Nook started as a copycat of US home renovation startups like "block renovation," assuming that bringing the exact same thing to Vietnam would work. It didn't — in Vietnam, like China, houses are built with partitions already in place and a lot of things are still brand new, so there wasn't the old-build renovation market the US playbook assumed.
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Robert figured that since these US startups had raised tons of money and there were copycat clones in China, "if we brought this exact same thing to Vietnam, we'd be successful." For about a year the idea "just totally fell." The US playbook was to start with the bathroom — the most complicated space — then expand to the kitchen and the rest of the home. But in Vietnam the builds were brand new with partitions already in, unlike the old US builds you'd renovate. The pivot was forced: they realised they had to build a construction marketplace just to execute the renovations, and the real opportunity turned out to be the blue collar workers themselves.