From the small province of Nghe An in Central Vietnam, Vo Tuan Binh or Bill Vo was born into a family full of musical talents, making music almost part of his DNAs. As Bill Vo grew up, he found himself developing another equally strong love for technology, and that was when his dream of combining his two life-long passions into one career was conjured.
Bill Vo founded the music technology company Amanotes in 2014, which then became one of the most successful Vietnamese tech companies in the world with the catchy slogan “Everyone can music.” Since its initiation, Amanotes has published over 30 applications of its own, reaching over 2.7 billion downloads globally.
Let’s meet Bill Vo to learn about his story to foster such a globally successful business venture.
What was your background and how did you decide to launch Amanotes?
Reflecting on my journey with Amanotes, I can absolutely resonate with a famous quote from Jeff Bezos, “All overnight success took about 10 years”. My journey started back in 2004 when suddenly I had the vision to do something big and impactful for society. Hence, I reviewed my internal resources and found my two prominent assets which are technologies and music, and I told myself why not combine them into one magnificent venture.
It was until 2009 that I thought I could finally realise my dream. With an urge to bring Vietnamese products to the global stage, I founded a startup to produce a musical game with an ambition to overthrow Audition, the world’s most popular online music game at the time.
But it was a major flop. I failed fast and failed hard before the product was even released. I did not fully understand the customers, and I tried to achieve something out of my league at the time.
But I persevered, and then by chance, I stumbled upon a post by Silver Nguyen on a popular startup community on Facebook. His visions and dreams immediately spoke to my heart, so I asked to meet him in person and from our first conversation, I knew he is my perfect puzzle piece.
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We launched Amanotes together in December 2014. With Silver, the road became much more blissful; I focused on the products and technologies while Silver ran pretty much everything else.
Since establishments, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
There are several keys to our success. First, we become successful because we fail many times, and learn from our own mistakes. To illustrate, after several failures with computer-based products, we obtained more insights and decided to switch to mobile games, which are growing in popularity among customers and align with the company’s technical strengths.
Second, simplicity is still the best when it comes to product design. In the beginning, I tried to fit everything in my product to satisfy everyone. Then I realised that the scope of the product grew too big, and I missed the golden time-to-market opportunities. Hence, less often means more here.
Third, your product must be unique and different from the competitors’ offerings; however, it does not have to be too different. In fact, you only need one or two differentiating points to really stand out. For example, with Magic Tiles, one of Amanotes’ most successful products, we chose to perfect our users’ listening experience, ensuring that our audio quality is superior to any other products on the market.
At the same time, we developed our own concept of “musicalisation”, adding product values by using music. It was our high-quality musical experience that satisfied customers and convinced them to introduce the app to other users in their network. This is also a blessing for Amanotes since in the early stage, we did not have much money to invest in marketing.
How did Amanotes go from two guys to 200+ employees?
For Amanotes, despite some challenges along the road, we have done quite a few things right that facilitate our scale-up journey. To begin with, through both successes and failures, we found a business model that works. This is a critical point because in this game industry, sometimes, having one successful product does not automatically translate into the success of other products.
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Take Angry Birds for example. After becoming a global phenomenon, Angry Birds failed to replicate its achievements with the subsequent products to solidify a sustainable business model. Hence, in our early stage, Amanotes focused on formulating a viable business model which works effectively and generates a healthy cash flow.
With our successful formulation, we managed to add more and more products into our ecosystem while maintaining our golden ratio of having at least one successful product out of 10 published applications.
Second, obviously, as our business grows, we need more people. Since we tend to dream big and do crazy things, we need talents even more. Nonetheless, recruiting in the tech industry is really hard and talents also have their own dreams and goals in life. Hence, I must sell my visions, and more importantly, prove that I can bring these visions to life.
I must make people believe in me and see a chance for themselves to grow with a thriving business and create value for society. Over the course of our existence, we have been able to show that we are one of the fastest-growing companies, not just in Vietnam but also globally.
Therefore, our impacts are global, so there is no limit to their dreams at Amanotes.
What are some of your leadership philosophies and business principles?
I would say from my experience, the first and foremost important principle for a business owner is to develop customer obsessions which I, unfortunately, did not have early on.
For instance, my first product was an application for users to play the piano via a computer’s keyboard. I was so excited about the idea and thought everyone would love it. Regretfully, in reality, no one used it; the application was too complicated even for a piano expert.
This lesson stayed with me even until this day. Now, I always try to understand my customers, envisioning who they are, their behaviours, their likes, and their dislikes. I think I have become obsessed with them.
The second principle would be to build a good team. Having talents is not enough; it is also vital to build a nurturing work culture and a strong support structure to retain and bring out the best in them.
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