My 2022 Reflections

So my investor asked me to share my learning experience this past year.

And it was tough for me to come up with what to say.

Because honestly, the whole past year was a big learning experience. I was struggling and learning from my struggles every day. So it was hard for me to compress it all into a few minutes.

I am sure most of you know what it is like.

Is our product the right fit for the market? Are we growing too slowly? Do we have enough cash? Are our people happy?

At the same time, when I actually sat down to think about it, 2022 did give us many useful lessons.

While 2022 was definitely better than 2021 because there was no lockdown, it wasn't as easy as I expected.

Q4 especially sucked. We had high hopes for it, since it was the peak season every year. But the traffic to retail stores in Vietnam actually decreased compared to Q2 and Q3. The inflation and high interest rates affected the purchasing power of the people, which impacted our clients.

So my first lesson is that you may do everything right, but there are still factors outside of your control that negatively affect your business. Allow yourself some time to reflect, then suck it up and move on. It is a tough world out there and success is promised to no one.

My second lesson has to do with product-market fit.

We used to think fine-tuning our product to fit the market was enough. And we failed. Hard.

Before 2022, we wanted to be universal. We tried to be everything to everyone. Big enterprises. Mid-market brands. Small businesses.

And we quickly ran out of strength.

Do you know the joke about celery? That it has so few calories that the energy you spend eating it is less than the energy you get from it? So the more you eat it, the more weight you lose?

It was the same with our mid-market and small clients. They have small budgets but need a lot of handholding to onboard our product successfully. Because we sell whole solutions, not just tools. So the more clients we get, the more money we lose.

Don’t get me wrong. I love all our clients equally! But we do not belong together, at least for now.

In 2022, we decided to just focus on enterprise retailers. They are more resilient. They have bigger budgets. But most importantly, they have better organization, better-trained people, better-designed processes in place. Those are absolutely necessary for a high-level solution to succeed.

Because at the end of the day, a product is only as good as the people using it.

When we ran out of enterprise retailers in Vietnam, we started looking elsewhere. We found them in South East Asia, especially Thailand. And our business recovered sooner than we expected.

I am very thankful we stopped to reconsider our Ideal Client Profile just in time.

So my second lesson is fine-tuning your product and your ideal client profile at the same time.?

Marketing a good product to the wrong people will kill your company more quickly than marketing a bad product to the right people. Because with the right people, at least you will get the right feedback!

So those were my two small, humble lessons in 2022. I hope 2023 will bring us better learning experiences and 12 months from now, I’d be able to share our success stories.!!!!