Finding Your First Recurring Customers in Vietnam

You have a working product, a few encouraging conversations, and a question: who will pay for this every month?

For a small team in Ho Chi Minh City, go-to-market work should fit around building. It needs to help you find a buyer, understand a recurring problem, and test whether solving it earns repeat business.

This guide is for B2B software and productized services with ongoing value. Monthly recurring revenue, or MRR, makes sense when customers buy a recurring service. A one-off project can be a good business without becoming a subscription.

1. Choose a customer you can actually reach

Start with one city, one segment, one buyer, and one recurring job.

Here’s a hypothetical starting point: operations managers at small digital agencies in HCMC who spend Friday afternoons assembling client reports. The buyer might be the agency owner; the daily user might be an account manager. Interview both.

Write down 20 businesses that could fit. If you cannot name them or find a route to a conversation, narrow or change the segment.

Be careful about who your network represents. If your contacts are English-speaking founders, their feedback may tell you little about Vietnamese-speaking operations teams. Ask which language people use for the work, and have a fluent speaker review your interview questions and onboarding where needed.

2. Investigate the process before showing the product

Ask someone to walk through the last time they did the job, using a redacted example. Find out:

What triggered the work, and how often does it happen?
Which tools, spreadsheets, or messages were involved?
What took time or went wrong?
What do they already spend on the process?
Who can approve a replacement, and from which budget?

For the agency example, “reporting is annoying” needs more investigation. How long did the last report take? Who checked it? What happened when it was late?

End by asking whether the problem is important enough to address this month. Record objections in the buyer’s words. A polite demo request carries less evidence than access to the person responsible for the budget.

3. Test two ways of reaching buyers

Keep early sales founder-led so you hear where the offer is unclear.

Choose two routes: perhaps personal introductions and a relevant professional community, or carefully targeted email and referrals from a service provider. A local meetup can help you meet operators and learn how they work. Ask permission before following up, and contribute something useful before asking for introductions.

Zalo is another option to test with the buyer’s agreement. Zalo Official Account supports business–customer messaging, including two-way messages with users who have already interacted with the account. That capability does not establish whether your buyer wants sales outreach there. Ask what channel they prefer.

Track qualified conversations, paid pilots, and founder hours by source. Replies alone will not tell you which route can support a business.

4. Offer a paid pilot with an ending

Turn the recurring problem into a small, specific offer. For the hypothetical agency, that might be producing one client’s weekly report through a two-week pilot.

Agree on the scope, price, customer owner, required inputs, and review date. Define success against the current process: time spent, correction count, or another measure the buyer cares about. Specify support limits and what happens when the pilot ends.

Discuss the ongoing price before starting. Keep the pilot fee separate from recurring revenue until the customer activates an ongoing subscription.

Manual help is reasonable while learning. Log the hours so you can see whether delivery, support, and infrastructure costs leave a viable margin.

5. Make the purchase workable locally

Before changing your price, understand what prevents payment.

Ask the buyer’s finance contact about the contracting entity, invoice details, purchase approval, payment timing, and currency. Confirm whether a VND quote would help and what your own billing setup can support. Check invoice and tax requirements with a qualified local adviser.

Payment options deserve a direct question. NAPAS describes VietQR as a way to make bank transfers by scanning a QR code. If that fits your customer’s process and your provider supports it, test an invoice-and-transfer workflow. Plan reconciliation and reminders; a customer-initiated QR transfer does not establish automatic monthly collection.

Choose a pricing unit the customer understands, such as active seats, locations, or reporting accounts. Test willingness to pay against demonstrated value and delivery cost.

6. Earn the renewal, then expand

Define the first useful outcome and help each new customer reach it. Review actual use weekly. Before renewal, ask what they would lose if the service disappeared.

Track onboarding completion, time to first value, support hours, overdue invoices, and renewal decisions. With only a few customers, read each account individually. One departure can change the percentages dramatically.

Once customers repeatedly get value, test expansion through more users, another team, or an adjacent workflow. Before entering another Southeast Asian market, recheck language, buyer access, payment, and procurement. A successful HCMC sales motion is a starting hypothesis for the next market.

7. Keep the revenue maths honest

MRR is the monthly-normalized value of active recurring subscriptions. For fixed-price subscriptions in one reporting currency:

Ending MRR = starting MRR + new + expansion + reactivation − contraction − churn.

A hypothetical business starting at VND 10 million, adding VND 4 million in new subscriptions and VND 1 million in expansion, then losing VND 2 million to cancellations, ends at VND 13 million MRR, assuming no other movements.

Spread annual subscriptions across 12 months. Exclude one-off setup fees, trials, unsigned pipeline, and gross merchandise value. Report variable usage revenue separately. Track cash collected and overdue balances alongside MRR; billing systems can count past-due subscriptions. Document your definition and, if consolidating currencies, separate exchange-rate effects. Stripe’s analytics documentation explains these distinctions.

A manageable first 30 days

Days 1–7: Name 20 target accounts. Aim for five process interviews; record the buyer, current workaround, budget, and urgency.
Days 8–14: Test two outreach routes. Aim for five more interviews and present a bounded offer to qualified prospects.
Days 15–21: Run any agreed paid pilots. Measure the baseline, first useful outcome, and delivery hours.
Days 22–30: Review results with each buyer. Record conversion decisions, recurring commitments, cash collected, and the next renewal date.

Treat these as activity targets. Thirty days can reveal whether the offer deserves another test; retention takes longer to establish.

Bring one customer problem or pricing question to The Sandbox’s next After Hours.