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.
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