If you are truly passionate about something, begin today while you are still healthy and have few commitments. You can start with very slow steps, as long as you are willing to keep moving forward. Keep going, and you will arrive!
-Nguyễn Thanh Minh-
Starting a Business ‘Empty-Handed’
In fact, Minh began his entrepreneurial journey in year 3 of his finance degree at International University in Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City), when he and friends founded the DeltaViet social network. Still a student, Minh noticed many young people seemed lost when planning and pursuing their future dreams. Many cherished dreams and set goals, but these remained vague and unstructured, and many lacked encouragement and support from family, friends, and the community. Minh proactively created DeltaViet so people could write down life goals, share them, and find like-minded people to motivate one another toward success and realizing their dreams. After only a short time, the network had more than 100.000 members across Vietnam and abroad.
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This initial success encouraged Minh to pursue his startup plan more boldly. After graduating with honors, he could have joined many companies willing to hire him, but instead chose to start a business in work still fairly new in Vietnam. Beginning with nothing, he gathered a group of like-minded friends, co-founded DeltaViet, and became its Director. His team designed an online training system through hanhtrinhdelta.edu.vn, offering numerous soft-skills and professional-skills courses.
For Minh, choosing online training as his startup field ‘came from my own experiences.’ Until his 2nd year at university, Minh still did not know what he really needed or wanted. He said he studied finance because he ‘had chosen the wrong career.’ ‘My communication skills were very poor. A friend once told me, “I have never seen anyone communicate as badly as you.” Fortunately, I later discovered suitable training courses and had the opportunity to change,’ Minh shared. He added, ‘I know many other young people, especially those in provinces and cities outside Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, have few opportunities to take such courses. I want to make courses in both soft skills and professional skills affordable and widely accessible to young people aged 18 to 30 nationwide. The only way to do that is through online training.’
Minh believes online learning, or E-learning, will become a trend because it saves time and money and offers much greater course diversity. His biggest startup challenge, however, is understanding customer psychology to offer a product customers “truly need,” rather than one he likes or already has.
Keep going and you will get there!
Recently, Minh was honored by the Center for Social Initiatives Promotion (CSIP, based in Hanoi) as an outstanding social entrepreneur of the year—a person who uses entrepreneurial qualities and skills to build and manage organizations or businesses addressing a specific social or environmental problem. This was a great joy for Minh in his early entrepreneurial years. Social entrepreneurship is still not widespread in Vietnam. Minh therefore continually hopes for specific state policies supporting social entrepreneurs and social enterprises.
Minh believes many young Vietnamese people's independence, creativity, courage, determination and ambition remain limited compared with those in many other countries. He offers a small example: “In the US, it is normal for young people to move out at 18 with no family support. In Vietnam, young people usually stop receiving family support only after finishing university and working steadily for several years.” He believes the US environment encourages independence from childhood, while Vietnam's is less conducive to it, so more attention is needed.
Nevertheless, Minh emphasizes that young Vietnamese people now have an enormous opportunity to become global citizens more easily. Vietnam's internet growth is among Asia's fastest, and its young people quickly absorb new technologies and ideas. “Becoming a global citizen requires many factors, foremost foreign languages and an open mindset: readiness to learn new things, acknowledge one's limitations, and accept differences in culture and thinking,” Minh observed.
Surprisingly, Minh is also passionate about writing books. His book Following the Dream (2nd reprint by Thanh Niên Publishing House), written with 3 friends who are all DeltaViet members, could be considered essential for many young people. It tells an engaging, continuous story of Minh and his friends' real experiences during their student years, incorporating many life skills lessons. Its style resembles Spencer Johnson's famous Who Moved My Cheese?, but its setting is 100% Vietnamese, making it very relatable.
‘What matters most deeply to you?’ I asked. Quoting Steve Jobs, the American inventor and co-founder of the renowned Apple corporation, Minh replied: ‘On average, it takes five years to create something great. None of us has many opportunities like that in a lifetime.’ He added: ‘If you are truly passionate about something, start today while you are still healthy and have few constraints. You can begin with very small steps, as long as you keep moving forward. Keep going, and you will arrive!’
(According to Thanh Niên newspaper)
