I was reading some articles today of companies who are actually located in countries that aren’t exactly deemed as technology leaders of sort to the point where they recognize if they were to sell their products overseas then they need to make it sound like it was made from a country that is known to have high quality products. As a result, they partnered with other companies to manufacture and distribute their products which seemed to solve that perception issue.
This isn’t the first time I have read stories like these. I still remember one about a teen that literally wanted to design websites as a business where he was perfectly capable of doing the job. However, because of his age people laughed at him while not giving him a chance. So his solution was to literally pay someone to be the face for him where people thought the adult he hired was the person doing the work. Not surprisingly, people were more open to actually doing business with him this way.
That’s just one of the realities in running any kind of business as people will judge you unfortunately with superficial factors like these regardless of your qualifications. Because of that, you need to adapt and find solutions for it versus the fairy tale approach where everyone treats people just based on skill and qualifications.