State of Affairs I; Merry Christmas

The boiler in my house is broken. I’m inside wearing a winter hat, a scarf, and heavy winter boots. I am trying to type, but it’s so Celsius sub-zero that my hands are locking up. [update: the gas people came over, even though it’s xmas, and fixed it]

Anyway…my partner in this business, Jamie, and I started this blog because we were looking for low-cost ways to generate interest in the product we are going to be marketing and this seemed to fit the bill. We thought that a blog that described the process of starting one’s own business was cool and novel. Having never written a blog before, I often find it difficult not only to create content, but to write the genre of content most germane to our goal, generating interest in the Next Big Thing. In keeping with this idea, Jamie and/or I will be writing a weekly post called the State of Affairs [Roman  Numeral]; [Clever Title].

What we’ve done this past week:

• After numerous calls to U.S. based Vietnamese trade organizations, I received the name of a sporting good company in Vietnam, Dong Luc Group. There are some interesting pictures here:  http://www.donglucsport.com/Detail.aspx?tab1=47&id=15. From their about us page: “Dong Luc Joint Stock company is leading ball manufacture, located in Vietnam. Our experience and technology have developed increasingly since last 1980s with two factories and thousands of skilled workers.” I’ve e-mailed them.
• We created an account on http://www.alibaba.com/. Alibaba is a business-to-business e-commerce company that, through its website and financial services, allows, primarily, companies in China to contact and trade with companies all over the world. We posted a buying lead there – in other words, somewhere on the huge website, it says we’re looking to buy the Next Big Thing.
• We drafted a generic letter which expresses our interest in purchasing the Next Big Thing from company X.
• We discovered that the Next Big Thing is also sold in Brazil, by a different name. There is also a respectable Brazilian company with a good website that sells the NBT. I’d give you the name of the company if it weren’t too obvious what we want to purchase from their website.

What we need to do next week:

• Since the Dong Luc Group has not respond to our e-mails, we probably need to find someone who speaks Vietnamese who can translate our e-mails declaring our intentions and/or fax them (per the recommendation of the guy I spoke with at the Vietnamese trade organization).
• E-mail the Brazilian company which manufactures and markets the NBT. We probably don’t need a Portuguese speaker for this one.
• Collect the responses we’ve got from our buying lead posted on Alibaba.com. If there are none, contact directly the companies which are selling the NBT using a mandarin speaker (we’ve got one of those lined up).
• Quit our jobs. If this company is going to go anywhere, we have to make it our primary focus. It’s time to get serious.

What we’ve learned:

• This isn’t going to be easy. I felt like the Vietnamese people I spoke to at the Vietnamese trade organizations I’ve contacted were being lazy. After about 15 calls and lot of e-mails, they give me the name of a single sporting good company, which, based their website ordering options, doesn’t even sell the NBT. What. The. Hell. Kind of pissed off, I called Vietrade, the organization whose responsibility is to encourage trade with Vietnam, and called their guy out. He said that many Vietnamese companies lack the business infrastructure to export their product. Further, smaller Vietnamese companies are less likely to have English speakers. A smaller Vietnamese company, were I to successfully get in contact with them, might well have to contact a larger company in their industry like Dong Luc to get their product to me anyway. I told him that I wanted to cut out the middle man. He sympathized with this, but stuck to his guns. Having lived in the United States all my life, the idea that Vietrade can’t just send me an excel spreadsheet of 100 names, numbers, and e-mails is pretty absurd. Vietnam is still a single-party communist state. Things work differently over there.
• China, just like Alibaba.com, is a tricky place. More on this later.
• We need Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Portuguese speakers. I’ve had a tremendous amount of difficulty communicating clearly and concisely. The people I reach over the phone who live in the United States hardly speak English. I’ve sent out a ton of e-mails which have gone out unanswered, probably because I don’t speak the language. It’s very hard to do business in a foreign company without good connections or communication skills.

Everything Else:

• This has been a really frustrating week. As I mentioned in a previous post, I accepted a temp job, which pays well. It eats up my days however so I can’t spend much time working on what I really want to do with my life, this business. This weird anxiety creeps up on me every time I am reminded of the recent inertia, which characterizes the NBT’s state of development. If things continue at the rate they are going (they won’t – I’m optimistic), this is never going to happen.