A lot of that innovation in regards to SaaS has been driven by the U.S. But obviously now if you look at Asia, culture also impacts how people do business. Therefore this impacts how businesses who are building SaaS products or anything else in the cloud space actually need to create their companies. Because those can actually impact how the organizations are run. That is actually the interesting thing that is happening in Asia right now. This is why you are starting to see the potential for great opportunities for SaaS startups in Asia.
Biggest Challenges to SaaS Scaling
We are in 14 countries in Asia and we are adding a couple more. Right now we have opportunities in Ethiopia and we are talking to some larger clients there. However, in the end, localization is probably the biggest challenge to SaaS scaling. I think the great thing about being in China and the great thing about being in the U.S. is the big single markets. The challenge in Southeast Asia, for example, is that the language needs to be translated. Every market needs a different payment platform. You need to have data storage at the local level (like in Indonesia). All these things relate to slowing down your scalability across channels. This relates to how much countries are looking to put into R&D and therefore make sure that you can get local in each of these locations.
The Success of EventBank in China
We have been able to do it through developing methods in order to try and reduce the time to go to market as we have new clients in new places, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is any easier as you will have to translate your entire product or a part of the product for certain markets. We have built into our organization over the last four years and certainly, China is a completely a different beast because the whole payment system and data center to house our China operations is different from the rest of the world because of the great China firewall. This along with how the government interacts with certain products are some of the challenges companies might face.
Opportunities for SaaS Startups
Opportunities for SaaS companies are vast because there are many different things to get into the market throughout Asia. However, relationships are still #1 factor in being able to sell a product. That impacts how successful you are going to be. Relations are important and if you can into the bigger organizations you have credibility. A second thing to really be able to scale to be an organization, being successful across Asia is very important. Learning how to go across to other Asian markets is extremely important to be able to have a big enough business that from a revenue/profitability standpoint is going to be able to be sustainable in the long run.
The Challenges
That is one of the challenges in Asia is that each market, with the exception of a few, is small so, therefore, how do you package enough of them up to be able to have a successful enough business that an investor or an exit can be possible. Therefore entering new markets in Asia is still about building relationships. In the U.S. I can use digital marketing to acquire new customers.
In Asia, I can to some degree but unless the person in the local market has seen one of my customer’s success, has met one of my salespeople, there isn’t that same level of trust. Also, people’s ability to buy something online is not at the same level as it is in the U.S. yet. It is coming and it has improved in the last five years we’ve been doing business but it is still not at the same level as the U.S. is yet. So entering new markets still requires for you to go out and shake some hands and get to know people.
