flash cards containing practical phrases in Vietnamese to use in day to day life. With their help and some from ‘Google Translate’ we got by... and then we fell in love with this beautiful land
Everday I went for long walks pushing my daughter in the pram through our residential complex only to be stopped every few yards by friendly mothers and grandmothers, minding their playing children, wanting to admire my baby daughter. Somehow we pantomined our way through the story of my origins, my liking for Vietnam and my daughter’s accomplishments. I went for jogs around the lake in the green and airy community park. I left intructions for my nanny through google translate which was quite unnecessary as she always second guessed me. We sipped ca cao and cà phê in the coffee shops.
Our stint in Vietnam finally came to an end when my husband took up a job in a different country. I moved to India from where I continued to work on analyzeVietnam.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Monday, June 28, 2010
Maps
November 2009
The challenge was to make a data and number driven website accessible to the lay person. Displaying data in the context of its location using visually appealing and interactive maps was one of the many value additions that we provided to make analyzeVietnam more user friendly.
One would think that sourcing and displaying a map is easy enough. However we soon found that there were many versions of the Vietnam map available. Although all the maps were “S” shaped many had inaccurate borders and most came minus a few islands. Moreover none of the publicly available satellite images were detailed enough. They just gave a high level view of Vietnam with its provinces.
A Vietnamese state owned enterprise came to our rescue and was willing to sell us accurate and very detailed maps making it possible to drill down to the districts, showing major roadways and landmarks. Soon we had a CD with 64 high resolution vector images – a map for Vietnam and each of its provinces.
The next step was to consolidate information on each province and each district of Vietnam to be displayed against each map. All this had to be in English and Vietnamese. Uyen undertook this arduous exercise
Threshold did a splendid job of making the maps easy and quick to download, zoomable numerous times, and pannable to any district. Thanks to Uyen’s back breaking effort against each map analyzeVietnam now contains detailed information on topography, economy, infrastructure and business climate. Each province is rated based on how developed and business friendly it is.
And thus with the maps module analyzeVietnam sought to become a universal medium for communication, easily understood by all.
It is said that maps are much more than an aid to navigation; they are, in effect, the key to empire, the way to wealth. How True!
The challenge was to make a data and number driven website accessible to the lay person. Displaying data in the context of its location using visually appealing and interactive maps was one of the many value additions that we provided to make analyzeVietnam more user friendly.
One would think that sourcing and displaying a map is easy enough. However we soon found that there were many versions of the Vietnam map available. Although all the maps were “S” shaped many had inaccurate borders and most came minus a few islands. Moreover none of the publicly available satellite images were detailed enough. They just gave a high level view of Vietnam with its provinces.
A Vietnamese state owned enterprise came to our rescue and was willing to sell us accurate and very detailed maps making it possible to drill down to the districts, showing major roadways and landmarks. Soon we had a CD with 64 high resolution vector images – a map for Vietnam and each of its provinces.
The next step was to consolidate information on each province and each district of Vietnam to be displayed against each map. All this had to be in English and Vietnamese. Uyen undertook this arduous exercise
Threshold did a splendid job of making the maps easy and quick to download, zoomable numerous times, and pannable to any district. Thanks to Uyen’s back breaking effort against each map analyzeVietnam now contains detailed information on topography, economy, infrastructure and business climate. Each province is rated based on how developed and business friendly it is.
And thus with the maps module analyzeVietnam sought to become a universal medium for communication, easily understood by all.
It is said that maps are much more than an aid to navigation; they are, in effect, the key to empire, the way to wealth. How True!
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Selecting our IT Partner
Early November 2009
If content is king then the IT partner is the foot soldier without whom the kingdom would collapse. The quality of the IT partner can make or break a website. I am aware of so many horror stories where the IT vendor would drag completion endlessly making you a secure income base for himself and making himself a drain in your pocket. IT companies are notorious for holding a revolver to your head and refusing to take on even the slightest change without a substantial fee.
We were looking for an IT company with not only the right capability but also someone who was agile and could churn out results for review on a day to day basis. I sent out emails to all our contacts and alumni groups asking for a good IT vendor. We were thrilled to find a plethora of recommendations. We tediously sieved through them and there were atleast 10 companies that seemed to fit the bill. After extracting a non-disclosure agreement from the candidate companies we sent them the RFP along with screenshots and sample data. We also scheduled calls with each company, did background checks and took referrals from their clients.
We finally zeroed in on Threshold – a small yet nimble company situated in the back alleys of Srinagar Colony, Hyderabad. We found out that Threshold had worked well with other start-ups and their proximity to our home in Hyderabad, to where I soon moved, was a very compelling factor. Although technology famously breaks-down all barriers of distance and remoteness I am a strong advocate of old fashioned face to face dialogue.
analyzeVietnam, with its complex data joins, rich and interactive charts and maps and multi-language support, would have posed a challenge to any software developer. Threshold gave it their best shot. They were honest and took feedback and criticism in the right spirit. We rode over many frustrating moments and we came up against many seemingly insurmountable road blocks. But together we ploughed along and saw through the completion of analyzeVietnam in time and on budget.
If content is king then the IT partner is the foot soldier without whom the kingdom would collapse. The quality of the IT partner can make or break a website. I am aware of so many horror stories where the IT vendor would drag completion endlessly making you a secure income base for himself and making himself a drain in your pocket. IT companies are notorious for holding a revolver to your head and refusing to take on even the slightest change without a substantial fee.
We were looking for an IT company with not only the right capability but also someone who was agile and could churn out results for review on a day to day basis. I sent out emails to all our contacts and alumni groups asking for a good IT vendor. We were thrilled to find a plethora of recommendations. We tediously sieved through them and there were atleast 10 companies that seemed to fit the bill. After extracting a non-disclosure agreement from the candidate companies we sent them the RFP along with screenshots and sample data. We also scheduled calls with each company, did background checks and took referrals from their clients.
We finally zeroed in on Threshold – a small yet nimble company situated in the back alleys of Srinagar Colony, Hyderabad. We found out that Threshold had worked well with other start-ups and their proximity to our home in Hyderabad, to where I soon moved, was a very compelling factor. Although technology famously breaks-down all barriers of distance and remoteness I am a strong advocate of old fashioned face to face dialogue.
analyzeVietnam, with its complex data joins, rich and interactive charts and maps and multi-language support, would have posed a challenge to any software developer. Threshold gave it their best shot. They were honest and took feedback and criticism in the right spirit. We rode over many frustrating moments and we came up against many seemingly insurmountable road blocks. But together we ploughed along and saw through the completion of analyzeVietnam in time and on budget.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Sourcing the Data
Early November 2009
Content is King
We all agreed that the real intellectual property of analyzeVietnam would be the content. Businesses, strategists, marketing managers and B-Schools would want to use analyzeVietnam essentially for the insights brought forth by its ‘content’.
The checklist of items to address were as follows:
- What databases are currently available on Vietnam?
- What level of detail do they provide?
- How was the data collected by these databases?Are these sources reliable?
- Is the data across these databases consistent?
- Which of these are free and which paid? What are the copyrights details?
We spent the first few days scouring all the available databases on Vietnam. We soon found that almost all the international databases provided macro level data, no where near the level of granularity that we were looking for. The only database that had anything close was the statistics department of the Vietnamese Government – GSO, Vietnam. This office conducted monthly surveys of a wide range of data and a detailed census once every 5 years.
However this data again suffered from some of the problems that we were trying to overcome – it was disjointed making it impossible to run even slightly complex queries. We decided that GSO, Vietnam woud be our starting point and we would work with them to plug the holes.
Our next step was to create a high level datastructure which would form the basis of the analyses that we wanted to let the user perform. In order to make analyzeVietnam really flexible this data structure would have to facilitate conditional data fetches using all possible permutations and combinations of the various data parameters. Once we had our database design pasted on the wall we started filling it with the available data. The gaping holes were immediately apparent.
It was time to approach GSO. Over the next few months we worked with statisticians and made sure that the data added up – top down and bottom up and that this data was consistent with those published by international bodies.
While the data from GSO formed the crux of our website you will find in analyzeVietnam a rich collection of data from other sources as well as interesting articles, photographs and business templates
Content is King
We all agreed that the real intellectual property of analyzeVietnam would be the content. Businesses, strategists, marketing managers and B-Schools would want to use analyzeVietnam essentially for the insights brought forth by its ‘content’.
The checklist of items to address were as follows:
- What databases are currently available on Vietnam?
- What level of detail do they provide?
- How was the data collected by these databases?Are these sources reliable?
- Is the data across these databases consistent?
- Which of these are free and which paid? What are the copyrights details?
We spent the first few days scouring all the available databases on Vietnam. We soon found that almost all the international databases provided macro level data, no where near the level of granularity that we were looking for. The only database that had anything close was the statistics department of the Vietnamese Government – GSO, Vietnam. This office conducted monthly surveys of a wide range of data and a detailed census once every 5 years.
However this data again suffered from some of the problems that we were trying to overcome – it was disjointed making it impossible to run even slightly complex queries. We decided that GSO, Vietnam woud be our starting point and we would work with them to plug the holes.
Our next step was to create a high level datastructure which would form the basis of the analyses that we wanted to let the user perform. In order to make analyzeVietnam really flexible this data structure would have to facilitate conditional data fetches using all possible permutations and combinations of the various data parameters. Once we had our database design pasted on the wall we started filling it with the available data. The gaping holes were immediately apparent.
It was time to approach GSO. Over the next few months we worked with statisticians and made sure that the data added up – top down and bottom up and that this data was consistent with those published by international bodies.
While the data from GSO formed the crux of our website you will find in analyzeVietnam a rich collection of data from other sources as well as interesting articles, photographs and business templates
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Building the Prototype
From concept to something more concrete
Tired of the inadequacy of wire frames on MS excel and PowerPoint we finally resorted to hiring a freelance Vietnamese software developer to translate the web-pages in our mind into a HTML prototype. In retrospect dealing with our prototyper was one of the most hilarious parts of developing analyzeVietnam.
Like a lot of industrious and enterprising Vietnamese our prototyper and his wife ran a small IT shop in the night in addition to a regular salaried day job. The wife managed the finances of their side business and she dispatched her husband to collect the specifications during lunch and coffee breaks.
And again like most Vietnamese our prototyper spoke very little English. Uyen graciously agreed to serve as the interpreter. Needless to say a lot was lost in translation during our hurried sessions at Uyen’s office and the result was a prototype that was quite unreadable with typos and spelling mistakes.
We were bursting with ideas. We wanted Matrix movie style raining numbers with charts and a globe for the central banner and an eye-catching green yellow combination for our theme. Our prototyper tried his best to accommodate most of our creative surges but the result was unfortunately mediocre and not very pleasing to the eye.
As you can see the compact analyzeVietnam of today with its mellow blue and white theme is a far cry from the above description- something that we arrived at after several iterations carried out almost till the time of launch. But what the Vietnamese built for us was the first physical manifestation of a nebulous concept in 3 peoples’ minds. This simple HTML prototype served as the basis of the multi-faceted and user friendly analyzeVietnam of today.
Tired of the inadequacy of wire frames on MS excel and PowerPoint we finally resorted to hiring a freelance Vietnamese software developer to translate the web-pages in our mind into a HTML prototype. In retrospect dealing with our prototyper was one of the most hilarious parts of developing analyzeVietnam.
Like a lot of industrious and enterprising Vietnamese our prototyper and his wife ran a small IT shop in the night in addition to a regular salaried day job. The wife managed the finances of their side business and she dispatched her husband to collect the specifications during lunch and coffee breaks.
And again like most Vietnamese our prototyper spoke very little English. Uyen graciously agreed to serve as the interpreter. Needless to say a lot was lost in translation during our hurried sessions at Uyen’s office and the result was a prototype that was quite unreadable with typos and spelling mistakes.
We were bursting with ideas. We wanted Matrix movie style raining numbers with charts and a globe for the central banner and an eye-catching green yellow combination for our theme. Our prototyper tried his best to accommodate most of our creative surges but the result was unfortunately mediocre and not very pleasing to the eye.
As you can see the compact analyzeVietnam of today with its mellow blue and white theme is a far cry from the above description- something that we arrived at after several iterations carried out almost till the time of launch. But what the Vietnamese built for us was the first physical manifestation of a nebulous concept in 3 peoples’ minds. This simple HTML prototype served as the basis of the multi-faceted and user friendly analyzeVietnam of today.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Belief, Commitment and Hardwork
October 2009
“Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans”- Peter Drucker
We asked ourselves many times – What is the guarantee of success? None. Did we have the capabilty? Likely. Was our idea good enough? Maybe.
But then I always believe that the more important ingredient for success is the belief that we could do it. With this belief we could acquire the capabilty to do it even if we did not have it in the beginning, and we could overcome any obstacle to make the idea work. And unless we act with this belief at every step the chances of failure are very high.
I had belief in analyzeVietnam and the intent to give it my best shot, yet, how could I forget my biggest distraction – our one year old daughter Aabha. Aabha was the new found joy of our lives and she did not tire from offering me new and delightful challenges everyday. My latest challenge was to find the necessary time and energy required for a start-up and also satisfy my infant’s ever growing needs. Isn’t that the clichéd dilemma of every working mother?
So it turned out that most of my slog hours came after Aabha’s bedtime when I burnt the candle till late in the night. As analyzeVietnam development progressed my nights of hard labour only became longer and longer. I would go to bed exhausted only to be awakened in a few hours by my daughter crying for her milk and a diaper change. analyzeVietnam soon turned out to be a leech that sucked every spare moment and energy from Uyen and me. But the rush of adrenalin for analyzeVietnam and our commitment to the business compelled us to put in the hard work and to make the small sacrifices.
“The heights by great men reached and kept, were not attained by sudden flight, but they while their companions slept, were toiling upwards in the night” – analyzeVietnam would be a true test of H W Longfellow’s words.
“Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans”- Peter Drucker
We asked ourselves many times – What is the guarantee of success? None. Did we have the capabilty? Likely. Was our idea good enough? Maybe.
But then I always believe that the more important ingredient for success is the belief that we could do it. With this belief we could acquire the capabilty to do it even if we did not have it in the beginning, and we could overcome any obstacle to make the idea work. And unless we act with this belief at every step the chances of failure are very high.
I had belief in analyzeVietnam and the intent to give it my best shot, yet, how could I forget my biggest distraction – our one year old daughter Aabha. Aabha was the new found joy of our lives and she did not tire from offering me new and delightful challenges everyday. My latest challenge was to find the necessary time and energy required for a start-up and also satisfy my infant’s ever growing needs. Isn’t that the clichéd dilemma of every working mother?
So it turned out that most of my slog hours came after Aabha’s bedtime when I burnt the candle till late in the night. As analyzeVietnam development progressed my nights of hard labour only became longer and longer. I would go to bed exhausted only to be awakened in a few hours by my daughter crying for her milk and a diaper change. analyzeVietnam soon turned out to be a leech that sucked every spare moment and energy from Uyen and me. But the rush of adrenalin for analyzeVietnam and our commitment to the business compelled us to put in the hard work and to make the small sacrifices.
“The heights by great men reached and kept, were not attained by sudden flight, but they while their companions slept, were toiling upwards in the night” – analyzeVietnam would be a true test of H W Longfellow’s words.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Project Inception
Early October 2009
Now that we had decided on the business it was time to roll up our sleeves and get to work. We embarked on this venture pumped up with an enthusiasm that comes only from working for oneself, with ones own skin in the game and for a cause that we were passionate about. Easily we slid into the roles that we had carefully honed over years of work experience.
My husband, Sandilya Vadapalli laid out the vision and roadmap and was not going to be involved in day to day activity going forward; Uyen Dinh Thi To who brought an indepth understanding of the Vietnamese market drew up the business plan and I, Aarti Ashok took responsibility for all operational aspects. Our trump card was Uyen’s husband, Nghia, who is one of the earliest internet entrepreneurs of Vietnam. He would help grow analyzeVietnam and realize its potential.
The initial days comprised endless checklists, white boards and post-its. There were so many decisions to make – “What will be the content of our website? Who will buy it? Where should we outsource the software development? From where and how do we source our data?”... And then there were even more basic ones - “How do we structure the business? What is our budget and timeline? Given our various commitments and constraints how do we work together?”
As you can imagine business was thriving in the coffee shop. Finally most of our answers were either plastered on the wall of our meeting room or were bulleted out on the white board.
We would build the prototype in Vietnam but would outsource the actual software development to India. We had the names and contacts of the various sources for the data and maps. We worked through long afternoons and late nights on templates and frameworks.
And so.. analyzeVietnam was officially kicked off and we drank one more cup of “cà phê” to that.
Now that we had decided on the business it was time to roll up our sleeves and get to work. We embarked on this venture pumped up with an enthusiasm that comes only from working for oneself, with ones own skin in the game and for a cause that we were passionate about. Easily we slid into the roles that we had carefully honed over years of work experience.
My husband, Sandilya Vadapalli laid out the vision and roadmap and was not going to be involved in day to day activity going forward; Uyen Dinh Thi To who brought an indepth understanding of the Vietnamese market drew up the business plan and I, Aarti Ashok took responsibility for all operational aspects. Our trump card was Uyen’s husband, Nghia, who is one of the earliest internet entrepreneurs of Vietnam. He would help grow analyzeVietnam and realize its potential.
The initial days comprised endless checklists, white boards and post-its. There were so many decisions to make – “What will be the content of our website? Who will buy it? Where should we outsource the software development? From where and how do we source our data?”... And then there were even more basic ones - “How do we structure the business? What is our budget and timeline? Given our various commitments and constraints how do we work together?”
As you can imagine business was thriving in the coffee shop. Finally most of our answers were either plastered on the wall of our meeting room or were bulleted out on the white board.
We would build the prototype in Vietnam but would outsource the actual software development to India. We had the names and contacts of the various sources for the data and maps. We worked through long afternoons and late nights on templates and frameworks.
And so.. analyzeVietnam was officially kicked off and we drank one more cup of “cà phê” to that.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
How analyzeVietnam came about?
Late September 2009
Every venture starts with an idea, a conviction and the enthusiasm to make it happen.
My husband, our dear friend and business partner Uyen and I were sipping strong Vietnamese coffee on a hot, humid afternoon in Hanoi. While the office premises with its transparent meeting enclosures was just across the road it was still a road side cafeteria that provided the stimulus for brainstorming. This time the debate was about finding a way to give vent to our entrepreneurial urges.
“To what business venture will our collective talents do justice? What value-add can we profitably provide for the people of Vietnam?”- I mused aloud. My husband had the answer. He was convinced that one of the biggest problems faced by companies investing in Vietnam was getting reliable and comprehensive data for doing market research. Uyen thumped the table in agreement.
In their previous avatars, before they became self styled entrepreneurs, and when they were both working for a multi-national, this was a huge hurdle. They had a mandate to launch a new product in Vietnam and they just couldn’t get the right data to help them assess their market potential. The data at hand was fragmented, inconsistent, not detailed enough and mostly in Vietnamese (a big handicap for English speaking business people like my husband and I). It did not afford any practically oriented market research and did not provide any insights on the size or quality of their customer base. My husband and his team had to painstakingly collect the data from multiple sources and hire a company to build them the software to meaningfully slice it. Needless to say, all this cost a lot of time, effort and money. On enquiry they learnt that this was the stumbling block for a lot of other companies operating in Vietnam.
Their arguments were indeed very pursuasive and I was convinced we could do a business in this space. We agreed that we would build a website that provided complete, insightful and robust market data to help businesses make informed decisions about their marketing strategy. We would provide a way to turn complex information into insights that could be used for business advantage. We would provide this research for all the provinces and let the user slice and dice it in a variety of ways. And this is how analyzeVietnam was born.
Every venture starts with an idea, a conviction and the enthusiasm to make it happen.
My husband, our dear friend and business partner Uyen and I were sipping strong Vietnamese coffee on a hot, humid afternoon in Hanoi. While the office premises with its transparent meeting enclosures was just across the road it was still a road side cafeteria that provided the stimulus for brainstorming. This time the debate was about finding a way to give vent to our entrepreneurial urges.
“To what business venture will our collective talents do justice? What value-add can we profitably provide for the people of Vietnam?”- I mused aloud. My husband had the answer. He was convinced that one of the biggest problems faced by companies investing in Vietnam was getting reliable and comprehensive data for doing market research. Uyen thumped the table in agreement.
In their previous avatars, before they became self styled entrepreneurs, and when they were both working for a multi-national, this was a huge hurdle. They had a mandate to launch a new product in Vietnam and they just couldn’t get the right data to help them assess their market potential. The data at hand was fragmented, inconsistent, not detailed enough and mostly in Vietnamese (a big handicap for English speaking business people like my husband and I). It did not afford any practically oriented market research and did not provide any insights on the size or quality of their customer base. My husband and his team had to painstakingly collect the data from multiple sources and hire a company to build them the software to meaningfully slice it. Needless to say, all this cost a lot of time, effort and money. On enquiry they learnt that this was the stumbling block for a lot of other companies operating in Vietnam.
Their arguments were indeed very pursuasive and I was convinced we could do a business in this space. We agreed that we would build a website that provided complete, insightful and robust market data to help businesses make informed decisions about their marketing strategy. We would provide a way to turn complex information into insights that could be used for business advantage. We would provide this research for all the provinces and let the user slice and dice it in a variety of ways. And this is how analyzeVietnam was born.
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