What it's like to be a startup in a 3rd world country
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is it only me or calling it a 3rd world country really sounds humiliating?
Almost the same story here in Armenia.
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.
"We’ve heard of tons of successful startups from countries like US and Europe" ... :(