Has someone ever succesfully entered their market? How?
The biggest problems I have with Vietnam and Asian developing countries right now, and this isn't unique to just Vietnam as far as I can tell: 1. The postal system isn't uniform/consistent throughout the country, so there's a real problem in mapping people with a clear home address. 2. Not having a clear home address combined with a lackadaisical sense of infrastructure planning, it's making things like loans and credits and ultimately credit card ownership is very difficult. So online transaction can be difficult. There is a population of Vietnamese population with ATM debit cards, but the commitment and buy-ins with online transactions are still at an early stage. As far as I can tell, most transactions to push money to an online vendor still go through a brick & mortar proxy (go to shop, load up on digital points --> pay with points like old school phone cards) 3. Speed/ownership of private internet connections is also an issue. A lot of the general population are still using the internet from internet cafe. As more and more people are getting personal internet connections at home, this is getting better; but it's a long way from where we are in the US. Imagine the early AOL modem era.
I don't disagree that the market is huge and there are countries and locations that are ready: South Korea, Hong Kong, Philippines and Malaysia etc. But the big market you're looking at are still made up of low to middle Asian population, which is getting ready but not there yet in term of online-marketing ready. FYI, a lot of successful services for Vietnam right now are mostly free or supported by ad revenue.
These are just a few of my personal thoughts though. Perhaps someone else with more solid data on Asia would really be insightful for everyone.
I gained a lot from this experience and i think that opening to each other would be good for everyone but there are many obstacles, like language, different minds etc...
Btw, I hear South Korea's internet is much better than what we have here in the US.
Source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/11/12/real-connection-speeds-f... - Raw data source: http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/
The biggest reason is government/law. China likes to talk a lot about the rule of law but the rules are ambiguous and not everyone plays by the same rules. A lot of business here is ruled by who you know and how much back-scratching you can do. Even if we (my partner and I) were able to accurately understand language (we're coming close) and culture (this still needs more work), we would be at a huge disadvantage.
I am not so naïve to think that corruption doesn't exist elsewhere, but in China it is systemic. I know college grads who talked about paying someone for a job, the idea being that they will eventually make more money than they paid for the job. Thus the job isn't necessarily given to the highest qualified (or even baseline qualified) applicant, but rather to the person who can provide the greatest amount of financial gain for the gate keeper. This type of thinking is pervasive everywhere in society: your future customer will think like this too... which is why it's so hard to sell software here.
I don't have a problem with developing 关系 (relationships) with others. That's part of the recipe for any type of business transaction; having a good relationship with your clients/service providers just makes life better. But in China, it seems, even from my lowly perspective that the demands from this kind of game are extremely high. This is a cultural/language issue in itself, but it's for the business side.
The culture/language problem in relating to potential customers is very high, but even if that issue gets solved, the disadvantage that a Western (i.e. American/European) business faces in terms of understanding the business culture is so high that it seems very risky to try to enter the market here.
If you're selling a simple service/product that solves a technological problem and it doesn't really need customer support then it could be relatively simple.
Now if you are going in the lifestyle direction or your service is customer support heavy then you're in for a mess.
And Asia is a big place itself, I guess you mean south east Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, Singapore, HK, China, Taiwan etc. But those are already disconnected enough.
There is very very little overlap in web infrastructure between those countries. Even HK, China and Taiwan are completely different in those matters. You might be doing great in HK without getting a single customer from China or Taiwan. So it's very hard to focus on a single market.
As you're saying you find it hard to reach them then I guess your product is not easy to adapt to foreign markets. Unless you're already doing great in the US don't waste your time.
What makes you think Asia is a good idea? Maybe we could help you more if we knew what're you're after. There's definitely many cases in which entering Asian market would be a terrific idea.
Why, yes, of course. There are plenty of Western megacorps doing business in Asia. What do you really mean?
For instance, if there are megacorps successfully selling their stuff in Asia, then maybe Asia is not such a completely different world as you seem to assume? Not saying that it's easy, but then it's not necessarily easy to sell your stuff in (say) Brazil or Italy either.
For instance, Google and Yahoo have a big market share in many countries. But social startups don't tend to fare that well, probably because of network effects and not because of specific technology. Amazon is big in several developed countries but has no presence in the developing world. You would think that they could easily reproduce their business model in more countries and make money.
I wonder if you're selling your stuff outside your country already?
By the way, I live in Japan and I have thought of a company who would help web and tech startups to enter the Japanese market. There are plenty of companies who do translation and localization, but I don't know of any that does something both more comprehensive (PR, advertising, possible deals with local companies, etc) and more specific to web companies.
Language won't be a barrier. These days 4 out of 10 people in Asia use English for day to day communication (my assumption as Asian). You need to first find those 4 with whom you won't have language barriers. Then, figure out whom to partner with. It's easy.