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by ChuckMcM
3710 days ago
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Every place is different, the GP was talking about Indonesia where the folks were in fact shopping online and the challenge was the payments system. In Cambodia with poor package delivery then that might be the place to start. What I was alluding too is that one of the things that makes startups successful is that they seem to be "right place, right time" but sometimes it is simply that they are designed to mesh well with an existing infrastructure. The trick here is to take something which is is known to work and try to think about what changes would make that thing work where you are. In a country where everyone has a smartphone, you can look at things that you can do with a smartphone you couldn't do with a 'dumb' phone. In a country where there are extremely inefficient transport, mail, or payment systems, then working within what you can there can be a winner. |
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Totally.
> they seem to be "right place, right time" but sometimes it is simply that they are designed to mesh well with an existing infrastructure
Mmm there can be other elements such as "right person" and "right way to solve the problem". Sometimes the keys to success aren't easily condensed into soundbytes, so they aren't widely known. Air B&B wasn't the first home sharing website, but there were probably some ingredients in their secret sauce that fall under the HN definition of "execution". We don't know all of those ingredients, but they differentiated Air B&B from the pack.
So, I'd argue there is a right solution for Cambodia's e-commerce, and any problem really. It may not become a billion dollar company, but there is a way to make it profitable. There simply is not a model that's easily copyable from the US. Conditions are very different. There are definitely people working on this problem. Adoption rates appear slow to me. Time will tell when they're successful.
> The trick here is to take something which is is known to work and try to think about what changes would make that thing work where you are
Yeah we are in agreement.