

What it's like to be a startup in a 3rd world country - twidlit
http://thenextweb.com/asia/2011/04/24/building-a-startup-in-a-developing-country-the-pitfalls-and-opportunities/1/

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ggeorgovassilis
I'm the co-founder of a startup in Indonesia [EDIT] (<http://bazarooma.com>)
and would like to share some of the experience. I've been to both Indonesia
and the Philippines for business over the last three years and I observed
that, compared to the pace in the west, development is significantly faster
resulting in a quicker increase of quality of life. However my feeling is that
Indonesia surpasses most of the neighbouring countries by far in both the
quality and volume of its development, maybe excluding China.

On the plus side, we encountered an open market which makes placing new
products and ideas easy. Internet users are reasonably experienced, our server
logs show that Indonesian visitors use modern browsers and understand common
UI concepts easily. It has a thriving tech and startup scene and is well-
connected. Indonesia is the second biggest Facebook user and we found that you
can indeed efficiently reach people over Facebook.

The cons we encountered so far are few, but they hurt. Throughout our
communication with either individuals, the media or businesses we found a
recurring pattern of either ignoring our communication attempts (mail,
twitter, phonecalls, facebook) or deliberately misreading them regardless of
them being on a business or personal level. As soon as we switched to personal
contact (we visited them) the situation improved, leading me to believe that
they have some catching up to do with modern media.

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namank
Insightful, thanks.

Ok now this may come across as ignorant but is language ever the problem?
Maybe your emails are in english and the subtext doesn't translate over to
Indonesian via written forms easily?

Also, any comments and insights on the Indian startup scene? Bangalore has
been making a lot of noise lately...

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ggeorgovassilis
Hello namank,

We wanted to rule any language problems out from the beginning and have access
to native Indonesian speakers for all of our communication.

As an anecdote I could mention that they are very mindful about where in
Indonesia the addressee originates from, because social protocol advises
towards custom addressing and language.

~~~
namank
Yes, thats exactly what I was wondering, thanks. So you must need to
accommodate all the different regions.

Implementing localization within the country! Wow!

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rlander
It makes me cringe to see the original title changed from "developing" to
"third world" country.

The term was originally used to either distinguish countries non-aligned with
either capitalism or communism during the cold war but has since gained an
economic connotation and become synonymous with "poor".

The Philippines is a capitalist country and consequently doesn't fit the first
definition; it most definitely is not poor, so it also doesn't fit the last.

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mbenjaminsmith
I think it shows a profound ignorance of how the world works. I hear it all
the time living in Thailand.

To put that in perspective, Thailand ranks 23rd by GDP, has a literacy rate in
the high 90s and has an unemployment rate of around 1%.

The average professional _does_ make around half of what they would in the US,
but their taxes are lower and their cost of living is also half or less. The
health care cost/quality ratio makes many countries look barbaric.

I think "third world" could be safely replaced with "economy I know nothing
about" in the majority of cases.

~~~
jbellis
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_capita)
puts Thailand in the 80s in GDP per capita. The Philippines is 125, 113, or
132 depending on the list. All three lists agree that Thailand has less than
1/4 of US GDP, and the Philippines has less half of Thailand's, putting it on
the edge of the bottom quartile.

So jumping down someone's throat for calling the RP a poor country looks a
little premature to me. (I lived there for two years and my gut feeling
doesn't disagree with that, although if you've only been to Makati I can see
how you might not realize that.)

That said, to me "3rd-world" has pejorative connotations regardless of income
levels, and I also wish the submitter had left the title alone.

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)>

Quote:

"Using a PPP basis is arguably more useful when comparing generalized
differences in living standards on the whole between nations because PPP takes
into account the relative cost of living and the inflation rates of the
countries, rather than using just exchange rates which may distort the real
differences in income."

Thailand ranks #24, #23 and #24 in those lists. I rounded up. You picked a
list to illustrate your point (that Thailand and the Philippines are poor?). I
picked one that better reflected GDP vs cost of living, which was my point.

I wasn't jumping down his throat specifically, I was saying that the term
"third world" as applied to Thailand (and other countries) is a worthless
description today. As the original commenter pointed out, it's related to the
geopolitics of the Cold War. People often swap it for "developing nation"
which is a euphemism for "undeveloped by Western standards" which I think is
condescending and a culturally biased value judgement. When someone says
"third world" I would say they either don't really understand the economics
involved or are deliberately being derogatory to another people/nation. I
think that's pretty safely called ignorance.

~~~
wcarss
The PPP is not without flaws for these uses; compare the average standard of
life in China or India to the average standard of life in the Netherlands or
Canada, and compare their PPP rankings.

If you're looking to compare quality of life, while not perfect, I would
imagine the Human Development Index would be closer in line with average
experience: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index>

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wyclif
I was a bit disappointed that infrastructure issues were only touched on in
the briefest way, and then not by the writer but by the interviewed Filipino
entrepreneur.

That's a shame, because after investment capital the biggest problem in the
Philippines is lack of infrastructure. Government corruption is extreme. Even
in the better-off cities there it can be tough to get any work done because of
the constant brownouts, and high-speed fiber buildout is lacking.

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pilib
Did anyone read cost-effective manpower as cheap? :(

I'm from Serbia, and still living here. The local market is small and
extremely undeveloped. Telecommunication infrastructure is sub-standard, no
non-ISP/corporate data centers and no multiple backbone links. While the
cloud/grid hosting solves that particular problem, there are others.

Running a company here costs you around 300€/month, whether you have profit or
not. That doesn't include office space or bills, taxes only. Note that it is
the average net monthly salary, but you can't live of it really.

Corruption. Shitty infrastructure. No Paypal and no widely available (and
inexpensive) card-processing options. I'm not sure about getting a proper,
signed SSL certificate either.

All of the above can be circumvented, yes. The problem is that when you are so
far behind everyone else society wise, ideas and visions that are popping in
your head are being sold as a commodity in the rest of the world, and even if
you have a nice, modern, innovative idea, unless you are wealthy, you wont be
able to implement it because of so many bureaucratic obstacles.

So, what do we have here? A bunch of IT service and programming sweatshops,
outsourced of course. Because of relatively cheap labor.

It is my opinion that having an inspiring and motivating, if not competing
environment helps innovation.

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zengr
Is it only me or calling it a 3rd world country really sounds humiliating?

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grigy
Almost the same story here in Armenia.

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thebigj
a little bit of a side track, does anyone have opinions on the emphasis of
pretty/slick/minimalistic UI/UX on apps in developing nations. It maybe due to
my ignorance, but there doesn't seem to be much emphasis/value placed by
stakeholders on that front, the focus particularly in asia seems to be on
content rich rather than UX rich.

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known
<http://www.doingbusiness.org/economyrankings/>

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jhuckestein
"We’ve heard of tons of successful startups from countries like US and Europe"
... :(

