Why Vietnam is proud of Flappy Bird

February 9, 2014 Leave a comment

Why Vietnam is proud of Flappy Bird

February 7, 2014

by Anh-Minh Do

Flappy Bird, the hottest app coming out of Asia (and possibly the world) at the moment, is from Vietnam. Today, in Vietnam’s startup and tech scene, Flappy Bird marks a major achievement. It’s a moment of pride and triumph for the fledgling community. It’s common to hear someone say “When you ask people about Vietnam, the first thing they remember is the war. I want Vietnam to be known for innovation. I want my product to break that mold and redefine what Vietnam is.” And against the most bizarre and lucky odds, Flappy Bird has done it. Flappy Bird is the most famous piece of Vietnamese software in the world right now.

Of course, most of its players will not know (or care) that Vietnam is where the game came from. But for people in the Vietnamese tech industry, it’s a huge deal. After all, how did this lone developer amass over 50 million downloads on the App Store, with over 500,000 reviews, two to three million downloadsper day and $50,000 in revenue per day? It’s baffled analysts and even unseated Facebook’s buzzed-about Paper app, which has sat at second place in the App Store since Flappy Bird went viral.

Everybody will have their own explanations for how Dong Nguyen made the game in one night and rose to Appilionaire fame. But for today, it’s a celebration of Vietnam’s tech world.

Adding to Flappy Bird’s mystique is Dong Nguyen’s silence and avoidance of the press. Tech In Asia, despite corresponding with Nguyen regularly, has yet to pin him down for a face-to-face interview time – and the two of us live in the same country. Moreover, Nguyen had been on our radar as a developer to watch months before Flappy Bird went viral, but even at that time he remained press-shy. This is in stark contrast to most startups, game designers, and tech companies in Vietnam who are desperate for media attention, hoping it will help them get them more users, investors, and community support. And that has only fueled the interest in him as a person. But true to his own values, he is trying to stay focused on his product.

Flappy Bird is surprisingly not the only runaway success from Vietnam

The sad dichotomy of all this is the silence from investors and startups toward Vietnam as a whole. This includes both Asian investors and American investors. 500 Startups, on its first trip into Asia skipped right over Vietnam and went to Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore. In a recent Tech in Asia survey, we asked what countries people would be interested in learning about at Startup Asia Singapore. Vietnam was largely ignored.

No doubt this has left Vietnam rather isolated from international investment and the sentiment is that Vietnam is a blackbox. But the thing is, Flappy Bird is not Vietnam’s only mobile app success and the country is also opening up.

Changes in investment and the apps you didn’t know came from Vietnam

Flappy Bird is yet another indicator of Vietnam’s potential. As Action.vn, Vietnam’s leading and oldest startup blog, noted last month, there were 18 significant investments in Vietnam in 2013, ranging from strategic investments, series A, series B, M&A’s, and seed funding. Chris Zobrist, CEO and founder of Saigon Hub, Vietnam’s largest co-working space, says “In 2014, we’re going to see a big difference from 2013 in that there’s going to be much more money and investment coming in from within Vietnam and international.” Japanese, Russian, and Korean investors are all keenly looking at Vietnam for investments.

At the same time, it’s becoming quite clear that Vietnamese startups are also very fundable. Flappy Bird, after all, isn’t the only Vietnamese app that is topping the App Store. Fuzel App is not only the first app to introduce animated visual collages to iOS but is also consistently towards the top of photography app rankings. INKredible is also another app that has topped the App Store in the productivity category for iPad, ranking number one ever since its introduction. It’s also from Vietnam.

So yes, Flappy Bird is cause for celebration and this will be a big year for Vietnam. There’s more to come out of this country.

 

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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