So you have the next big startup idea in Sri Lanka? Stop. Better think Sri Lankan first!
I know the title sounds like a“clickbait” but I’m going to keep it anyway.
I know the title sounds like a“clickbait” but I’m going to keep it anyway.
I’m writing this as I complete almost one year of my first startup venture in Sri Lanka and among the many invaluable lessons I’ve learnt are some that were surprisingly unexpected, at least for me, so I thought of sharing.
As a background setting, my startup was primarily involved in the technology arena with a catchy name — IoT (Internet of Things), which is considered to be one of the most hyped technological trends in the world at the moment. My co-founder and I coming from pure engineering and tech research backgrounds were all over this. And reading articles on financial projections showing billion dollar global markets we were like “let’s go!”
What was our plan to capture these markets? Start from Sri Lanka! Yeah. I wish somebody at that time must have had written an article on, here we go my first point;
The technology adoption rate of Sri Lanka.
Let me put this into perspective. If a Brit wants to see how British technology worked several decades back, invite him/her to Sri Lanka and visit the nearest railway station. See how the signaling system works. How the rails move to change path. How trains are maintained. This thing is a living museum.
Ok. Now that might be the most common example that we Sri Lankans always laugh about, but there’s clearly a very slow rate in tech advancements here. It’s happening, but very slow. And when you are a tech startup aiming exponential growth, you won’t have that much time to wait.
Coming back to my story, so here we are, with our cutting-edge IoT product, targeting Sri Lankan industries to be our initial customers. Right.
By now you might be wondering, “hey, so that’s just for tech startups. If I’m a rich kid from a family who made it big in the apparel industry boom in Sri Lanka, and I want to start my own fashion line, this won’t be an issue for me”.
Here’s where I think my second point will go beyond tech;
Sri Lanka believes that foreign products are always superior.
At least an affiliation to a US/European company or a connection to an Asian client would do.
So we would go on marketing our product as “purely designed and assembled in Sri Lanka”, and the facial expression changes during some meetings were pretty evident.
Side story — Once during a lunch at a potential client's company I sat next to a person who had come from another tech startup pitching a product to the same client. When asked about his company his reply was “Our startup is based in Canada and I’m managing operations in Sri Lanka.” Out of curiosity I kept on getting to know him where finally I learnt that what he meant by “based in Canada” was that he has a friend who lives in Canada and he refers to that person as their Canadian office.
See now, it’s fine if you and your friend are doing a startup in two different countries simultaneously, but why emphasize the other country when marketing it here in Sri Lanka? Because it is an utter necessity!
It’s quite sad why as Sri Lankans we have this mindset of thinking that foreign things are always better. That attitudinal change will somehow have to take place if we want to make the most out of this country’s best minds working for us.
Third and last point;
$1M seed funding for your startup from Sri Lankan investors = Fairy Tale
Yes. We read how early stage startups raise millions and millions of dollars as initial funding and even crowdfunding those amounts in the US.
Say you have a great new business model which has never been tried before but is ready to disrupt an entire industry, be the market leader and set long term returns with a given uncertainty (As all out-of-the-box startups should be like). If you believe that you can raise the same money for this startup in Sri Lanka, you might as well believe in Peter Pan and his fairies too.
Funding is a requirement for any startup to reach at least the initial milestones and the best way to raise that amount in Sri Lanka would be from your own bank account. No investor here is going to risk his money in your great idea unless he sees some immediate returns.
Final thoughts —
I’m not trying to define the entire realm of entrepreneurship in Sri Lanka. Also note that I’m not talking about all businesses here. In my opinion there is a clear difference between a startup and a business. A startup should always have that entity of uniqueness and some out-of-the-box thinking to solve a problem which will always come with higher risk factor.
We remember the great startups from Facebook of Silicon Valley to Go-Jek of Indonesia because of these same elements of uniqueness they have. And they take their origins along with them to the world. They build the brand images for their countries.
There are so many successful entrepreneurs here in Sri Lanka. And I think they all had something in common at some point in their ventures when they made it big here. They made sense to this mindset of Sri Lanka and embraced how things work here.
So when you have that next big startup idea to work in Sri Lanka, make sure you think as Sri Lankan before executing.
I know I would.