How is it difficult for Viet start-ups to survive?

Perhaps start-ups is one of the most popular term that we hear too much from media recently. The word "start-ups" easily strikes in our mind of Facebook, Google, Instagram, Evernote, representing for young, big and rich names in ICT world. Start-ups also inspire youngters dreams of building up an enormous empire, showing our own values, and spreading our belief ...

Those beautiful descriptions are always true, obviously, if we succeed. But, on the other hand of reality, there are many existing obstacles that we need to realise, before we come too deeply to a mess of troubles by our own that there's no way out...

Ok, I've been talking quite a lot so far. Then, I will go straight to some exceptional difficulties which are currently hindering Viet start-ups dreams.

1) Lack of capital. It's so clear that money in term of investment, or revenue, is too important for start- ups to survive. Unfortunately, chance to approach clean capital is scare here, for many reasons, such as Vietnam is poor country, lack of capital ventures and mutual funds, or weak support from government. Let's look at a different picture in U.S, funding is much easier in various forms and sources willing to invest in promising products and businesses. Anyway, I can see the funding activity has some improvements recently in Vietnam.

2) Lack of supporting industries. It's very hard to create a real prototype from an original model, and it is even  tougher to make our product economic-of-scale, in Vietnam. If you think of a physical products, a decorated or re-innovated stylus for instance, you can see how hard to make it real. But how about in software industry, I believe my opinion is still true. From a draft idea, we can create a promising raw product for demonstration, but when its come to scale for a big amount of users, I don't think we have enough resources to implement  it.

3) Lack of market. Vietnam is still a too small, poor and immature market to encourage and consume new products. Note that start-ups usually make products containing high level of uniqueness and personal customization capiability to avoid directly competing with big brands, thereby they need a remarkable amount of audience dare to pay plenty of money for these products.

I believe these 3 above points are essential for Vietnam to survive and grow. In the next entries, I would like to discuss some successfull start-ups in Vietnam to see how they overcome those issues.