Press Release
Getting rich in “the stormeye”
14/06/2008
Surely, when choosing the name Mat Bao to name a company, student Le Hai Binh (now a director of Mat Bao Company) did not believe that in market environment, to get into the “quite” place like “the eye of a hurricane”, he has to survive to get over strong waves and winds, and to compete severely.
The difficulties on Mr. Hai Binh’s career path are also an example for many young people who want to start their career by setting up a company…
Starting a career
In 2001, student Le Hai Binh, born in Dat Lat, studied IT at HCM City university of Polytechnic, had to throw himself into working for many software companies as a part-time worker to earn money to pay his tuition and accommodation and to accumulate experience. In 2002, he opened Mat Bao Company, specializing in providing online services. His total assets at the beginning were 15 million dong and 3 computers. He just hired one third of the third floor of a house in district 11, HCM City to locate his office. ”There were only five people. My friend, Huy Phong, and I are vice director and director; both not only did executed the sales, but also wrote software, as well as did accounting and whatever we could do.” Binh blinked his eyes and smiled when remembering his first days of starting his career.
Wandering in a
Wandering in a storm
Le Hai Binh:
“My biggest failure”
“We developed a website about online recruitment (webvieclam.com) at a time when Vietnam Works did not appear; websites about online work did not also exist, but we had to withdraw from this sector. That is my failure. Later we found that if you only use a technician’s mind into trading, it will be hard to develop. If you want to penetrate into a market, you shall have a creative look to find your own way. A big company has its own advantages, so is a small company. It is impossible for a huge man to collect as meticulously small stones on his way as a small man. From those stones, he can build a castle. Everyone starts from a small company. If you take a good care of your customers, know how to care about human factor to develop, you will not have to worry about failures.”
Binh and Phong were willing to work hard, accepted to work all days and nights in hopes of “surviving” through thirst for work. Having a good qualification, however, is not enough; the biggest capital that we did not have is customers. Binh knew that it was important for a new company to build prestige gradually, but house rental, office expenses failed to wait for him; good staff would leave if there was nothing for them to do. He could not sit and wait, he decided to introduce a promotion which was shocking at that time; that is, to develop websites free of charge. Huy Phong, his close friend, remembered, “at that time, big companies often had contracts to develop websites for businesses, organizations at a rate of US$ 2.000 up. We were the first to introduce this promotion to construct websites for businesses “free of charge”.
After this shocking promotion, we had a lot of work to do. Within 2 months, we received about 80 orders to construct websites. Not collecting the beginning charges, but more than half the customers used our value added services, giving us work to do during the most difficult time; and they became our prospect customers later.”
In 2004, Binh decided to focus on hosting providing and internet service packages. Our problem at that time was how to develop the market while most of it has been tapped for some years before by providers like FPT, VDC…
Found “gold” when providing internet service
After many months of getting to know, Mat Bao members found their own way. While many companies focus on making to orders, Binh put himself in customers’ positions to find out requirements. He approached customers to find out each target’s needs. After that, Hai Binh and his colleagues have improved expanded service packages and introduced them to the customers.
In this way, Mat Bao has gradually expanded its market share and become one of Vietnam’s three largest domain/hosting service providers (according to the assessment of an international e-commerce website webhosting.info belonging to Amazon group). We were also decided to become an official Vietnamese domain registrar by VNNIC. More importantly, we recently were granted an OSP certificate (Online Service Provider).
When the company develops strongly, it is also time for Mat Bao to face a “whirlwind” of hackers. On September 2, 2004, some of Mr. Binh’s servers were attacked by hackers. Data, secure information of our customers were likely revealed. Mr. Binh stopped his holiday to promptly return HCM City in order to work with technical staff to make every effort to restore the system. “It is our big lesson. Now, we assert that technology security is our life or death factor,” said Binh. The Mat Bao’s director’s way to secure technology is to focus on the entire system security, as well as individual products. Each member of a project group just performs a different segment of work. The technical manager is the only person to gather and correct final errors. There are about 10 people in a testing and error correcting department in the company; they always keep on working to minimize the attacks on the system.
Kap Thanh Long