Starting a startup in Nepal? You’ll fail — and here’s why.
Swapnil Acharya
• Wednesday, September 27 2017
• 6 minutes read
It has become way too easy to start up your own company and hire yourself as the CEO. But there is a lot that goes into making a company successful than just starting it. Here’s why —
1. Very slim chances of (local) investment.
The general reason why someone starts a startup is hoping that eventually someone will buy you out, or give you more money to grow. However, that is a thing of the West — more precisely how startups and venture capitalists in the Silicon Valley work. Unfortunately, Nepal is a tiny market and I’ve not really seen this happening a lot around here. You can literally count the number of venture investors who invest in startups on the fingers of your right hand (or I’m even not entirely sure if these accelerators, incubators qualify as investors). Well, a lot of people who are knowns to invest in firms are already at the bigger playgrounds or lobbying with larger corporations for investment opportunities. There is a very thin and slim chances for them to lay their trust on a three-man startup compared to an established corporation doing business for at least a decade or so. The channels for you to be discovered by these investors, and even if you do, the challenges of convincing them and getting funded is very very rare. I’m not saying it’s impossible — but it’s very rare. Also, we don’t really have a culture of investing in someone else’s business. Also, there isn’t really enough grounds for investors to trust twenty-something guys with business ideas. It just doesn’t seem to work that way. We live in a society if someone sees something cool; they’ll go and start their own rather than exploring possibilities of working together for greater good. 1 plus 1 is never 11 in Nepal; it’s almost always two isolated 1’s that don’t regard highly of the other 1. It’s kinda sad, but it’s true.2. Too big ideas, too few resources.
Today in the existing market, if you go headhunting for a CTO, a developer or a marketing guy — they’re like the girls in college: the prettiest ones are already taken. No, seriously no matter how many engineers we churn out every year, there still is a deficit. The best ones are already working for a better company with a better salary or are in the USA. So this brings about the biggest problem validating an idea — inadequate minds to materialize it. Human imagination is infinite; in terms of getting new ideas or just thinking out something for the sake of thinking. However, the real test begins at the execution table; and these limitations aren’t just technology based or people-based. For example, no matter how many new online services you think — the biggest limitation is payment gateway. You can’t control that, and your idea will never see the true light of day because there is no simpler way for you to accept payments from customers, except for the COD (that’s Cash on Delivery, FYI). Shit happens, and mostly it’s beyond your control. There are more than half a dozen taxi hailing services in Nepal, and I don’t even understand how each one of these operate; without proper infrastructure or money movement options — these I believe are just half-thought wannabe ideas that will eventually fail.I fucking hate these taxi hailing apps. I counted almost a dozen of them and I wonder if any one of them actually works at all, though I’ve never tried their app — but their website was visibly broken. (Hire a designer!)