Startups and entrepreneurship have always appealed to young people. The extraordinary stories of Facebook, Alibaba, and Instagram have strongly motivated many to pursue being their own boss. A Google search for the keyword “Khởi nghiệp” returns 2,280,000 results in 0.29 seconds. No longer as new and unfamiliar a concept as a few years ago, startups are becoming a new wave—a trend through which many young Vietnamese express their passion and desire for wealth. Yet reality is harsh, and the journey from idea to reality is long and arduous. Is this startup wave disorienting young people and wasting their time? Is entrepreneurship suitable for all of us?
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Why Start a Business – What Product Will You Sell?
To succeed in entrepreneurship or any work in life, you first need to find a purpose: ‘Why are you starting a business?’ Joy is also a choice—‘Youth is for experience’—but is it strong enough to help you overcome all the difficulties ahead? Most successful people in this field begin their careers out of passion: a breakthrough idea nurtured for years, or dreams of great things that could change society. Sometimes they are victims of circumstances, forced to start a business to support themselves. Meanwhile, many students are simply captivated by the appeal of being their own boss and becoming rich, which means spending enormous amounts of time asking, ‘What should I do?’ They often prioritize selling some kind of product because it does not require much capital and is commonly seen as an ‘easy-to-implement’ idea. Yet choosing among clothing, cosmetics, handmade goods, hand-carried imported technology products… and so on is not easy either. Alongside this question, a series of others about sourcing, distribution and selling products also challenge young people. What most young entrepreneurs forget is that the more common the idea, the fiercer the competition and the fewer opportunities to differentiate or develop the product over the long term.
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Turn ideas into action
Suppose you already have passion and a unique, creative, highly feasible idea. This does not mean your startup will succeed. Starting a business means beginning a venture you own, but you cannot build your own empire alone. To turn an idea into concrete profit figures, you must first address questions about “relationships”: relationships with investors, partners and customers, and legal relationships… To reach a certain scale, raising capital is unavoidable. But which investors actually need you, and how do you contact them and get them to spend some of their precious time listening to you? Remember that countless entrepreneurs like you are struggling with the same questions at that very moment. Once you have capital, finding partners who share your passion and are determined to follow you to the end is much harder still. You will then face countless other issues involving consumers, economics or legal matters. For young people with limited experience and understanding and very few business connections, answering these questions is truly a major challenge!
As VNG CEO Lê Hồng Minh once shared: “Understanding exactly why you must become an entrepreneur and who you are, amid so many deep and difficult questions, makes answers hard to find.” Daring to dream and making dreams real are part of youth, but make sure you are not following a passing ‘trend.’ If you lack confidence, take time to gain experience, learn and strengthen yourself before facing the great wave of a startup!
YUP!: Say goodbye to seasickness on your entrepreneurial journey. Be happy! 🙂
Chương trình liên quan tại YUP Education: X-Startup – khóa học khởi nghiệp «Khởi Chánh Nghiệp» · The Journey – lộ trình phát triển doanh nhân
