Business in Vancouver’s “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. This week, former Vancouverite and entrepreneur Rita Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam, talks about how she returned to Asia and ended up in Myanmar, where she has developed the country’s first Burmese-language social media networking site, SQUAR.
"I was born in South Vietnam. We fled when I was two after the war in 1979. Right before I moved to Asia, I worked for Electronic Arts for about five years. I basically built the online and social media and community teams for Need for Speed and a bunch of other franchises.
“I went to Vietnam on vacation and met someone who convinced me to move to Asia [in 2010] to work for his startup. Then one of my friends convinced me to go to Myanmar to take a look. So I did that in January and pretty much knew right away that I was going to do something in Myanmar.
“The government had switched to a democratic government and the censorship laws had been eliminated. This was one of the most disconnected countries in the world and yet it had one of the largest BarCamps [user-generated web conferences]. It had over 6,300 kids attend in a weekend.
“It’s a country of 60 million with only about 1% Internet penetration right now. That’s changing.
“There were so many problems to solve it was like shooting fish in a barrel. I thought about job boards, placement and housing because all these things are tremendous problems in Myanmar.
“The reason I landed on SQUAR is that it all came down to a consumer play – the ability to profile [consumers], understand who they are, how old they are, what they like, what their purchasing power is. This is where the real money was going to come in later.
“Facebook is used in Myanmar. It is very much a newsfeed. But Burmese people don’t read and write English. The written language is like a Sanskrit-based language and our whole site is done in Burmese.
“We’re a social network, but we are planning on layering a lot of online experiences in Burmese. We’ve got a game coming out.
“I went to some connections that I knew in Vietnam and convinced a couple of developers to almost work for free. We slammed the app together in a month. We went to angel investors in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and a Vancouver fund as well, and raised $500,000 almost right away.
“There’s a severe shortage of skilled talent in Myanmar. I went to BarCamp and asked them to reach out and all the organizers wanted to work for me.
“We have around 10,000 users now. We’re growing organically at about 20% month over month, but we haven’t actually done anything yet. Our first marketing initiatives start this month.” •
