Opening up capital flows for local blockchain startups

Jennie Hoang Phuong - CEO, D.Lion Media & Solutions

From my experience, business owners should think about how to establish a good rapport and maintain healthy relationships within the team. The key message for any successful business is to build an effective, holistic team.

Furthermore, commitment and clear communication among relevant stakeholders need to be updated on a daily basis, which will help to bridge the gap between businesses, the whole community, and its investors. Investors are very diligent to know what is happening with the projects, so commitment and clear communication will help the project not only become a very successful startup, but they will have them move into a sustainable path on a long-term scale.

Besides this, startups need to conduct thorough insights into the market because their product can only be acceptable if it can address emerging issues.

Your products will be deployed and used by the market, so please try to understand what they actually need. It always comes down to your core values – you keep your core values but you can change your strategy, which is based on the current situation of the market.

William Do - CEO, HOBBIT Investment

You need to collect all the ingredients and it has to be under certain conditions. Then, at the right moment, you introduce them to the market and the market will welcome the project. If not, then it is hard for them to even look at your projects.

If the economy is bad, everyone is cautious about their money. If you want money out of their pockets, you need to give them a stronger push than you normally would do. If you do that, people will look at your project with more intense feelings. If you don’t create intense feelings for them to look at your project, you already fail from the first moment that you present your project to the market. In addition, you need to know two types of audience to convince them to jump on board. First, they are your community supporters who are using your products.

The project should have a solid product to convince the community to support it. It can be your friends, family members, and a circle of people around you who have to trust and believe in your products. From then, you will build a larger community.

The second type of audience you need to focus on to build is the support from investors. It doesn’t have to be financial investors – it could be any kind of investor who assists in your project in terms of time, effort, equipment, facilities, and more.

They will help you build slowly and supply the things you lack when you raise funds. Investors will look at different aspects of the project including the chance of acquiring users and the solidity of the product, as well as the community supporters.

Hadi Malaeb - CEO, Agora Group

Vietnam has established itself as an innovation hub in Southeast Asia. There is a clear government policy on digitalisation and on improving innovation and the startup ecosystem. These policies have yielded some strong results for the startup ecosystem in general and for the blockchain in particular. All the ingredients are there to sustain the drive towards digitisation and increasing funding for startups.

VCs will evaluate the business case of the startup, the team leader, previous experience, the capacity to execute their business plans, and the valuation of the equity they have invested. Nearly one-third of the deals come from colleagues and ex-employees of the VC firm, one-fifth from other investors who have gone through the projects, and 8 per cent come directly from existing portfolio companies. Only 10 per cent of the projects come from startups approaching VCs. Startups need to connect to the right social and professional circles in order to seek capital directly from VCs. The fundamental question commonly posed by investors yet challenge the majority of blockchain startups is their go-to-market and listing approaches.

All relevant stakeholders in the startup ecosystem need to understand the essence of blockchain. Blockchain will soon be integrated into everything to make our lives easier without us having to understand the technology behind it.

As a startup, the earlier you can talk to investors, the better it is. Investors are not only there to put their money in but also to provide their expertise and guidance. Early interaction with investors helps startups steer their ship and save up time for research.