Since the start of the year, Da Nang’s startup community has consecutively got good news as ‘Made-in-Da Nang’ startups named Selly and Dat Bike have raised a large amount of capital from some investment funds. The lessons learned from the founders of these two startups will be a valuable reference for young entrepreneurs in the city.

Nguyen Ba Canh Son and his “Made-in-Da Nang” electric motorbike

Selly: Asking and answering the 3 W's and H Questions

Selly is considered one of the pioneering startups in term of community interactive e-commerce model in Viet Nam.

Officially established in April 2021, Selly is a platform dedicated to those who want to run an online business with the criterion of ‘3 Nos’: no capital, no inventory, and no worries about operation.

In early 2022, it successfully raised US$2.6 million (nearly VND60 billion) in a Pre-Series A funding round to upgrade products and expand the e-commerce market. The funding capital came from investment funds of CyberAgent Capital, Do Ventures, Genesia Ventures, JAFCO Asia and KVision.

Mr. Nguyen Nam Hai, Co-Founder cum Director of the Selly Co., Ltd., said that Selly has helped more than 300 suppliers and manufacturers generate revenue of tens of billions of VND per month, as well as supported them to connect with more than 300,000 sales associates across the country.

Mr. Hai shared, one of the lessons he has learned in the process of starting a business with Selly is that financial sources of each project are always limited. Therefore, before carrying out a project, he always asked himself 3 W's and H questions to find answers for the implementation of the project.

The questions are “why do you want to build Selly”, “What do you want to do?”, “who are your companions”, and “How do you implement the project?”

Dat Bike: Know when to step back

In late April, Dat Bike, a electric motorbike startup, raised US$5.3 million in its series A funding round led by Jungle Ventures, with participation from existing investor Wavemaker Partners.

Thus, the company has raised a total of US$10 million to date.

The startup will use the freshly-raised funds to innovate tech, enhance scale production, and expand its business and production to first-grade cities across the country, as well as recruit top talents.

Looking back on his more than 3-year startup journey, Mr. Nguyen Ba Canh Son, Founder and CEO of Dat Bike, remarked one of "motivations" that helped him persevere in the early days of implementing the project was that he has "defined" himself as a solver of the problem of popularising electric motorbikes in Southeast Asia.

Nguyen Ba Canh Son, a Year 12 pupil from the Le Quy Don Senior High School for the Gifted, brought home a silver medal at the 20^th International Informatics Olympiad held in Egypt. That achievement offered him an opportunity to have 2 years of study later at the US University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a public research university in Illinois and the flagship institution of the University of Illinois System.

At the end of 2017, Son decided to return to his roots after his “10-year adventurous journey” in the U.S.A, with a Master's degree in computer science and precious experience he accumulated during his working in Silicon Valley, a region in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology, innovation and social media.

He said “When starting a business, I no longer force myself into the role of a software engineer, but consider myself a problem solver. I also learned how to weld and lathe, and then I made the first electric motorbike ".

When he established a business, Mr. Son said that the hardest thing he learned was to do nothing.

He explained, when there is a problem in the company, his first instinct is to take action. However, gradually, this made him become too busy and too detailed, while the other members of the company did not have the opportunity to solve the problems. This will result in the slowdown operation of the company.

 Mr. Son shared, he has learned to empower, guide others to work and let others do it, even accept that there will be mistakes to learn from. Things may not always go the way we want, but we need to think for a long-term period. Now all areas in the company have senior management personnel. He only manage in term of product production.

Reporting by PHONG LAN - Translating by M.DUNG