An informative guide for foreigners who wish to explore the business landscape in China

China offers entrepreneurs in various industries promising opportunities.

For this reason, many foreign entrepreneurs like yourself are starting businesses in “the world’s factory”.

However, you need to follow the proper steps to fully take advantage of the opportunities for businesses in China.

Without the proper preparation, your startup could end up failing before getting established overseas.

If you want to achieve a better outcome, read this post on how to start a business in China as a foreigner.

Conduct market research

To start a company in China as a foreigner, you need to conduct market research. While researching, you will determine what the best opportunities available are.

Keep in mind that businesses thriving in the United States may not be successful in China. Different products and services may be in high demand in “the world’s factory”.

Also Read: A China VC gives you the lowdown on the future of Chinese tech (Pt. 1 )

You need to identify these products and services to achieve your entrepreneurial goals and earn a profit.

During this process, you should also learn about the “barter economy” and how it affects the market.

If you complete market research well, you will choose a promising product or service to sell. In turn, you will succeed in starting a business in China as a foreigner.

Choose a business structure

After you decide on a promising product or service to sell in China’s market, choose a business structure.

In China, you have four options to choose from. They include a joint venture, representative office, a wholly foreign-owned enterprise (WFOE), an umbrella company.

If you set up your business as a joint venture, you declare that you will run it with a local partner.

The representative office option does not yield any revenue because it is strictly for communicating. WFOE businesses take longer to set up than other options.

However, they provide entrepreneurs with full sovereignty on their businesses, making the extra time worth it for some foreigners.

Lastly, umbrella companies do not actually create structures in China. Determine which option would suit you the best to start and scale a successful business in China.

Pick a promising location

Moreover, entrepreneurs need to pick promising locations to launch their startups in China. The best way to choose a location is to travel there in person. Then, you can experience the areas first-hand.

Consider your transportation and logistical needs when visiting so that you can make a well-informed decision.

Additionally, you should research the culture before traveling to China for the first time. This is especially crucial for foreign entrepreneurs planning to network.

Also Read: A China VC gives you the lowdown on the future of Chinese tech (Pt. 2 )

If you accidentally disrespect a potential investor, customer or employee, you could create a bad reputation for your startup before it even launches.

Guarantee yourself success by not only picking a promising location for your business but also making a good first impression when you travel to China.

Then, you will succeed in starting up your company.

Gather the necessary documents

Foreign entrepreneurs also need to gather the required documents to launch startups in China.

These documents include Articles of Formation certified by the Chinese embassy, copies of your investors’ passports and bank references.

You also need to supply a business scope, registered capital, copies of your letter of authorisation and your new office address in China.

Furthermore, prepare copies of the Chinese legal representative and a resume as well.

You will need all of these documents to legally start a business in China as a foreigner.

Wait for government approval

Finally, you need Chinese government approval to start conducting business. Typically, foreign entrepreneurs hear back from the Chinese government within two to three months.

However, it depends on the size and location of different projects.

If you plan to set up a new business in a big city, it will likely take longer to receive notice from the government. Additionally, more extensive projects usually call for negotiations.

Therefore, entrepreneurs trying to start large projects in China should brush up on their negotiation skills to achieve their startup goals.

Regardless of the size of your project idea, you need government approval before you can officially start your business in China.

Entrepreneurs jump at the idea of doing business in China, which is also known as “the world’s factory”.

To take advantage of the possibilities the country offers, you need to determine what the options are through market research.

Then, choose one of the four business structures.

Travel to China to select a promising location for your startup, brushing up on your culture knowledge before departing.

Also Read: How China is outperforming the US and Europe in technology and innovation

Gather the documents the government requires foreign entrepreneurs. Lastly, wait for government approval and prepare to negotiate terms.

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The history of communication has a profound impact on the way we function as a society today

All businesses market themselves in one way or another because they want their target audiences to choose their products or services over a competitor’s.

Marketing is more than just that in the modern world, though. Not only do customers and clients want to purchase business’ products or services – they want to align with the business’s journey, mission and vision.

Marketing mindsets have not always been this way. So, how did we go from accepting services from nearby vendors to choosing from a vast amount of service providers?

And when did we decide that a business’ journey, mission and vision were essential aspects in the decision-making process?

Well, there’s a history of marketing for businesses, and it starts with word of mouth communication.

History of marketing communications

Word of mouth communication

Before printing supplies were utilised for marketing purposes, word of mouth reigned as the supreme marketing tool. The factors that made a business unique or credible had to be relayed verbally.

People couldn’t go on Yelp or Google to review a business or worker. They heard about a business – and peoples’ experiences with that business – by communicating face to face with friends, family and colleagues.

Also read: 3 essential crisis communication strategies every entrepreneur should know

When word of mouth communication was the primary way of delivering information, it was likely only a handful of people in the area were skilled to complete a task.

So, there wasn’t an extreme demand for people to prove their worth to a vast amount of people because the business was already theirs.

Word of mouth communication is advantageous for directly receiving messages, understanding who the message is intended to reach, clarifying information on the spot, as well as free marketing for the business.

On the flip side, the cons of word of mouth communication concern the possible inaccuracy of information etc., difficulty reaching a wide amount of people, coming to a standstill of interest and engagement and it’s not easy to measure.

At this period in time, business owners and merchants needed tangible ways to market themselves for a profit. In response, print communication was utilised for marketing.

Print communication

Years ago, print resources were more popular than digital platforms.

By this time, there was a reason to purchase a place in the newspaper for your business ad, there were grounds for posting flyers around town, and there was justification for handing out business cards for people to retain your contact information.

It’s all because there was competition, and proximity was no longer the biggest factor when choosing a business to buy from.

Although, newspapers, flyers and business cards were posted and handed out among audiences that weren’t quite targeted to the highest potential.

With numerous corporations competing for the same peoples’ business, business owners had to give those audiences a reason to choose them.

Businesses had to come up with ways to showcase the offerings of the business in a 2D format. Without someone there to explain the benefits of choosing one company over another, it was left to the consumer to analyse information and make a choice on their own.

Positive aspects of print communication include the ability to take marketing materials with you, targeted marketing with strategically placed advertisements and a loyal readership of publications.

Conversely, the negative aspects of print communication are that printouts can be easily ignored, tossed to the side or thrown away, there is limited readership of print communication channels and print quality is not as high as digital displays.

So, our marketing tactics could be improved. Thankfully, the internet was created, and social media platforms were developed for digital social interactions.

Digital communication

Now that we live in a digital world, businesses are discovering how critical it is to involve itself in a variety of digital platforms, including social media.

Social media isn’t only for business, though. The reason businesses started creating profiles on social media was to reach their audiences.

Not only are the online platforms showcases for your business, but they entice audiences with visual and audio content.

Today’s competitive market requires businesses to uniquely position themselves to attract people to give them their business.

Digital communication is excellent for reaching a lot of people in your target market, cost-effective marketing, and measuring the success of your marketing efforts.

Unfortunately, involvement on the web can put users at risk of privacy and security of the technology being used. Public feedback can be negative and there is a high amount of competition.

Today, digital marketing is arguably the most accessible forms of marketing. Millions of people communicate digitally across types of social media platforms.

Present-day implications

Word of mouth communication

You can’t control what every customer says about your business, but you can give them a reason to speak positively on your behalf.

Word of mouth, while not a form of marketing to solely rely on, is still an important aspect of marketing. People trust their friends and family members to give them an honest account of their experiences.

Drive conversations by bringing up relevant company achievements and recent projects.

Print communication

Print communication is a form of visual communication, and the purpose of marketing through visuals should be to turn the reader into your customer.

Some print materials are handed to people. Others sit on tables or other platforms where interested consumers can grab them on their own.

No one is there to explain what your text means, so you have to relay your message in an understandable, two-dimensional way.

Additionally, your business’ message should be represented consistently across all print forms.

Interpretation is up to the viewer, but it’s your responsibility to direct and capture their attention using thoughtful marketing strategies.

Also read: Effective communication is key to startup growth

Some business owners grab viewers’ attention by including eye-catching visuals. Others exquisitely describe their offerings with text.

Combining the two is a sure way to grab the attention of your target audience. Just make sure to remain consistent across your marketing materials.

Digital communication

Your business’ interaction online plays a big role in the overall success of the company. These platforms are too critical for businesses to engage on to skip signing up for them.

The target audiences you’re trying to reach is accessible. They’re looking for the best in the business. Show them why you’re the right business to choose!

Your commitment means increased publicity, increased engagement and increased wealth. What business owner doesn’t want that for themselves and their company?

Journey, mission and vision

Conclusion

From word-of-mouth-only times to the world’s digital transformation period, marketing one’s business has changed tremendously.

There are positive aspects and drawbacks to all communication forms, but using them interchangeably can have an impact on your digital marketing success.

Your business’ marketing tactics should be modernised to fulfil the needs of your consumer and ultimately boost revenue.

While your mode of communication may differ, your message should be consistent. What is it you want your consumer to know, and why should they choose you instead of the competition?

Also read: Beyond managing PR disasters, effective communications strategy ensures all stakeholders are united in achieving organisational goals

Drive your customers online, where they can interact with your company digitally. Encourage them to engage with your business on social media, and they will learn more about your business’ journey, mission and vision in the process.

Use your understanding of effective communication when marketing your business and persuade your audience to engage with your business in a modern way.

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Tips, from the perspective of a mentor and judge, on how you should make the best use of your time during a hackathon

Hackathons are awesome. In the short span of 36-54 hours, you and your team work tirelessly to solve problems and create amazing solutions.

Occasionally, promising solutions even spin off into standalone companies, e.g., teams that win Startup Weekend Singapore. Heck, even my first startup was conceived during a hackathon many years ago.

Interestingly, companies have also started organising hackathons as a way to hire, e.g., Grab’s AI for SEA (powered by Padang & Co), DBS’s Hack2Hire (powered by HackerRank), and Shopee’s National Data Science Challenge (powered by Kaggle).

In short, hackathons are an exciting part of the startup ecosystem not just to spur innovation, but to open up opportunities for people who may not normally have access to.

Over the years, I have transitioned from being a participant to being on the other end of the pitching stage as a judge and a mentor.

After my observation (and a bit of free time), I was motivated to write this guide in hopes of helping participants enjoy their sleepless weekends hacking away.

Who knows, you might also stand a chance of being in the top three or even find a job in your next hackathon?

1. Understand the problem

Let’s start with the most obvious tip. What does it mean to understand the hackathon’s problem? For starters, you should know what the challenge statements in the hackathon are if the hackathon is themed.

The next step is homing in who exactly will benefit from your solution/product.

Typically it’s not enough to have a top-level description of who you’re helping – you gotta know their persona. Identifying personas is something UX designers are very good at.

I’ve seen UX designers winning competitions from solely explaining how their solution transforms user journeys with a high-fidelity mockup.

As such, it’s often important to talk to the stakeholders involved in the problem. If the hackathon is themed, the organisers will usually invite individuals or representatives who can share pain points in detail. They might even be a roaming mentor during the hackathon.

Maximise your time and ask mentors the right questions, focus on their pain points rather than running solutions by them.

The chances are that you might over-optimise and create biases when you pitch a solution before you have an opportunity to understand the problem truly.

If the hackathon requires you to define your solution, it’s also important to make sure that you understand the problem inside and out by talking to more people, e.g. target users.

In addition, from my experience, the best teams (or at least the designated business person) know the problem that they’re trying to solve inside out and weaker teams struggle with understanding and articulating the same problem.

2. Check your ego at the door

Even when a team understands what problem to solve, they may not necessarily arrive at the same idea to solve it. A very common reason why teams don’t make it to Day 2 is when the teams fail to focus on a single problem, fail to arrive at an agreed-upon solution to tackle the problem.

Also Read: [Discussion] Are hackathons a waste of time? Are there better alternatives?

More specifically, conflicts occur when there are two (or more) people in the team try to dominate the direction of the team and insist that their respective idea is the best. This results in endless discussion with neither side budging. I have seen teams taking more than half a day to debate.

There are three ways to solve this:

1. If you find yourself the one trying to convince your team that your idea is the best, keep your ego in check and come to a compromise with the team. Commit to taking 1-2h to research the problem and everyone present their ideas. Whoever sounds the most reasonable wins.

2. If you find that your teammate is giving the team a hard time, consider 1). Otherwise, kick the teammate out if he/she continues to be a source of indecision and annoyance. Better cut your losses early.

3. Find a mentor as a sounding board and let him/her decide whose idea is the best. One of the roles of a hackathon mentor is to ensure that teams work well, and they do not end up disbanding over conflicts. Also, agree on just one mentor. Don’t look for another mentor just because your idea lost.

If it doesn’t work out in the end, consider disbanding altogether and find other teammates. It’s better than sticking it out with a discordant team and having a bad time all weekend. Sometimes, you gotta let go, y’know?

3. Get validation

Now that you’ve understood the problem on a deeper level, what’s next? A solution is not exactly a solution if no one wants to use it.

For consumer solutions, you can always call up a friend or two (or your village) and run it by them to see if it’s something that works. For B2B-centric solutions, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from picking up a phone and harassing/engaging/asking people on LinkedIn.

Not only do you get to unbiased feedback, but you might also end up getting validation from your would-be users/customers. The only challenge is that you’d have to message hard because it’s the weekend after all.

For most of the hackathons I judge in, validation gives you extra points. I recall watching a pitch where a team reached out to large institutions, identified decisionmakers, and got a letter of interest. They won.

It’s really how hard you hustle for that “yes that’s something I want to use”.

4. Tell a story, not the product features

I see this happening very often with teams which are solution/product-centric. During the pitch, I often encountered teams that spent most of their time describing their solution and product features rather than how the solution solves a particular problem.

Take a pitch for the Grab app, for example. You can do it two ways during a hypothetical pitch:

1. Problem centric: “The Grab app helps users save time hailing a ride and ensures that they reach their location in time. This is in contrast to waiting by the roadside to hail a taxi without any certainty, or spending a long time queuing at the taxi stand.”

2.Product centric: “The Grab app lets you input your current location and your intended location and then contacts the nearest available vehicle to come to you. You can keep track of the car using the phone’s GPS. When it arrives, you get on!”

These two pitchers have almost the same number of words (45 vs 41), but one pitch is more meaningful. Teams often fall prey to the shininess of their product. Don’t let that team be yours.

But wait a minute. Does it mean that there’s no point in creating a product? Yes and no.

Sometimes, if the judging rubric does not involve a completely functioning prototype, it may be better to consider a high-fidelity mockup that shows the judges what you’re solving, rather than what you’re telling.

Also Read: Go-Jek launches a new hackathon to solve everyday problems in the lives of Indonesians

This evens the ground for non-technical teams. I have seen high-fidelity mockups beating fully functioning websites, by the sheer power of telling a good story and explaining how their solution tackles the problem.

5. Do your homework

During the pitching session, as a judge, I often ask teams whether they’ve seen any solutions out there doing what they proposed, i.e. competitors, and how and why their solution is better.

If they didn’t do their homework, they’d stammer a no. Good teams often do extensive research on the problem and can compare themselves to existing solutions.

It’s also prudent to anticipate questions from judges and prepare additional slides to answer those questions.

Show judges that you know your shit.

6. Practice, practice, practice

As a judge, it is very easy to tell whether a team is prepared or otherwise. Even when they’re tired, you can see the gleam in their eyes and confidence.

Pitching can be daunting since you’re essentially compressing 36-54 hours of work into a 5-minute pitch. Despite that, most of the time, I see teams practising their pitch on the last day, sometimes only a few hours before their pitching session.

Doing last-minute pitch preparation is a bad idea for a few reasons. Firstly, the chances are that you’re exhausted from working on your solution for the past 36+ hours. This means that it’ll be much harder to organise your thoughts in this tired state of mind.

Secondly, when you organise your pitch, you’ll start discovering holes in your idea which may not have been apparent at first. If you’re lucky, you can fix those holes.

If you’re not, these holes surface during the pitch and Q&A. If you don’t fix those holes, it will result in a subpar pitch which doesn’t do anyone in the team and the idea any justice.

Lastly, it’s very easy to develop nerves if you don’t practise enough. This is even truer if there’s no reliable pitcher in the team. Avoid pitching as a team and designate a single person to pitch; the time you spend moving from one person to another should be spent on presenting instead.

The solution to this?

Start early. Your pitch should be developed alongside your hackathon solution, the moment your team agrees on what to solve. This can (and should) happen on Day 1.

Also Read: Smart floating dome, zombie detector emerge winners at Sci-Fi Hardware Hackathon 2016

It’s never too early to start designing your pitch deck. This way, you’re continuously iterating your pitch as the idea is developed into a product. Another plus side is that the pitcher (usually the business person) is hustling along with the developer, which spurs greater team harmony and dynamics.

Good luck, and don’t fu-, mess it up

That’s all folks; this is my take on how participants can experience the spirit of a hackathon.

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