Hello, it’s me again, The Fool from Easy Knowledge Channel. In episode 3, I went into detail about my first business plan, which included:
- 1. The capital-use and sales plan
- 2. The marketing plan
- 3. Assuming the worst-case scenarios for your business
And by the end of that clip, I had 100 million VND to my own name, after a business journey that started with 0đ and grew over 4 years.
Today’s story begins with how I managed to multiply that capital 5 times over the next 3 years of running the first business I ever built, Big E Co. — legally, Big Electronics Trading-Services Co., Ltd — and the next failure-lesson that came from building…
So now, find yourself a quiet corner, put on your headphones, grab your cigarette of choice, and start listening with me — The Fool from Easy Knowledge Channel, a guy who never quite grew up, wearing every title from shipper, to biker, to a dreamer of a founder… who built all this from 0đ.
Remember the story I told in episode 3? After selling gaming gear and mobile components and landing my first bit of success, by the end of 2018, after attending an affiliate workshop by Babylon, given by a foreign speaker who was, at the time, an affiliate mogul…
By that point, I had over 10,000 retail-customer data points, and over 100 positive comments on my products across e-commerce platforms like Lazada, Shopee, Tiki, and Sendo — and they were willing to feature my products on their own platforms.
Right away, an idea popped into my head: start a company combining my components business with advertising, aiming to land as many clients as possible, doing their marketing while also building out an affiliate-marketing sales arm for them.
Alongside that, through some outside research, I discovered a model that was becoming very popular abroad: cashback (getting money back on a purchase). So I looked into it right away and built my own e-commerce site called DeDa.vn, combining these two areas together.
So I got straight to work building this e-commerce site. But knowing this was my first major project, I couldn’t just analyze it simply like my previous ventures — I quickly sketched out a detailed Business Model Canvas, split into B2B2C and C2C, covering 9 elements:
- Customer Segments
- Value Propositions
- Channels
- Customer Relationships
- Revenue Stream
- Key Resources
- Key Activities
- Key Partnerships
You can check out how I laid this out in the “BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS ANALYSIS.” A sample analysis chart for two common business models today, B2B and B2C, from two of DeDa.vn’s major partners, will be linked in the comments and description of this video.
Lesson:
Before starting any business venture, you need to thoroughly analyze the business model, along with mapping it out on a Canvas analysis chart. This Canvas chart will give you a clearer view of your own business strategy and…
Download the Business Model CANVAS Analysis.
What’s more, since I was now running a much bigger project, I needed to complete the legal paperwork to establish my own company and raise capital from people around me.
So I convinced 2 friends to join me in this business venture with a total capital of 50 million VND, of which I held 51%, contributing 25.5 million VND.
After completing all the legal paperwork to establish the company (including registering DeDa.vn with the Ministry of Industry and Trade), I got straight to work building an e-commerce site for myself. Since capital was limited, I chose a website builder (yet another guy I’d gotten to know, folks…).
To register an e-commerce site through this specialized platform and use their service, you can find more detailed information through the link I’ve left in this video’s description and comments.
So from there, I started making use of my existing customer data to launch marketing campaigns attracting affiliates to join DeDa.vn. At the same time, I used this very site to further push my growing gaming-gear sales business through omnichannel…
At first, everything went very smoothly — my e-commerce site ran stably and already had its first 1,000 affiliates, while my sales staff were still landing around 3-5 digital marketing service contracts, hitting the KPI we’d set. Among the businesses we’d partnered with, there were also 1-2…
Everything went smoothly for a whole year, and once my revenue from providing digital marketing services to businesses reached close to 9 figures a year, I started spending money to attract more collaborators for my DeDa.vn project.
At that point, I boldly used a whole year’s profit from the digital marketing arm to run campaigns to find more affiliate members for DeDa.vn. But all I got back were comments like this on my campaign:
At this point, I went and looked into why people were saying such things about my project, and after researching it, I found that a lot of affiliate-and-cashback projects were being used to scam people and steal their assets.
What’s more, a project running at the same time as mine, under the domain deeda.vn, had been running a charity scam by skimming commissions off patients.
At this point, I really wanted to prove my project was completely legitimate, with evidence of properly paying my affiliates — even recognized by the Ministry of Industry and Trade, unlike that scam website.
However, you can’t fend off public backlash when you don’t have enough resources (at the time, my content collaborator team was only 3 people, so there wasn’t much we could do). And so the collaborators gradually pulled out of the project (from over 1,000 members down to fewer than 10).
Lesson: don’t run a project when your resources aren’t enough yet. In business, there will always come a time when you face a media crisis, whether from a competitor playing dirty or some unfavorable market development. If you haven’t prepared enough resources in your communications team to set the record straight for yourself…
By 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Trade finally issued a clarification supporting legitimate, non-scam affiliate projects — but by then, I’d already had to shut down the project back in mid-2020 and put 100% of my effort into providing digital marketing services for my clients.
What’s more, when preparing the legal side of signing collaborator contracts with my affiliates, I overlooked and failed to keep up with Decree 40/2018/NĐ-CP, and couldn’t come up with the strongest possible arguments to defend my own project.
Yet after I decided to shut the project down, major e-commerce players like Shopee, Lazada, and Tiki jumped into this affiliate market, and of course they had better legal footing than I did — and to this day, they’re still finding success in this space.
Lesson: when you want to build a business plan for any venture, thoroughly research the relevant documents and current legal regulations so you can protect your project and build trust among the people supporting it. In general, a business project…
So now, has the cigarette in your hand burned out yet? Let me take one last drag and put it out, as if snuffing out yet another low note in my business career.
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