By Ty Morse
The startup community in the U.S. is crowded. Everyone wants to be their own boss, run their own company, and make their own money. We believe that we can, and so we do. The entrepreneurial spirit is part of our cultural heritage. This optimistic desire to create new things is amazing and wonderful, but it is also rampant and excessive. For those of us in the startup community, the overgrowth of entrepreneurs and plethora of startups has created two substantial challenges:
- Competition. We know that competition is healthy, but competition also means that there are many people and companies innovating the same or similar products and services. Someone else is thinking of a way to make it better, faster and cheaper before you do. Someone else is always outsmarting you or one-upping you because there is always someone else doing the same thing as you. You are challenged to establish your own share of the market.
- Employees. If everyone wants to and potentially can be their own boss, then who wants to do the work, gain experience and learn from someone else? It's hard to find good people who are willing to work for you to make your product or service the best it can be. Employees may work for you to earn a paycheck, but they have their own projects, innovations and potential startups on the side; it doesn't take long before that side project becomes their main focus, and either they ask to leave or you have to ask them to. In a market where everyone has access to the education, money and tools they need to be their own boss, as soon as they have an idea, few people are interested in using their valuable resources to benefit someone else.
In the U.S., these challenges are pernicious; they undermine you at every turn. You have a new idea, but someone has already patented it, bought the website and garnered the market share. Or, you have a great product or service but your business operations are regularly interrupted by employee turnover or overly entitled prospective hires.
Fortunately, business isn't limited to the U.S. In fact, many emerging markets around the world exist where entrepreneurship and startups are a brand new thing. Most of these countries have growing numbers of educated people looking for employment: they are hungry to work hard and to learn, and they do not yet have access to a wellspring of opportunities. Emerging markets provide the answers to the two biggest challenges facing American startups--less competition, if any, and a bigger pool of invested and determined potential employees.
Because the pool of startups and entrepreneurs is smaller in these emerging markets, it's easy to quickly build a network of people who want to work with you. And many of these countries genuinely want to encourage startup and entrepreneurial growth, so they have funds available to people who want to bring business or develop business in their markets.
The U.S. is the center of the startup world, but the astounding growth in technology, the ease of travel, the increasing access to education (much of which is actually better than our U.S. educational system), and the prevalence of English as a second language around the world mean that entrepreneurs have access to massive opportunity by looking beyond the obvious and finding new and emerging markets to explore. In other countries, startups can take advantage of resources, talent and capital, which, so scarce in the U.S., is plentiful around the world. Your opportunities are global.
Ty Morse is the CEO of Songwhale, an interactive technology company focusing on enterprise SMS solutions and direct response campaigns, both domestic and international. Since the company's 2007 launch, Ty has grown Songwhale into an international leader in mobile marketing. A two-time Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, Ty has been featured in the New York Times, Wired, NPR, PBS, and Discovery Channel and published in Forbes, the NY Report and Geek.