By Niniane
In recent years, there has been a good deal of talk about the rising importance of the Chinese market. Companies hold seminars on how to conduct business in China. Many of my American friends took Mandarin classes. Given the attention, I am surprised at the relative lack of web sites made in Silicon Valley focusing around the Chinese market; the blogosphere proliferates with coverage on US-centric products.
Recently my college friend and I made a web site to accumulate user reviews and photos of Chinese hotels. In going through this process, I came up with a few thoughts on the pros and cons of making a software project focused on the Chinese market.
A couple of the benefits:
- If you base your engineering in China, talent is cheaper to recruit. From salary numbers that I’ve heard, I estimate that it is six times cheaper to hire an engineer in China vs. the US. This means you can stretch out an angel round for a year or two. Although we did not take advantage of this perk, many of our friends have talked about it.
- The potential market is large. The number of Chinese internet users rose 42% in 2008 and now surpasses the size of the American internet population. This number is also growing more quickly in China than the global average, especially in rural areas.
A few thoughts on the challenges:
- CPM from AdSense and other sponsored ads are often lower on Chinese-language sites. This is a common way for smaller sites to generate income, so it can be a hurdle. However, other methods of income (virtual goods, lead generation) are as viable in the Chinese market. Our site employs both Adsense and lead generation.
- The best products are made by people who understand the customer. Some developers have voiced a concern that they lack this intuitive knowledge of what draws a Chinese user to the site. The most visible manifestation centers around how Chinese web sites appear cluttered with links compared to most American web 2.0 sites.
There are other perks and obstacles that I haven’t addressed. If you have thoughts on this subject, please chime in on the comments!
Niniane is the co-creator of hotelfoo.com. Previously she worked as an engineering manager at Microsoft and Google. She resides in Mountain View, California.
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2 Comments to “Pros and Cons of Web Products in the Chinese Market”
Jeff wrote:
I recently did a project with an engineering team in China – not quite a web hosting project, but we did do some work with web technologies.
Some positives from the experience:
1. I got excellent work done at much cheaper rates than if I hired a US team. I was very pleased with the quality of the work.
2. The Chinese team was really “hungry” and eager to learn. They were really disciplined, and that combo of eagerness and discipline made them a real pleasure to work with. I am not sure if this is a typical experience, though, but mine was really good.
Some negatives:
1. Time zone craziness – I was the only one in the US, so we met during their day. My late afternoons were typically busy with kids activities, so I would end up meeting with them in the middle of the evening.
2. Occasional communication problems. – I don’t speak Chinese, while some of the team didn’t speak English well (while I didn’t ask, I suspected that they didn’t speak Tagalog either.)
3. Occasional guilt trips – I got lectured by some people for not employing Americans and employing Chinese for the project.
For my next project, I will try to use this team again, but I have to say that the time zone hassles were a big pain that might persuade me not to use them.
Posted on 31-Mar-09 at 5:46 pm | Permalink
daniel wrote:
I once worked on a web project with a foreign-based team (not China, though)–we handled design, they handled development.
My experience was not good. The work quality was subpar, and the turnaround time was significantly longer. Part of it was the time difference, I suppose. But there were also noticeable communication issues (bugs not being fixed, wrong layout, etc)–and I felt like we had to report the same issues over and over again before it got fixed.
Most of the times, it’s so much easier to get everyone on the same page when the person you’re working with is right in front of you. We eventually brought a developer in-house instead… which ended up being a boost to workflow & productivity.
Well… YMMV, I guess.
Posted on 01-Apr-09 at 4:39 am | Permalink
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