Note from Shlomo: This is a sponsored post from Kodi. As one of the most read posts in Startup Noodle is about finding the right VPN for you. It made sense adding this one as well for other readers. Enjoy!

Considering going to China? In this case, a VPN is your saving grace. Of course, if you don’t want to miss a new episode of your favorite TV-show, or want to be able to chat with your friends and share photos on Facebook. Why? We’ve got some interesting information for you. If you are wondering what websites are officially blocked in China and want to know the state of VPN services there, keep reading.

And what about Kodi?

Kodi is a streaming process, allowing you to watch blocked and restricted services like Netflix, Pandora, Freeform, etc. If you want to preserve the anonymity of the traffic while streaming online, you need to get a VPN service. Of course, VPN services are not necessary for Kodi. But it is always a better practice to consider getting it set up. For more information about the importance of VPN for Kodi click here and find out how to use Kodi to get the most of it.

Using VPN in China

Without a VPN service, almost 65% of China’s Internet is blocked. Yes, the Chinese government blocks the biggest part of the world’s Internet. You literally don’t have access to anything. Among the most famous websites, which are banned in China are Gmail, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Squarespace, Pinterest, Wikipedia, SoundCloud, Flickr, Bloomberg, BBC, Snapchat, Netflix, etc. And that is only the smallest part of all websites, banned in the whole country. Harvard study claims that more than 15.000 websites are forbidden in mainland China. The Chinese government created a special program to censor media through the whole country. Thus, the only solution is a VPN service.

So, what VPNs can you use in China?

• IP Vanish. The company has one of the biggest server bases on the market. This means you can easily find a server, which suits your location. This list can be sorted by country, city, or servers. The running and download speed has no problems at all if choosing the right server. The pricing range is quite reasonable. The longer subscription the lower price is. For example, 1 month costs 10$, 3 months – 8.99$, and 1 year – 6.49$. There is a small note for Chinese customers. You will have to make small changes in a configuration menu and connect to the servers’ IP addresses.

• Express VPN. A high-speed VPN service, which supports services in more than 90 countries all over the world (Belgium, Turkey, Israel, Poland, Canada, USA, etc.). Express VPN provides access to any website, allowing to watch videos from anywhere you are. The price policy is a little bit more expensive than the previous company has. For example, 1-month trial period costs 12.95$, 6-months period – 9.99$, and 1-year period – 8.32

We recommend trying different VPN services to find out which one will work the best in your particular location.

Now you know how to have freedom in your Internet choices in China too.

I got a request from a client about 2 months ago. He said they would like to buy our service and distribute their app in China. They also mentioned that they will be paying using…Bitcoin.

The question is should you really accept that currency? Is it here to stay? What are the odds it will keep its value?

Here are my encounters of where Bitcoin is going.

My friend Itai Damti, who is the co-founder of Leverete estimates that there is a 20% chance that bitcoin will be extremely valuable. 

Is bitcoin a good investment? 

So, how does this work? How do you really receive bitcoins in your business? 

 

1. Click ‘request’ payment

2. Write down the amount you need to get paid.

 (Then the app will autogenerate a QR code which will be shown on the screen)

3. Send the QR code by email or SMS to your client.

At the moment the client scans that QR code the transaction is made and the money is transferred to your wallet. It’s really that fast and simple.

So, what’s the bottom line, should you or should you not get paid in Bitcoin? 

 

There are risks in accepting Bitcoin payments. You can lose on the value of the bitcoin currency you hold. It’s also, a volatile currency. This means that the exchange rate can change a lot in a short amount of time.

 

This what voletile means. A large change in vlaue over a short period of time. That is 5.68% change in 24 hours in this case.

 

Here are the 3 questions you need to ask yourself to make a decision. 

 

1. Do I have how to spend that Bitcoin?
2. Is the transactions accepted in Bitcoin will be a small amount of my overall turnover?
3. Can the business survive a serious devaluation of the currency?

If you’ve answered yes on all these 3 questions then you should probably consider accepting Bitcoin in your business. You need to be aware of the risks though

 

As Itai mentioned if these are relatively small amounts we are talking about it makes sense to take the chance. Even with my wife’s job, we are intending to tell them to pay only 5-10% of her salary in Bitcoin. We figured that this is a small amount that would be a nice investment, and if we loose on it, it would still not influence our life.

(Disclaimer: I’m not a financial advisor. You are accepting bitcoin at your own risk)

Now over to you?

Are you considering implementing Bitcoin payments in your business? Have you bumped into specific difficulties? Have more considerations of why to accept or not accept Bitcoin that I didn’t cover? Add those remarks in the comments or send me a message 

Image credit by Zach Copley

I’ve been recently working on writing a book that will enable me to share my knowledge and experience about raising funds in China from Chinese investors. It’s going to be called: “Raise Your Funds in China” (tentative title).

The book is still in the works, but I’m very excited to bring you the Preface of the book, along with a description of the content you’ll find there.

I have created a No Obligation pre-registration form, and I’ll announce updates about the book and, of course, the release date on this page.

As I’m still in the writing stage, I’m opening this up to crowd-sourcing. I’ll be happy to receive your input and to add specific topics that you are interested in knowing more about. Just leave your questions and remarks in the Comments section.

So …

Step #1: Register using the following form to be part of the book launch.

Step #2: Sit down, relax and enjoy the show!

 Preface

…And then I fainted.

This is how a Chinese business meeting once ended up for me. I had my (then) boss taking a picture of me in a wheelchair, being taken to my hotel room. My wife says that when I called after a few hours, I sounded awful.

That was a learning experience for me — and I want you to learn from my experience.

Working with Chinese investors isn’t an easy task. It’s a process of learning to work with people from a culture and mindset so different from westerners. But, hopefully this book will provide some insights and shortcuts for you.

At the end of 2011, I moved to Beijing with my wife. I had the pleasure of helping to build one of the most thriving and exciting entrepreneurship ecosystems in the world. I organized (and still today) one of the largest meetups in Beijing, called the “Lean Startup Meetup”. I therefore became a ‘connector’ at some point, helping people to … well…connect. It’s kind of like matchmaking, though I was never asked to help anyone find his or her significant other.

As someone who was born and raised in Israel – AKA “The Startup Nation”, I saw a lot of potential in connecting the Israeli tech ecosystem with China. Israel develops cutting-edge advanced technologies but has no market – while China is looking for new technologies and has an endless market.

Being the organizer of the meetup helped me connect with investors, and when they heard that I was working with Israeli companies to bring Israeli technologies to China – they became interested. Back then, in 2012-2013, it was still fairly new. I, of course, wasn’t the only one doing this, but if you compare it to what’s happening now in 2016-2017, Israel and China’s business relations are flourishing.

In total, I worked with close to 100 investors in China. With some I had close relationships and with others, only email correspondence. With all of them, my value proposition was the Israeli technology which is widely known around the world and was a significant advantage.

I actually thought that just by doing the right things, closing deals would be easy. It was certainly not easy.

The chapters of this book can be read in order, or according to the content you find interesting and relevant..

Chapter #1 starts with the decision-making stage – whether or why you should look at China as a potential source of funding – and also covers the current status of innovation in China.

Once you’ve made your decision to really go through the process of raising funds in China, you can take a look at Chapter #2, which will tell you what Chinese investors are looking for in a company. Their approach is very different from investors in the West.

Chapter #3 and Chapter #4 discuss the differences in doing business in China. Chapter #3 focuses on cultural differences while Chapter #4 zeroes in on business aspects.

Chapters #5, #6 and #7 address the actual meetings with investors: how to prepare, what to do while in the meeting, and, of course, what you do after that critical meeting you’ve been waiting for – in order to bring your company to life or jump it to the next level.

Chapter #8 identifies various financial vehicles that can potentially invest in your company, and the differences between them.

Chapter #9 talks about the due diligence process you’d be going through, if your company is potentially going to get the investment.

One last remark. This book could have been generally about Business in China, but I’m going to focus more on the work I’ve done with investors. Still, you can learn a lot from it about the Chinese business environment in general.

Image credit by DaMongMan

Here’s what I’m covering in this post:

1. Where to work from in Chiang Mai?
2. Which co-working space should I choose?
3. Where to live?
4. How to look for an apartment in Chiang Mai?
5. Which mobile company I should sign up with in Chiang Mai?
6. How to find a nursery, kindergarten, nanny or a babysitter for your kids or babies?

3. Where to live?

This is our place. One Plus Condo in Suan Dok area

4. How to look for an apartment in Chiang Mai?

5. Which mobile company I should sign up with in Chiang Mai?

6. How to find a nursery, kindergarten, nanny or a babysitter for your kids or babies?

Intentional schools and nurseries

• International oriented

• Egg Tots House – We spoke with them. I’ve been told the pricing on the website is outdated. I didn’t write down exactly how much it was, but you can call (082- 421 – 5009 For Thai, 087 – 817 – 0032  For English) . They have an English speaking staff. They are also the only ones we found in Nimman area.
• Kido Educare center – This one was recommended for us to check by a local who has been living here for a while. We didn’t speak with them but worth trying.
• This post from Nicole Bowden of Hello World gives a recommendation for Little Star nursery. It’s a bit further than where we live (and much more expensive than the option we found). She also has a list of international nurseries and schools in Chiang Mai
• Chiangmai Kiddee has a special program for drop in travelers if you are here for a short term of a few days. They also have a monthly program (6000 Bhat/month for half-day, 9500 Bhat/month full day).

• Local nurseries

Here are some direction maps which were drawn by people who directed me to different nurseries in the street.

• Nursing Faculty & Medicine Faculty – These two nurseries are literally 50 meters away from each other. The Nursing school has a person who speaks English which is the education counselor of the nursery. The tuition is 3500 Bhat/month for the nursing school nursery is 3500 Bhat / month.  They are both located in the university area across from Suan Dok area.

Location of where Medicine and Nursing Faculties nurseries are.

• Education Faculty – The Faculty of Education has another Nursery It’s opposite of Sethi school of the Faculty of administration., much further than the other two nurseries. Phone #: 053908666

Location of Faculty of Education nursery

 Now over to you

What’s your experience when settling in a new place? How hard was it? Give some tips if you have and share in the comments.

First and cover image by David McKelvey

Last week, I spend 4 days walking around the street of Chiang Mai. I literally went from one nursery to another, trying to find the best choice for my 1-year-old daughter.

It was tough and frustrating as there isn’t a lot online about this topic. Still, it’s exciting every time to reach a new destination and explore it like a local.

This is part of what location independence has to offer. Settle in a place and get to know it like a local vs. like a tourist. It’s not always an easy experience, but I like those challenges and discoveries it brings.

I CHOSE to live this way, what’s your choice?

My wife and I have been keeping a few principles in our lives that brought us to the point where we can live as digital nomads (This is the term many uses now instead of location independent).

Frankly, our families think we are not really normal in our approach and sure, I get why they think this. “How about just settle down?” But for us it’s the optimal way of living. With the least stress and the most flexibility.

So, first what is a digital nomad?

As I mentioned, a digital nomad is a person who is location independent. Digital nomads make enough income to support themselves while traveling.

We don’t travel all the time. But we are now about to do a long 2.5 months term of work+vacation. Flexibility is the name of the game. Let me tell you how we do this.

So, are we really a Nomadic family?

First, a little background for you to get the picture.

We always liked this flexible lifestyle.  We are now exploring the digital nomad community in Chiang Mai. This is 2.5 months long trip, with a business hop for me to Taiwan beginning of March for some meetings and MOX demo day.

By the end of March, we will be back in Israel.

Yes, I’m aware that the quality can be better, considering the circumstances it came out quite good.

Our base right now is in Israel, and we prefer it to be this way because of being close to our families.

We, of course want that our 1-year-old baby daughter will spend as much time with them.

But we certainly can live anywhere we want as long as we can afford the expenses.

So, I can’t say we are living the vagabonding life and travel indefinitely.

But what I can say is that we do have the flexibility we want to move to a new place and try it out when we want.

HOWEVER…

The ability to do that didn’t all happen in one day, though. There isn’t a certain moment I can say that we became “nomadic”.

However, we build our life and keep a few principles that keep us flexible.

And if you want to do the same you need to work on those principles to keep this flexibility.

Here are our 5 principles

1. Choose to be location independent

we CHOOSE to work remotely and looking for those kinds of jobs and opportunities. I run AppInChina remotely for 2 years now, since we left Beijing. My wife used to work for a Chinese company who kept hiring her even after we left to Israel.

She worked there up to 10 months ago and now gaining expertise in coding and QA (Quality assurance).

She had to switch to a new expertise. Why? The reason is that you can find a lot of remote jobs in programming and QA. It’s much harder to find a remote product management role which is what she used to do.

Your Takeaway:

Find a job that you can do the work remotely. If you can’t find one, learn the skills to do it.

2. Smart investing

We are trying to let out capital work for us. This is to ensure that we have as much passive income as possible.

The importance here is starting early. Avoid getting into analysis paralysis of what to invest in. I’m oversimplifying here obviously, so don’t invest in a business selling ice to Eskimos. Or should you?

Once you know what’s your sentiment to risk you are good to go with investing.

Then compound interest is the power behind this.

We mainly invest in small real estate projects overseas and the stock market (Had a wonderful 38% increase in 2016).

Your Takeaway:  

Step #1: Understand what’s your sentiment if you lose money. How much of it are you able to lose and still sleep at night.

Step #2: Start investing as soon as you can. It’s not easy but you’ll have to jump into the water and swim at some point.

Tradeking is where I manage my US portfolio. They have the lowest commissions I could find.

3. Maximizing resources

You got resources that can make you extra cash. I’m talking about your car, your house or apartment. Even different appliances you have in your house can be a source of income if you rent those out when not in use. When was the last time you’ve used your drill?

With today’s shareable economy it’s a no-brainer to do it. It does take some of time. But when you think about it, it’s worth the effort.

The way you should look at it is as something to increase your investments capital. So, you’ll have more money the earliest that gains the compound interest. Then it makes a lot of sense!

Here is how we do it

We are renting out our Yurt on Airbnb and HomeAway. We live in a Yurt because it’s Cheap, easy to move, sellable and easy to change inside when the family grows.

(we are spending a lot of time with family, so the house is empty anyway).

This is where we live:

Something we are doing as well but wasn’t proven to be successful yet is listing our car for a short term rents. Also, offering paid rides (There are a few apps you can do that in Israel) when we use our car anyway.

Your Takeaway: Have an extra room in the house or even a garden for pitching a tent.  Rent it out on Airbnb, Homeaway or any other alternative out there. 

Related: 12 sites like Airbnb for perfect holiday homes

4. Minimizing expenses

We are not huge spenders. We barely buy new stuff, let it be clothing, furniture or toys for the baby. This lets us spend less and save more and then…invest more.

Most of the things we buy are 2nd hand or we just get from different people.

There is a popular website called Agora (a ‘penny’ in Hebrew) in Israel where people give away things they don’t need, some of them are almost new.

We are also giving away things we don’t need, which brings me to the next point.

Your Takeaway: Buy things on the 2nd hand market or get things for free when people don’t need it. People really throw new usable things sometimes. It helps your financial bottom line and saves our planet.

5. Being minimalists

We got to the conclusion that we don’t need a lot of stuff for living. Less is actually more, way more.

Think about it.  All the stuff you own, require storage space and so it makes your rent higher. If you plan to buy a house it requires you need to buy a larger and more expensive place then.

Also, you need to pack your stuff when you are moving which takes more time. And time is the most valuable resource. It’s irreplaceable.

Here is how we do it.

Our rules for new furniture. It needs to fit in on one of the following categories.

1. We can move it by ourselves. No need for a special truck.
2. We don’t mind leaving it behind when we move.
3. We don’t mind giving it away at some point.

So, we rented places that already had furniture, bought 2nd hand furniture, or got those for free.

The only things we have that don’t fit in our tiny car (cheap to buy, cheap on gas) is our refrigerator and our bed both 2nd hand (cost: ~$150 and ~$37 respectively).

On the last 4-5 times we moved to a new place, we didn’t rent a truck to move, and it feels great!

We really don’t mind selling those or even giving them away when we would like to move to a new place.

Also, we are always thinking what we can get rid of and not keep it in the house. Don’t get me wrong, we still have boxes with stuff and we don’t use EVERYTHING in our closet. But we are on a constant mindset of ‘how we get rid of stuff’. So when a box goes away, that’s something to celebrate.

Your Takeaway: Be lean. You really don’t need everything you possess. Buy folding furniture or such you can take apart by yourself and move. Or just rent a furnished house or apartment, so when you move you have only boxes and you are good to go.

BTW, here is an excellent TEDx talk about minimalism if you want to learn more about it.

This is it!
I hope you understand better the flexible and lean mindset right now and I inspired you, even a little. Call it digital nomad or anything else, it just makes life much simpler.

Now over to you

What’s blocking you from being lean? If you are on the flexible mindset, what other things you do to be more flexible in your lifestyle? And most important, if you’ve got any questions for building this kind of lifestyle for yourself add those in the comments, I”ll answer them directly there.

Main image credit by Phalinn Ooi

How many posts you’ve read about productivity recently?

a. 10
b. 50
c. Endless!

And how often you see those online?

Probably a couple of times a week unless you are on the knitting space.

I see them a lot!

And what crosses your mind after reading such a post?

Is it this? “Yes, this is what I should defiantly do! That will increase my productivity! I’d be able to work like a machine!”

Why productivity tips never work?

Well, I got some bad news for you. We are human. It means that we are inconsistent, undisciplined and just slack sometimes. But hey, is it really such bad news for us?

I’m not sure actually. It means that we can be flexible with what’s happening in the world, or able to react to urgent things we need to do, or just enjoy the moment sometimes.

So, how those productivity posts really help you?

It helps you fantasizes about the perfect schedule where EVERYTHING works as you wish, on time and moves forwards. ALWAYS!

Well…It doesn’t work this way. Life is about balancing.

Balancing your work times, balancing your personal time and also on those specific times know what’s, important, urgent and what’s a waste of your time. You need to know what will lead you to the real goals in your life.

What’s the best way to balance your life?

The basic way of addressing this is thinking of your roles in life. What kind of roles are you taking on yourself in your life. Here are my roles as

Here are my roles as an example, I’m:

• AppInChina.co founder,
• Startup Noodle founder
• Father and husband (Family role)
• Friend
• Self (These are thing I do for my self-improvement; Exercise, learn new skills, etc)
• China business Cast co-host
• Lean startup Beijing Meetup Organiser.

Thinking about the things you want or need to do in term of these roles helps you out. This is because you know that if you’ve “touched” all those during the week, you’ve balanced them all out.

You’ve taken care of your professional life different roles and your personal life different roles. This is how nothing gets neglected.

Assign goals for your roles

Ok, what do we do next?

For each one of these roles you assign goals. Goals are important as they show you the way of where you are heading. You wouldn’t want to be on full force towards achieving something, but then discover you are working to accomplish the wrong thing on the bigger picture.

On an ongoing basis weekly and monthly goals works best probably. BUT, it’s important to understand that these goals need to be aligned with your life goals. What kind of person you want to be, what kind of life you’d like to have. If all your weekly and monthly goals are tied to your life goals you know you are in the right direction for what you really want for yourself.

What kind of person you want to be, what kind of life you’d like to have. If all your weekly and monthly goals are tied to your life goals you know you are in the right direction for what you really want for yourself.

Here are some of my goals for the week along with their roles, when writing this post:

– Finish 7 exercises of Copy Hour which is an excellent copywriting course I recommend (Self)
– Launch Mastermind page for Startup Noodle (Startup Noodle founder)
– Speak with more app publishing companies (AppInChina Founder)
– Prepare questions for an interview recording next week (China Business Cast co-host)
– Spend coming weekend with family (Family)
– Have lunch with my best friend (Friend)

These were my weekly goals.

Then come the tasks

Then I need to break them down into tasks during the week that leads to that goal.

As an example:
I have daily task on my calendar to finish single Copy Hour course exercise, so at the end of the week I’ll achieve my weekly goal of finishing 7 Copy hour exercises.

This method I’m talking about is outlined in the book:
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey

I read this book a few years ago .Then as far as I remember I probably haven’t finished it back then but decided to read it again recently which gave a good boost to my motivation to be more planned.

The 4 generations of time management

Stephen R. Covey talks about the 4 generations of time management for managers around the world with the main idea that you should “organize and manage by priorities”.

The 1st generation of time management characterised by writing notes and remarks, trying to give notion to the tasks we need to do and put it as part of our lives (Must say I don’t fully get this explanation of the 1st generation so much and what he means by that, but the next “generations” he talks about are much more interesting).

The 2nd generation is characterized by using calendars and diaries. These tools are trying to foresee what suppose to happen and according to that plan events and future activities.

The 3rd generations is reflected in time management as we see it today. We use priorities and values. We are making sure the priorities we assign are according to our values. In addition, we assign goals for the short, medium and long terms.

The 3rd generation tries to control our time as much as possible and plan as much as possible. We try to be very effective with everything we do and know exactly when to start and end a task.

This is why I think many of us relate to very strongly to what I stated at the beginning.

Yes, this is what I should defiantly do! That will increase my productivity! I’d be able to work like a machine!

But then… we miss something very important in life which is what makes us human and not machines. We lose the spontaneity in life and being “at the moment”. All this over planning makes people stay away from time management. It’s not natural for us.

The 4th generation acknowledges the fact that “time management” is the wrong term as Stephen R. Covey says. The real challenge is not time management but self-management. Our satisfaction comes from expectations and fulfilling them. We would like to preserve our relationships and strengthen them along with getting the results we need in the most effective way. We focus not only on the tasks themselves but also the ability to produce more with our time.

Our satisfaction comes from expectations and fulfilling them. We would like to preserve our relationships and strengthen them along with getting the results we need in the most effective way. We focus not only on the tasks themselves but also on the ability to produce more with our time.

I’ll explain that with an example:

Let’s say I need to work 12 hours a day to complete my tasks for today, but I understand that I also need to preserve my well-being and exercise to be more effective then I can perhaps exercise each day for 1 hour and then be more focused on my tasks and finish them in 8 hours. So,

So, in total I invested 9 hours on achieving these tasks and not 12. But for that I had to “give away” part of my work time to do something else which was not work but indirectly helped me achieve that. I got to be more effective!

The Importance of balance

This brings me back to the balance I mentioned before. If you invest on your well-being, spending time with family and friends and  exercising regularly you’ll then be more effective and productive so overall achieve more (not to mention that most of the time being with family and friends is much more enjoyable than work time).

How do you manage all this?

Everything I mentioned here is hard to implement, I agree. You always need to assign goals, decide on tasks and balance your roles. That’s cumbersome.

You always need to assign goals, decide on tasks and balance your roles. That’s cumbersome.

But, here is the thing. A few years ago, I bumped into a tool called Weekplan and started using it. I then forgot about it, probably because it was too hard for me to manage my life accordingly. But now after re-reading the 7-habits book, I looked it up again.

Weekplan, is a tool to manage your life according to the book. It was created by Aymeric Gaurat-Apell and is run by him as a single co-founder. It’s pretty impressive what he achieved alone with a group of freelancers.

A Note for you Aymeric, It was VERY hard for me to recall what your tool name was and find it again after such a long time. Better branding and social media will probably do the work as it’s a shame there won’t be more people using it.

Here is how my roles and goals look for this week.

Then I have my tasks assigned for each goal with a special color.

There are many more aspects in the book that are reflected in Weekplan such as writing your life goals, which I mentioned briefly, along with classifying tasks according to quadrants of important vs. urgent. I can add more about this on another post, If there will be requests from the readers.

I can add more about this on another post, If there will be requests from the readers.

Meanwhile I highly recommend you to read the 7-habits book and sign up for Weekplan .

My tip is: They work great together!

Now Over to you

Which productivity tools are you using? And what you think are your struggles with being more productive?

Image bredit by Steven Zwerink

What’s the best way to accelerate your company, which is easy, fast and also makes you a better person?

The method I’m going to show you here is extremely effective and get’s you to faster results. I use it as well and it works great for me.

I know many entrepreneurs and company CEOs are struggling with their company growth and expansion basically not knowing which direction to go and this method WILL help them to succeed.

Before I’ll talk about this, let me share with you what i’ve been up to in the last few weeks…

If you’ve subscribed to my newsletter in the last few weeks you received a survey where I asked my audience a few questions to improve my service for the community I manage. Hundreds of people received got it and  the results revealed exactly what the community needs.

Let me share some of what I’ve found.

The first question was “What kind of service would help you best on your entrepreneurial journey?”

I put in some of the services that I give to clients and really didn’t know what to expect.

Here are the results:

Mastermind group is by far the most popular choice.

I was looking for a mastermind group myself a while ago. I searched for some info about mastermind groups and how to join one and there was almost NOTHING out there.

last year I was in a mastermind group for a short while, but it was too short and the members there weren’t all committed. I even tried to open one myself back then for China Business Cast listeners but it didn’t work. The audience we had was too spread out over a few industries.

Anyway, I thought mastermind groups are a common thing, so there must be a place where you can join in such a group.

Well…there wasn’t or at least it was very hard to find back then. Perhaps they were all underground. I’m not really sure. I was disappointed but kept looking.

The 2nd question was “Please describe why you first joined Startup Noodle?”

More than half of the people said they joined because they wanted “Access to experienced China entrepreneurs info”

People are always looking for people with the right experience.

Why?

Because it saves them time to speak with somebody who already walked the path they are walking. You see, people need the experience of other people to succeed.

Mentorship has the same aspect, somebody shows you a path you don’t know yet and that moves you faster on your business.

Then I spoke with my friend Mike asking him about this. He said he knows of a few people that want to do a mastermind. I was excited but eventually, it also didn’t work.

I was frustrated. I felt that a Mastermind group is the key to my business success. I needed that support!

Then one day Mike called (nobody calls these days, they text you, but it’s a good metaphor, no?) and said that he is now part of the management team of Enter China (great club to belong to if you are building a physical product).

He said that they are about to open mastermind groups for their members. I was glad to hear this and had to wait for a few more weeks until they’ve started. I was then matched in a group with other members and have an ongoing weekly calls sience. This was exactly what I was looking for.

Are you still with me here?

Why am I telling you all this?

For one reason; to show you how successful people are becoming successful.

They are becoming successful by getting support & experience from other people. Let it be a mentor, a mastermind group or a meetup group.

Those answers from the two questions from the survey proved it.

Where is the slow engine coming in?

This is also what I call a slow engine because what you do is developing a relationship with the rest of the group members. It’s a slow process and you get to learn from them, get to know them and become their friend. That’s a slow process but get’s you on the right track fast.

This survey wasn’t supposed to be theoretical obviously, so I would just KNOW what the community needs It was meant to create an action plan. And this is exactly what I’ve been working on recently, the “Startup Noodle’s Mastermind Group”

What is “Startup Noodle Mastermind Group”?

This Mastermind group is where you can find the support, feedback, network and add knowledge you need on your entrepreneurial journey especially if your business is China related. I got all the details for you with everything you need. 

just click here to go to the signup page.

I can’t wait to get you on board!

see you on the other side.

Image credit by Bernard Spragg. NZ

The story that runs in Israel every few weeks now is “The Chinese are coming” — and it comes in a few different contexts.

The most prominent stories of the last few years were a few mega deals in the Israeli market of Chinese companies buying Israeli companies. One of the most famous ones happened in May 2014 when China’s Bright Food Group bought the most popular dairy called Tnuva, a company that for many Israelis symbolizes the country itself.

There were a lot of debates if a national symbol such as Tnuva should really be sold to a foreign entity, especially a Chinese one. What people in Israel forgot is that the majority of Tnuva stocks was sold in 2008 to Apax Partners, which is a British fund active in Israel since 1984. Back then there wasn’t such a fuss around the deal.

Another publicized deal was the selling of Phoenix insurance company to Fosun. This made headlines a few times as the deal was supposed to close by June 2015 but eventually was canceled in February 2016 as reported. This happened because of the objections of the Ministry of Finance over whether a foreign entity should hold Israeli pension funds.

Megadeals like these arise in headlines every one to two years.

Another type of deal that’s becoming very frequent now are technology deals. You hear a lot about these and it’s no wonder. In the four to five years I’ve been working with Chinese investors, I see more and more delegations coming to Israel looking for technologies.

A few examples:

– Baidu investing $5 million in Tonara

– 360 opening an early stage $60 million fund

– Ping An, Baidu and Qihoo 360 invest in Carmel venture fund

– Alibabab invests in Visualead

There are many many other examples. Generally since 2011, there has been a 50% year-on-year growth of Chinese investment in Israel according to IVC .

These investments also lead to more and more local presence. Baidu has an office now in Israel after several investments and so other large Chinese companies declare opening offices and R&D centers in Israel. Techocode, which is a Chinese accelerator (focusing currently on artificial intelligence and MedTech) opened up for Israeli companies in Tel Aviv and Vadi ventures operating also from Tel Aviv which connects Chinese and Israeli companies.

Mr. Yoav Sade, who is in charge of China region and a Partner at Meitar Liquornik Geva Leshem Tal law firm, says: ”We definitely see an increase in the number of delegations coming in. We now have Chinese delegation visits almost every week. We are also seeing an increase in Chinese involvement in many of the deals we are advising.”

I’m not surprised by what he says and with more and more delegations coming in, there is more room now for conferences around China-Israel technology and investments (goes without saying other smaller events which are related to startups I mentioned previously). There are many of them, some that are held in Israel and some in China.

Go For Israel is an annual conference and this time is held in Shanghai. Another major conference coming up is China-Israel Innovation summit. The first innovation summit was held in January 2016 in Beijing. It’s supported by both the Israeli and Chinese government. It’s held in parallel to the DLD innovation festival in Tel Aviv (get in touch if you are around, I’ll be there).

Another event coming up a few days afterwards is Israel’s China policy conference organized by SIGNAL.

As you can clearly see, the business relations between Israel and China is growing. While Israelis may sometimes be concerned over these mega deals, the general atmosphere is that it’s a good thing: A country with leading technologies but no market doing business with a country with a huge market which starves for innovation (though I think China is catching up very quickly).

I anticipate we are now seeing the tip of the iceberg. While the Chinese conglomerates are already scouting for Israeli technologies for several years now, there are many small and medium size companies who are yet to come. Stay tuned!

Image credit by UNIDO

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the Israel-China investment future. This was right before a week full of events I attended.

When invited by Sino-Israel Global Network & Academic Leadership (SIGNAL) to sit at a roundtable on Israel’s China policy, I frankly didn’t really know what to expect. As a fast-paced entrepreneur, dealing with something like policy seemed like a slow thing that would take ages to change and would belong to my parents’ generation. Something belonging to the “old world” with the “old order”.

Well, here’s a surprise: “policy” and “strategy” are fast-changing, relevant words for today’s world. Perhaps not as fast as sending a WeChat message but still, you feel the move and you feel the excitement when discussing them. Why? Because discussions over such issues can move mountains when they reach the right ears.

One of the main questions I’ve been asking myself, which also came up in the discussion several times is this: is Israel really important to China?

We see endless delegations going in and out of Israel for business, investments and academic exchange purposes, but perhaps Israel is just a commodity to be consumed like any other country wanting to do successful business with a rising superpower.

I don’t have an answer to that. But if the answer is, “Yes, Israel is a commodity,” then there should be a discussion of how to handle this reality, how to leverage the assets Israel already has and keep Israel’s competitive advantage over other countries.

In 2013, Beijing proposed the Belt and Road initiative (also called: One Belt, One Road or OBOR in short; 一带一路 in Chinese). This initiative spans a wide area, starting from Southeast Asia going through China, Central Asia, Russia, parts of Europe, the Middle East and Eastern Africa. It will essentially create greater trade, better infrastructure and cooperation between countries (about 60 of them) in these regions.

Now, in my opinion Israel has two main and unique leverages it can use to its advantage (and there are other advantages I won’t discuss here):

1. Stability: Israel is at a main junction of the Belt And Road; geographically it’s located towards Europe and towards East Africa. Currently, Israel is the most stable country in the region, which is exactly what China needs to go on with this initiative. Israel should maintain the stability as much as possible–this is what keeps it attractive.

2. Innovation: Eventually, almost every country in the world wants to have the best relationship with a superpower, both economically and politically. Out of all the countries on OBOR, Israel is the most known for innovation. In China, the first place investors and entrepreneurs look to for innovation is Silicon Valley. Israel comes in second place. Because Silicon Valley is not part of the OBOR area, Israel should use its innovation as leverage to attract China’s attention.

I’d say you can look at these two points as layers built one on top of the other where the whole is larger than the sum. You’ve got stability as a base, and innovation and cutting edge technology on top. Israel should make an effort to keep that competitive advantage. Innovation is not something you own but something you create. It is an ongoing process and takes hard work to stay on top. Since other places have great innovation as well, Israel needs to keep investing in this field to maintain its advantages. There’s also the branding aspect: innovation is good branding that should be kept.

If Israel were to lose that top layer of innovation, it would then only be a stabilizing power in the Middle East. Is that enough to attract China’s attention and maintain the excellent relationship Israel now has? Perhaps. But adding innovation is a power multiplier that Israel should keep investing in.

Image credit by Russ Bowling

The latest big news concerning Uber in China is that it was sold to Didi Chuxing. It’s a huge deal, as over the last couple of years Uber had tried to conquer the Chinese market with its service. Beijing was Uber’s 100th city to launch in globally, and the city with the fastest growth at the time.

Googling the recent merger results in many different articles and perspectives; here is a partial list:

Quartz – Uber has destroyed the Western myth that companies can grow huge in China without being Chinese

Financial Times – Uber’s battle for China

Fortune – Why Uber Couldn’t Crack China

Bloomberg – Uber Backers Said to Push for Didi Truce in Costly China War

Inc – 5 Reasons Uber Gave Up to Didi and Won in China

I do have my personal opinion on this merger, but I’d like to first give you the perspective of a foreigner living in Beijing who used both Uber and later on Didi Chuxing.

When I arrived to Beijing at the end of 2011 Uber didn’t exist there yet; it started running its service only in 2013. At that time Didi, had a horrible app and service. If you weren’t a Chinese speaker it was very hard to handle and understand. You had to send a voice message with your destination and sometimes since my accent wasn’t clear enough for the driver, it just didn’t work. So when Uber entered the market, it was very convenient to use.

Score: 1:0 for Uber

My business partner and I were helping promote Uber through the people we knew, helping to spread the word about the service. By doing this, we gained lots of Uber credit, and adding to the fact that Uber offered promotions frequently, we could ride for a very long with Uber on these credits.

As Uber grew in China, their incentives became smaller and smaller. It started with 100RMB incentive if you bring in a new user, then 50RMB, then 30RMB. This showed the success of the service. Uber got more users in Beijing.

Uber grew among the foreigners living in China and I imagine tourists as well. Though the drivers almost never spoke English, the app was in English and it was possible to get by for a non-native as well. This is how it got its initial user base, I believe.

What’s interesting in this story is that even though it was a substantial company, it never felt like they were established enough in China. People kept saying: “The Chinese government will never favor foreign competition in the market and will shut them down.”

On February 2015, the two major Uber competitors Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache announced their merger, with the merged company becoming Didi Kuaidi – and it was ready to give Uber a serious fight.

These companies are backed by Alibaba and Tencent, two of the major internet giants in China.

Score: 1:1 – Tie

On September 2015, China’s major internet giant Baidu invested USD 1.2 billion in Uber.

Score: 2:1 for Uber

But at around the same time…

Didi Kuaidi raised USD 3 billion from China Investment Corp., Capital International Private Equity Funds, and Ping An Ventures.

Score: 2:2 – Tie

On May 2016, Apple invested another USD 1 billion in Didi Kuaidi.

Score 2:3 for Didi Kuaidi

The most recent acquisition of Uber by Didi actually raised the score on both sides. Uber China was bought by Didi Chuxing, and on the other hand gets a minority stake in the company and additional 1B USD investment. So Uber basically still enjoys the profits from the massive China market. Many see this as a loss. I’m not sure that’s the case, but it’s also not a complete win.

Score: 3:4 to Didi Kuaidi

As for me, Didi Kuaidi caught up on the app interface and now the way it works and looks are very similar to Uber, so I’ve started using it. Now that I don’t live permanently in Beijing and only travel back and forth, it was just easier for me to use Didi and pay using WeChat payment with local currency. Though on my last visit, people told me that nowadays Uber is actually cheaper. Oh, well.

By the way, do you know of any Chinese tech companies dominating the U.S. market?

Image credit by TechCrunch

This post has two parts. If you wish to know more on the Chinese app market, I recommend you read this post as well: What ‘Pokémon GO’ Can Teach Us About China’s Mobile Market.

On my previous post I explained how the western Android market you know is vastly different from the one in China. Several major factors impact this market’s complexity and I’ll outline them here at the macro level.

1. Regulations

Regulations are almost synonymous with “China”, and whenever somebody talks about doing business in China they talk about what kind of regulations they have to comply with. By the way, as every country has its own regulations, it’s interesting to compare those with China’s regulations system (any reader perhaps familiar with a countries’ regulations ranking of some sort?)

The mobile app market has its own regulations as well. It starts with each store’s registration process, which is more complex than just opening an account on Google Play. There are different company documents you need to hand in. For example: business license translated to Chinese, picture showing your face holding a passport, and verification of a local phone number.

Additionally, there are restrictions on which type of apps can and cannot be published in China. Restricted apps include those politically oriented, containing sexual content and gambling. Also, some categories require special licenses and are checked throughly such as finance and location based apps.

The most recent regulation are specifically related to mobile games where each game app has to go through an approval process that can take a few months. The process takes a minimum of one month and for foreign apps can take three months and needs to comply with the Chinese government requirements.

2. Consolidation

When I just started AppInChina.co three years ago I had to first make what engineers call a “sanity” check. Does it really make sense to offer such a service? At the time I met a friend who works for a large company also in the mobile space and asked for his advice. He said then that I should work fast as I have about a year until the market consolidates and those 300 Android stores will disappear.

Well, perhaps I’m exaggerating what he said a little, but something that didn’t happen is a major consolidation in the market. Until recently, the only major consolidation event was when three years ago Baidu acquired both “91″ and “HiMarket” for 1.9 billion USD. Then, about 2-3 weeks ago Alibaba acquired Wanduojia. On recent stores ranking Alibaba’s store was ranked #24 with a market share of only 0.25%, so no wonder they decided to buy Wanduojia which currently is #8 (4.07% coverage) and the first store that doesn’t belong to any of the three major groups I mentioned in my previous post which all have no reason to sell their store. Wanduojia is almost the only independent top store.

It’s hard to tell how these consolidations are going to influence the market, but it’s certainly something to watch as the largest companies are now holding almost all top ten stores with the largest market size. It’s getting hot at the top; nobody wants to lose a 700 million user market.

3. Enforcement

As mentioned before Google Play is blocked in China. But it’s not that only the store itself is blocked, ALL Google services are blocked. How does that influence the mobile market?

Think of all the apps using Google maps, or the ones that have in-app purchases and need to use Google payments or if your app has Google or Facebook login. All these don’t work in China.

Foreigners mainly found ways around this as they are heavy users of these services by using VPNs (or “virtual private network”.) This is a constant, never-ending cat and mouse chase. The Chinese authorities are after the VPN providers constantly trying to block them, while the VPN companies keep developing ways around these blocks. It’s not uncommon to see such a question on a WeChat group: “ABC VPN is not working for me today, for you as well? Which one works for you?”

Chinese users almost never use VPNs, so if you are planning to get to the masses (which you probably are), using blocked services will get you nowhere. So, when building your app for the Chinese market, you are required to integrate Chinese services such as Baidu maps, Alipay or WeChat payment if you want to get into the mass of users.

Bottom line is this: doing business in China is complicated on the mobile sector as well and very competitive but because of its size, it’s a market you can’t ignore. Those influences I mentioned are guidelines for what you need to pay attention to and prepare when entering the market, which I hope makes more sense now.

I invite you to get in touch directly & follow me on Linkedin, Twitter & Facebook. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on my writing so leave a comment.

Image credit by Skinny Casual Lover

You’ve probably seen the words “Pokémon GO” and “craze” over the last two weeks in some news headline. Thanks to this game, Nintendo’s company value now exceeds Sony’s. Basically it’s a game where you go outside and hunt for Pokémons using an app. This has caused some surreal events, like this one in Central Park in NYC, when people turned up en masse to go out “hunting”.

The game was not released in all countries at the same time. One of these countries was China. But as things move fast in China, a clone was built which is very similar to the original game.

As I heard from a friend, Nintendo didn’t protect their IP properly in this case therefore can do nothing regarding the fact that they lost the largest mobile market in the world for a local clone.

Anyway, these kind of stories make app companies and developers say that they don’t want to go into the Chinese market. It’s a mistake in my opinion and I’m going to explain why soon. But we get a lot of questions at AppInChina about how the market is built as it’s really different from anywhere else in the world. So, it’s a good chance to explain it all.

This article will have 2 parts, I’ll focus on background info on the first part and later on will get to the actual things that influence China’s mobile market.

Let’s start with the major news about China’s mobile apps space: Google Play doesn’t exist! Well, to be honest it does exist but is blocked, which makes it a fairly unpopular service. Google Play has a market coverage of only 2.46%.

You’d probably ask then how people download Android apps in China? Well, they use third party Android stores, estimations that there are 300-500 “Google Play” stores in China. The largest stores in China MyApp (which belongs to Tencent), 360 and Baidu has 23.37%, 17.59% and 16.73% of market coverage respectively (as of June 2016; data supplied by Talking Data). Compare that to Google Play’s market coverage of 2.46%

So, who are those companies that have this large coverage and how did they get to that point?

If we look at the top 20 ranked stores, you’ll recognise three major groups of companies.

1. Mobile companies – These are one of the three mobile carriers in China. China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom. They distribute their store by installing it on phones people buy through their local stores. If you bought a new phone you get their store on the device you bought.
2. Device manufacturers – On this list you’ll find Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo & Vivo, as well as Lenovo, Meizu and Coolpad. These are major device manufacturers who sell the mobile device along with their store on the device.
3. Large internet companies – These would be companies like Baidu who runs the most popular search engine in China, 360, which is the #1 security company in China which owns one of the leading browsers in China, Tencent, which owns QQ and WeChat, the 2 most popular messaging platforms in China. All these promote their stores through other products they have. Last one in this group is Alibaba which we will talk about in the next post as it just bought #8 on the list, Wanduojia, which is kind of an exception from all the other groups.

Adding to an already complex situation, some people would say that China’s mobile market is better off ignored as there is always the danger that your app will be copied.

There are two major reasons why it’s a mistake thinking this:

1. China has the largest smart phone user base in the world. If you are looking into the Android market, this market is twice the size of the US population which is around 700 million users. iPhone’s user base is around 150 million and there is still room for more market penetration on both platforms.
2. If you already have a successful app, the chances are that it’s already on the Chinese market whether you intended for this to happen or not. The third party Android stores in China scrape Google Play and upload these apps unofficially to their platforms or your app might be hacked and somebody else is using your branding with no control over your app (by the way, the solution for both of these problems is a process called “reclaiming”, which I won’t get into right now). Because of this reality we at AppInChina published a tool a few months ago to help our clients figure out if an app already exists on one of the major stores in China as we get a lot of questions about this situation.

The bottom line is this. Yes, the market is complex and full with pitfalls but there are certainly ways to penetrate this market and at least try testing the waters for companies who are willing to put in the effort.

I invite you to get in touch directly & follow me on Linkedin, Twitter & Facebook. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on my writing so leave a comment.

Image credit by Eduardo Woo

OTEC (Overseas Talent Entrepreneurship Competition) is a yearly competition running for the past 3 years bringing in local and overseas startup companies to compete against each other. It’s organised by Chaoyang Overseas Talent Center (COTC) in Beijing. The way it works is that the winners of local competitions around the world then compete against each other in Beijing. This year the global event will be held on July 29th.

I helped organise the local competition in Israel last year and was glad to attend the one this year, which happened about 2 weeks ago in Tel Aviv organised by Startup East. Here is a Scope I made of one of the pitches, you can get the gist of how it was.

I was on both sides of these competitions. I had a few opportunities to be one of the judges, a mentor helping the startups with their pitches, and also as just an attendee watching from the side.

I’ve been to many startup competitions of all sorts, and have figured out there are some common questions judges are likely to ask. It’s not an exact science, but if you are about to join a competition you probably want to be prepared for these.

By the way, sometimes there are other reasons for winning a startup competition and it’s not because the company who won is the best. There are other considerations, which is OK.

So, what are these questions I see coming up many times? Others might have a slightly different list (add them at the comment section if you like).

1. What’s your business model? (The actual question is, how do you make money, but it’s a nicer way of asking)
2. How do you protect yourself against competition? Or, what is your advantage over your competitors?
3. What’s the company’s current state?

Personally, I think that if the judges are not clear on the business model after you pitch, the startup made a bad job at pitching, this should be one of the main slides.

Anyway, back to the OTEC event.

2 weeks ago in Tel Aviv the startup BAZZ won the OTEC competition. I met the CEO on the Israel Monetization summit 2015 and did a short interview with him on Periscope.

Last year’s Tel Aviv OTEC winner Coupon Roller, was very different. Coupon Roller is gaming related and develops technologies to help publishers best monetize their traffic while BAZZ is a safety utility app for safe driving. BAZZ reads your messages for you while you drive so you don’t have to reach out to your phone. The great thing about it is that it can also connect to every texting app (yes, even WeChat).

So, as you see the competition itself is very open to a wide range of startups as long as they are international. Why is that so important then?

I mentioned before that China is expanding globally and at the same time wishes to attract foreign talent. OTEC is organised by Chaoyang government which is one of the districts (practically it’s a large part of the city with about 8 million people) in Beijing. Many of the foreign community members in Beijing live in Chaoyang and this is one of its advantages over other districts in Beijing, enabling them to attract more foreigners to the district.

Anyway, let’s see who wins the finals this year.

I invite you to get in touch directly & follow me on Linkedin, Twitter & Facebook. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on my writing so leave a comment.

Image credit by slgckgc

The debate over China’s innovation potential keeps coming back. It was even one of the first topics I wrote about in my own blog Startup Noodle. Since then I see it returning again (interesting essay by Maya Cypris) and again (article published by the World Economic Forum) and there are many, many other examples.

This post was first published on Forbes: Why Are Debates About China’s Innovation Problem Useless?

It’s not that we shouldn’t talk about whether China is innovative or not. But I just think it’s useless. The ones who are part of the ecosystem (that’s including me) will claim it’s more innovative than what other people think. While those firms which felt their products had been copied and sold at 50% less by someone from China would claim they were not innovative.

In recent years, people understand that innovation has many forms also in addition defining innovation is pretty tricky. You made an existing product available in a new market. Is that innovative? Perhaps it is because you build the right partnerships and agreements. You tweaked and fit a product to target another group? That might be innovative, finding a new use for an old product. You can find many other examples how companies grow and show this is innovative, but does it really matter?

It’s related to what I claimed in a previous article. Innovation is everywhere and it fits itself to the place and time it resides.

Here is a question related to innovation in China to which I gave an answer on Quora a few weeks ago which was my most popular answer so far. I invite you to add your comments on the topic or here at the comments.

I tried to be very specific and gave one example that illustrated this point. Spoiler: the answer is about WeChat. I don’t think somebody would say WeChat is not an innovative app. There is a different debate if it will be successful or not out of China and even if it’s a complete failure but it’s definitely innovative.

Why does China appear to be ahead of wealthier countries in mobile apps, mobile commerce, and mobile payments?

Related reading on Quora: Why does China appear to be ahead of wealthier countries in mobile apps, mobile commerce, and mobile payments?

China has 1.276 billion mobile phone users and 93.2 out of 100 have a mobile phone. Out of those about 900 million to 1 billion have a smartphone. China is actually still lagging compared to Western countries in terms of percentages of smartphone, but the numbers of users is staggering, of course, and there is still room for growth.

For many of them they have only used internet for the first time with their phones, internet was never used on a computer. The fastest growth of smartphone users is actually in smaller cities and villages. Chinese mobile users like new mobile technologies and adopt them fast, so to answer your question – yes, you are correct they are much more advanced than the west to that extent.

Take WeChat – the most popular chat app – as an example. This app is no longer only just a chat app but a whole platform. Chinese people can do a LOT of things with it as there are many services connected to it right now. Just have a look at what you can do (that’s from my phone).
You can send money to a friend, invest, donate money, buy movie ticket, pay at a restaurant, pay your bills, call a taxi, buy flight tickets, etc. There is no need for a wallet anymore, you only need your phone. I even read somebody’s post saying how embarrassed he was using real coins.

Obviously WeChat is not the only advanced app and there are many others with creative ideas. Bottom line is, Chinese users see this as a natural device to use and adopt it happily. The mobile industry is definitely helping this trend by making it super convenient to use.
I invite you to follow me on Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook.

I invite you to get in touch directly & follow me on Linkedin, Twitter & Facebook. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on my writing so leave a comment.

Image credit by Maryland GovPics

Podcasts became our alternative way of consuming content. There are times that I completely only listen to podcasts once I find a new interesting one. Just like blogs who now give a hands on, personal views on different topics vs. news websites which tend to be for the wider audience, this is how podcasts work as well vs. Radio shows. Podcasts can get very niche in a topic and keep the audience interested.  Here is a rundown of podcasts I know speaking about China (mainly business oriented but not only).

This post was first published on Forbes: 9 Podcasts That Would Help You To Know More About China

 

Last month I came back from a trip in Hong Kong and Beijing. This was a tight trip, I had a lot to do and since I became a father almost 6 months ago, trips are shorter and not as often (Hi to all dads out there experiencing the same thing)

Anyway, whenever I’m in Beijing I always glad to meet old friends, colleagues and always (so far) managed to organise a meeting of the “Lean startup Beijing Meetup” I co-organise.  This helps me stay connected to what’s going on at the startup community and stay connected to the people I like to hang out with.

This time, I didn’t get to see so many people, some of them already left. This trip was tight yes, but generally speaking at least for foreigners China is a temporary place to stay, so Beijing (and I’m sure other places as well) are very transient cities. People come and leave all the time, so some people I know left China already and are living in other places. I know very few people who made China their home permanently.

In April Kaiser Kuo a Chinese American, who is an who used to be the director for international communications in a rock musician and a host in Sinica ( Podcast 1) podcast,announced that he is about to leave China back to the US and work on Sinica full time. Sinica podcast was acquired by a new media company from the US – SupChina.

Sinica is a China current affairs podcast started in 2010 and is quite popular. How popular? Well, Sinica just started to be published also on iTunes only a few months ago and therefore has only single review currently so officially it’s difficult to say. But frankly if you’ve been hanging out enough time in China as a foreigner there is a good chance you’ve heard about Kaiser Kuo or his podcast.

My first podcasting experience was with China Hangup podcast (Also used to run under Project PengYou). I remember I enjoyed it so much (Thanks guys!) that I said to myself I should have a podcast myself in the future (Which I do by now, so just keep reading). So, this is how it began for me.

Just like Sinica many other podcast in China change or disappear (This is how english podcasting about China looked like in 2012) . So, I decided to give you a rundown of podcasts running today in this space so you have more ways to get to know China from those talking about it.

1. Global From Asia (2) – I met Mike Michelini a few years ago while moving to China. He runs the GFA podcast for a while now speaking mainly about developing cross border e-commerce [entity display=”business” type=”channel” active=”false” key=”business” natural_id=”channel_1″]business[/entity] from HK.
2. The China Startup Pulse (3) – From the house of Chinaccelerator, hosted by Todd Embley and Ryan Shuken. These guys interview in person startup founders & mentors in Shanghai where the accelerator resides, speaking about their journeys and insights.
3. Limitless Laowai (4) – Hosted by Ally Mona and focuses on expats life in China, specifically in Shanghai. You can find interviews with local [entity display=”business” type=”channel” active=”false” key=”business” natural_id=”channel_1″]business[/entity] people, short Chinese lessons and relocation tips.
4. China History Podcast (5) – This podcast runs since 2010 by Lazlo Montgomery covering in great depth ancient and modern history of China. I’m still confused about all the Chinese dynasties as they are hard to follow, but CHP is a wonderful start for that.
5. China Business Cast (6) – Mike (from GFA here) and myself are also co-hosting a podcast about [entity display=”business” type=”channel” active=”false” key=”business” natural_id=”channel_1″]business[/entity] in China. I didn’t join it from the beginning but now running it with him for the past 8 months. We feature entrepreneurs and [entity display=”business” type=”channel” active=”false” key=”business” natural_id=”channel_1″]business[/entity] people speaking about their insights and findings on the chinese market and try to get our audience a glimpse to learn from their experience.

I obviously can’t mention all podcasts about China, there are many others, but just to mention a few names (these are the ones I know less about):

For people who live out of China listening to these podcast it’s a great way to learn about China through the eyes of the people actually living there.  If you find other interesting ones, feel free to add those in the comments.

Update: To clarify, this list of podcast is not meant to be ranking them. I don’t think there is really a good way to rank them unless you use, let’s say, the number of subscribers as a measure. Anyway, as a podcaster I know it’s impossible to get that number because the bad analytics the current platforms give you, so this is irrelevant.

So, enjoy this list!

Note from Shlomo: Here is another post first published on Forbes. This time after I visited RISE conference in Hong Kong. These are my insights.

Here is a link to the original post on Forbes if you prefer reading it there

I’m writing this while flying from Beijing back to Tel Aviv, I spent time in Hong Kong (later in Beijing) at the startup-focussed RISE conference. This indeed was an interesting trip.

What interested me when visiting Hong Kong, is to figure out how the entrepreneurial ecosystem is in Hong Kong these days as opposed to other places in the Asian region.

I wanted to understand what Hong Kong’s community feels about the ecosystem they are creating, and I was fortunate enough to be introduced to quite a lot of people who are part of this system to figure this out.

Generally speaking, people in Hong Kong are aware of the shortcomings of the city when considered against other places. The entrepreneurial spirit does not exist as much compared to, say, Beijing (see here and here).

Hong Kong is a major financial centre, which supplies very convenient jobs with nice salaries to locals and expats who then have no urge to work on a startup. The crazy real estates prices are definitely unappealing for entrepreneurs looking to live there and build a startup. Even Shenzhen has become financially impossible as an alternative for those who think of living on the mainland China side of the border.

My friend and co-host on podcast China Business Cast, Mike Micheini, happens to be one of these people living in Shenzhen but working in Hong Kong, crossing the border a few times a week. I asked him how Hong Kong and Shenzhen’s cost of living influences the local startup scene.

This has always been a hinderance in Hong Kong, and now is even overflowing to next door and across the border to Shenzhen, China. This city is growing in popularity, for its proximity to Hong Kong, as well as becoming a major business centre for China. This has therefore pushed costs of housing and living through the roof and squeezing startups for more rent.

While there are these challenges in higher costs of living, there are more and more investors in the area, as well as more entrepreneurial spirit in all its history. I believe the costs will not be a big enough reason to slow down the growth of the startup scene in the South of China.

But obviously Hong Kong has its advantages and this is what people are embracing as well. It’s easy to do business in Hong Kong, it’s an excellent place for expanding into China and has a major port which makes exporting from China easy as well.

Someone I spoke with told me that in Hong Kong, generally there are no core technologies being developed (I’m generalising here as there might be a few companies that defy this rule). So, startups coming here are mainly doing integration of a few technologies or tools, and go on to build something new out of it and create a new concept.

I asked Nick Ramil from Brinc – An IoT accelerator why they chose Hong Kong as their HQ vs China while recording our podcast with him. His answer was that the startups that come and stay with them are not necessarily from the region, and Hong Kong is more approachable than China as a Westerner moving out to Asia.

Running key aspects of your business such as marketing or hiring is more difficult in China because of the Great Firewall of China and lack of international talent, respectively. We see founders go to China for a single purpose, e.g. prototyping or manufacturing.

If you look at a broader picture, the question I asked is actually not that important. The reason is that each ecosystem just grows the startups it can and makes it fit for its market. Generally speaking, people are adjusting to the environment they are in. Opportunities for startups are really everywhere nowadays, also in places where entrepreneurship is just sprouting. I met an entrepreneur from Myanmar at RISE, and heard about their startup scene and how they built it. You end up understanding that even when the ecosystem is immature, people will find their way to build something they want.

I happened to visit Myanmar myself in 2014 and found a business with a great vision, and wrote about the experience here.

If you own a local startup based in a non-classic startup hub city, please post about it in the comments section as I’m interested to learn more about these.

Image credit by Anton

Note from Shlomo: Around 2 months ago I had a message in my inbox, from Forbes inviting me to join their contributors network. After endless thoughts on what I should start my writing about as well as quite a few rewrites I decided to come up with a post in response to CYRIAC ROEDING on his visit in Beijing and how amazed he was from the startup eco system built there. Hope I’ll provoke some thoughts and interesting comments. Here is to many more to come! Enjoy!

Here is a link to the original post on Forbes if you prefer reading it there

Cyriac Roeding published the article “After three weeks in China, it’s clear Beijing is Silicon Valley’s only true competitor” (here is a video version of it), about his experiences during a 3 week trip to China learning about tech & entrepreneurship there. I share those same thoughts about Beijing from almost 5 years I’ve been involved in that community, I’ll further share my thoughts on the subject in this article.

Roeding points out that China’s work culture is more intense, citing the 9/9/6 principle. He also goes on to point out where Beijing is lacking however, saying that, “Another shortcoming of Chinese [entity display=”startups” type=”section” active=”false” key=”/startups” natural_id=”channel_4section_124″]startups[/entity] is expertise on how to enter markets outside China quickly and efficiently.”

I believe that Chinese companies are taking a different route by growing globally through M&As, therefore larger companies really don’t have this expansion problem. The small [entity display=”startups” type=”section” active=”false” key=”/startups” natural_id=”channel_4section_124″]startups[/entity] indeed still have it though. Chinese companies are still looking at the local market first, as there is enough low hanging fruit out there (This is vs. Israeli companies who look from day one to grow internationally as they have a tiny market size of 8 Million people).

BTW, Yossi Vardi also related to this recently.

But there is one factor that Cyriac Roeding in not mentioning in his article and this is the large foreign [entity display=”startups” type=”section” active=”false” key=”/startups” natural_id=”channel_4section_124″]startups[/entity] community in Beijing (and obviously in other major Chinese cities). These entrepreneurs are part of the startup eco system and are building companies inside the Chinese market, usually in mixed teams combining east and west.

These foreign entrepreneurs and their companies are in my opinion one of the keys for Chinese companies to overcome the expansion challenge employing their connections, previous experience in western companies and familiarity with the culture. Another factor is the growing number of Chinese nationals studying abroad, and later returning to work in China bringing with them a mindset that can help bridge the gap. The Chinese government is now also making its first moves in this direction.

The Chinese government is known for constantly changing its policy towards foreigners looking to work in China. Regulations change every year and sometimes even a few times a year. Usually, changes mean tightening of work permit regulations making it harder to obtain one. But the last change was different, it actually made it easier for students to remain in China after they graduate to find a job.

Until recently, students needed at least 2 years of experience after graduation in order to be eligible for a work permit. However this requirement no longer exists. This gives hope to many foreign students coming to China to study and also start out their career, and at the other end, Chinese companies can hire more international talent to grow internationally.

On the entrepreneurship side, it’s still not that easy, an entrepreneur visa which you can find in the UK and other countries doesn’t yet exist in China. This makes it harder for those building their own company from scratch, to stay in China at the stage before formally registering their company.

Related reading:  Is Silicon Valley still the best place for startups? If not, where is the startup scene moving?

Image credit via storebukkebruse

I could have started this post with a lame salesy opening:

How many times has a delay caused you to miss your connecting flight? How many times has your luggage been lost? It’s a real problem on one hand, but who has the energy to deal with it after returning home from your trip?

INSTEAD:

If you watched me on Periscope recently, you saw I was doing some travel scopes using #AlwaysTravel. This trip was special for me as it was the first one with my wife and little baby girl. She turned 3 months while we traveled the Czech republic.

The trip was a huge success. She was easy to handle and frankly slept throughout large chunks of it. We are not so much sight seeing people and prefer the outdoors, so we even took her along to wonderful day hikes carrying her in a sling.

Before the trip I wanted to check out the local startup scene (Sorry could’t help it…), so I reached out to a few friends and got in touch with the guys from Startup Yard in Prague.

But before telling you about them and how to get your traveling flight compensation, let me tell you about our flight to Prague first.

This is how it all started

We decided to fly with Wizz Air which are a low cost Hungarian company, flying direct from Tel Aviv to Prague. The flight time was 11:50AM , but already in the morning of the flight we got a notice there is a delay of about 40 minutes leaving from Tel Aviv. Not so bad.

We still came early to the airport and on time for boarding, just to discover we had to wait more than one hour and a half at the gate until boarding will start. The REASON: Airplane coming from Prague was late and in addition was found to have technical issues, so, they brought another airplane from Prague which took time to arrive. FINE!

We are finally boarding and sitting in our seats, after waiting for a while the pilot announces that we missed our time slot for take off and the next time slot they give us is in 2 hours. That was a real BUMMER. Later on he said that they managed to get a better time slot for take off and it will be in one hour.

I don’t want to bore you with all the details, this is the short version of the story, but we were not happy with this delay obviously.

While on the ground I started to google how to get compensation for this delay. They were kind enough to give us some water while on the plane. wow! THANK YOU!

We finally took off at 3:51PM! More than 4 hours delay…

Back to Startup Yard

After arriving to Prague we went to visit the local accelerator (@startupyard), get to know them and what they do. Lloyd Waldo
came to meet us and we chatted for a while, kindly offering to introduce one of their startups in the accelerator.

I got introduced to Jacub from ClaimAir (@ClaimAir). I remember thinking when Lloyd was telling me what ClaimAir are doing: “You are exactly the person I needed to meet, now and I’m going to use your service!”

These guys claim on your behalf your travel compensation! Exactly what we needed!

ClaimAir will take care of the daunting task of getting in touch with the airline and negotiating with them over your compensation. ClaimAir already knows according to regulations what you SHOULD get and have experience with past cases. You can find these regulations online but who has the energy to deal with the airline companies?

Airline companies according to what Jacub says are not telling you what’s the full compensation you are entitled to, and obviously don’t make the process easier for you to claim it.

I challenged Jacub on the spot telling him we’ll do a Pericope broadcast together where I sign up to their service and make a claim, which we did.

On the video you’ll see how easy it is to do.

You’ll see how to find out early what travel compensation you are entitled for
and what the flight companies are not telling you about your rights.

It turned out to be a really cool scope which I learned a lot from.

Update: Katch team who used to host my Pericope video streams closed down on May 4th, 2016. Therefore I don’t have these videos online, but for now only locally.

You can watch it all here:

I’m now at the process of completing my claim. Jacub stated that the fastest they could get compensation was 10 days. ClaimAir commission is 25% of the amount they get for you. For me it will be at least 600 Euros, not bad!

This is actually more than what I paid for the tickets.

Update: Our payment was sent around 3 weeks after sending the claim. It came out even better than I thought. We got 1200 Euros!  400 Euros for each passenger. (A baby also counts a passenger though you don’t pay full price for them). After subtracting ClaimAir’s commission it’s a total of 900 euros… We actually covered 2/3 of an 11 day trip. . Register with ClaimAir, these guys know what they are doing and can help out.

I had to sign up for a Payoneer account to get the payment, but frankly these guys are very flexible and have a few services they work with to wire payments.

900 Euros in my Payoneer account. Not bad!

Startup Yard Demo Day

The week after I went to watch Startup Yard Demo day. I managed to watch some of the pitches. A very promising one in my opinion is Salutara, building a platform for trusted medical tourism. I know how much such tourism exists going to/from China. So this one has huge potential.

Here is their pitch:

Scroll down to get the discount code on the ‘Tickets’ section for each of the events.

This year will be the first year I’d need to miss GMIC (global mobile internet conference) in Beijing. Which made me think I should go and expose myself to other conferences.

Don’t get me wrong, GMIC is a major event in China tech scene but there many other conferences and tech events around. i already mentioned that if you really want to know what’s going on on the CHINESE mobile scene GMIC is the right place to go.

Related reading: Conferences Comparison; This is Where the Mobile Industry is Heading

Anyway, because of this I decided to collect the info of the conferences I know of happening this year related to mobile and internet in China and Hong Kong.

Let’s start!

MARCH 2016

GMGC – Global Mobile Game Congress

March 7^th-9^th,2016

GMGC is smaller player in the major Beijing Conferences but it’s still very large. Their focus is in gaming while GMIC are aimed for everything mobile. GMGC is split into many stages and forums, so check their website for info.

Event Website

Here’s how they present it (Main stage)

On our Main Stage, we bring together the world’s most dynamic industry elite, who are always thinking ahead and full of surprises. They all have different backgrounds and a variety of stories on how they became the leaders of industry today. Dozens of speakers will stand on our Main Stage and panelist stages to share insights on the industry and the essence of the tough journey they have made to reach the top. GMGC is proud to be the connecting dot between multiple generations to push the industry even further. Attendees will have the chance to hear exclusive advice on how they can help their own businesses grow within the mobile gaming industry.

Tickets

• VIP Pass – $800
• Main Stage Pass – $50
• D-Forge Pass – $0
• Media Pass – $0
• Online Biz-Match Access – 30 Request – $200
• Online Biz-Match Access – 60 Request – $400
• Online Biz-Match Access – Unlimited Request – $600

Venue

The China National Convention Center (CNCC)

Main Speakers

– Tony Shong, Director of Game Incubator Mars Era Institute of Digital Arts Co., Ltd.

– Danny Wang, VP Duoyi Network

– Yong Wang, CEO kick9

– Thomason Hu, CEO YuuGames

Social Media

• Facebook
  

April – May – June 2016

Tech in Asia Conference 2016 – Connecting Asia’s Tech World

April 12th-13^th, 2016

Though this conference is more pan Asian one, Tech in Asia is still a good resource of info about tech in China in English so worth adding it here.

Event Website / Wikipedia

Here’s how they present it

Tech in Asia ’s signature 2‐day conferences are held in Singapore, Bangalore, Tokyo, and Jakarta. They are among Asia’s largest conferences organized for the region’s tech ecosystem. Our conferences bring together entrepreneurs, investors, medias, corporations, developers and students to learn about the startup community.

Tickets

Startup Pass – 299.00 USD

General Pass – 499.00 USD

Investor Pass – 799.00 USD

Venue

Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre.

Main Speakers

– Takeshi Idezawa, CEO, LINE Corporation

– Adi Tatarko, CEO and Co-Founder of Houzz

– Patrick Grove, CEO, Catcha Group

– Vicki Huff Eckert, Global Leader, Technology, Communications, Entertainment & Media Practice, PwC

– Akiko Naka, CEO, Wantedly

– Saemin Ahn, Managing Partner, Rakuten Ventures

– Danielle Levitas, SVP Research & Analysis, App Annie

– Caesar Sengupta, VP Product Management at Google

Social Media

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Linkedin

Mobile Games forum (MGF) Asia – Asia’s Premium Mobile Games Event

April 12^th-13^th,2016

MGF so far organised conferences and exhibition in London, Seattle, Los Angeles and Asia. Just like GMGC and ChinaJoy (gaming is defiantly a form of entertainment…), this one is focused in Games.

Event Website

Here how they present it

MGF is the leading and longest-standing ‘mobile-first’ forum for games industry professionals who are shaping strategy and revolutionising the landscape of mobile gaming.

Established in 2003, we have built a steep history and reputation for quality content and seniority within our audience. Resultantly, MGF continues to cover the trends and best practice within the business and strategy of the global mobile gaming space, at the most senior level.

With all attendees at MGF events around the world of at least ‘Director’ level, and over 50% of our attendees in 2015 being ‘C-level’ or ‘Founder’, we pride ourselves on collating the most senior and exclusive mobile gaming event on the planet.

MGF were the pioneers in bringing studios and investors together

Today’s funding environment contains more than just traditional investors. This fast and fun format allows entrepreneurs to get exclusive face to face time with the people who are investing in mobile, technology and gaming start-ups, in a very short space of time. We were the first to bring the concept to events, and continue to bring more studios together with venture capitalists than any other event!

Tickets

Solution Provider Pass – $2999USD

Studio & Developer Pass* – FREE REGISTRATION

*only available to studios developing licensed or original mobile games IP

**Reserved only for Director level of seniority and above. Proof of seniority and title required for registration.

Venue

The Mira Hotel, Hong Kong

Main Speakers

– Robby Yung, CEO, Animoca Brands

– Tom van Dam, Head of Mobile Business Development, NetEase

– Cody Chen, Head of eSports, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, Riot Games

– Dan Brody, VP Tencent Games, Tencent

– Mika Kuusisto, Chief Revenue Officer, Outfit7

– David Liu, CEO, RedAtoms

– Taewon Yun, General Manager of Asia Pacific, Super Evil Megacorp

– Jean-Charles Gaudechon, General Manager and Executive Producer, CCP Games

– Narin Siritaranukul, General Manager of Southeast Asia, Gamevil

– Arthur Chow, CEO, 6waves

– David Bluhm, CEO, WG Cells

– Henry Yeh, Managing Director, Gumi Asia

Social Media

• Facebook
• Twitter

Cross Border Summit – Grow Your Asia Based Business

April 16^th, 2016

CBS is a conference which specials in cross border e-commerce business. It’s the first time organised, so relatively small than the others, but is dealing with topics many people encounter when expanding to Asia. The Summit is Organised by Michael Michelini who runs Global from Asia. He is also my co-host at China Business Cast.

Disclaimer: Startup Noodle is a sponsor of Cross Border Summit

Event Website

Here’s how they present it

For Businesses Selling From Asia

Get insights on marketing and operations for your Asia based international company.

– Doing Business Overseas

cultural differences in pricing models, negotiating style, time-to-market, delivery expectations, and more

– Pricing Models That Work

What is valuable to overseas buyers? What can you charge more for and what are you expected not to charge for?

– Quality Expectations

What do overseas buyers expect in your quality control processes? How can you benefit and profit by making, selling, and standing behind higher quality goods? What that means: quality inspections, managing returns and credits to your customers and more.

– Product Trends

How to help your customers design products that will sell well in their countries, be reliable, and still cost effective for everyone

For Businesses Selling Into China

Get off on the right foot for your China business expansion. Learn from people, on the ground, in China.

– Cultural Differences

This is where you need to put some “tender loving care” into making sure you respect the local culture and way of doing business.

– Time To Market

What are some realistic expectations you can set for your business to grow and expand in China. We all know its not the same as America and other parts of the world – hear it first hand.

– Negotiation Tactics

You think you know how to bargain? How about in China? Hear stories and case studies from people who have been around the block and back.

Tickets

– VIP Pass – 325 USD

– General Entry Pass – 175 USD

Startup Noodle readers special discount rate (Click here)

– VIP Pass – 195 USD

– General Entry Pass – 125 USD

Venue

IBM Building Rooftop, Gongye 6th Road, 1057 Nanhai Avenue, Shekou, Nanshan District, Shenzhen, China

Main Speakers

– Mike Bellamy, CEO, PassageMaker

– Tak Lo iDirector for R/GA Ventures Asia and a Venture Partner at Mind Fund

– Chris Wieners, Managing Partner of Hogo Digital

– Nick Hu, General Manager of Netconcepts Shenzhen office

– Renaud Anjoran, co-founder and president of China Manufacturing Consultants (CMC)

– Neil Woodfine, COO and co-founder at Remitsy,

– Gerard Nieuwenhuis, CEO and founder of Betafresh,

– Larry Salibra, CEO, Pay4Bugs

– Chris Gormley, Director at Genesis Global Marketing

– Chris Davey – MD and Founder of “Source From Asia”

Social Media

• Facebook
• Twitter

GMIC (Global Mobile Internet Conference) Beijing – Mobile Infinity

April 28th – May 2nd, 2016

As I mentioned GMIC is the largest mobile conference in China. It’s definitely more catered to Chinese crowd (Relatively not so many foreigners in recent years when I went, but then let’s you really understand the Chinese scene).

GMIC Beijing has many sub forums in it catered different audiences. So, check out their website for full details.

By now GMIC grew to have 9 conferences around the world total, with the first one this year in Tel Aviv (March 22nd, 2016), where AppInChina will be exhibiting for the first time (Yay!)

This is MWC speakers list for 2015. 2016 list speakers list was not published yet.

                       Here is the list of speakers for 2016

Tech Crunch Beijing, TBD

Slush China, TBD

Note from Shlomo: Ryan Champion is a member of our Lean startup meetup in Beijing. After I published the last posts about our mastermind Ryan mentioned he has been to a few as well and can give some of his experience over those explaining what to expect when joining a Mastermind and getting most out of it. Ryan take it from here! 

So you’ve got a business , or even a business idea. You’ve heard about this mastermind stuff and now you’re thinking “Yeah, sounds great. I could get some help with my project and get things going….”

You’re absolutely right. Getting into a mastermind can be one of the best returns on investment you can make along the journey of your business. Personally I think they’re great, and I use them as a regular part of my development as an entrepreneur.

But how do they function? What forms do they take? What are the costs and benefits? Here’s a few thoughts from my own experiences of masterminding with both established business owners and bootstrapping entrepreneurs.

There Are Different Kinds of Mastermind

Masterminds come in different forms just like any kind of gathering, be it online or offline. The number of participants and the way the mastermind is run don’t have fixed rules- all are slightly different.

The most popular form is the “hot seat” formula.

In this method each participant spends a few minutes sharing their business news since the last meeting. After that, the member in the hot seat will spend 15-20 minutes elaborating on a recent problem and share it with the group.
For the rest of the time, other members begin by asking questions around that issue in an effort to accurately diagnose the problem. They then offer information, advice, and support to the member in the hot seat. The hot seat is rotated every meeting to give each member a chance to seek help during their turn. Over time you develop a familiarity with each others’ situations and foster an extensive level of understanding between members.

Be Clear About What You Want From Any Mastermind

A mastermind is not a magic wand for your business. If you enter into a mastermind you need to be realistic about what you’re looking to get, and also what you’re prepared to give.

Thinking that other people will fix your business for you is a definite recipe for disaster.

Two golden rules for masterminds:

1. Begin by giving. By offering to others you are starting a positive cycle and setting a tone of leadership for others to follow. By doing this, you instantly gain respect from others in the group and foster an environment of sharing.

2. Know your own limits. Sometimes it’s about doing less. If you have no experience to contribute on a particular topic, then allow time and space for others to run with ideas. Demonstrate your ability to listen and learn on areas where you have less expertise.

The trick in this situation is to pick up as much as possible from the other participants , and be patient to see if there is a way you can help the process. That may come weeks or even months after the initial idea is floated, so don’t feel pressured to perform. That’s not the point of the process. The idea is to support each other, so try to keep that top of your agenda at all times.

Who Should I Mastermind With?

It’s really important to choose your mastermind well. Other members should have something in common with you first and foremost. Someone running an e-commerce store may have little common ground with a fruit and vegetable seller.

On the other hand, there is nothing wrong in masterminding with people from different industries. Cross-pollinating ideas from different types of business can provide valuable input and a fresh perspective. This is advocated hugely by business don Jay Abraham who has made a fortune from consulting across different industries and using tricks from one to innovate in the other.

In my opinion, this method has great surprise value. Someone outside of your industry will not be restrained by such things as your standard practices and mindset, and may well be able to suggest you a shortcut that you would literally never have considered.

Rules And Regulations

The most important factor in the mastermind is to have clear leadership and sensible guidelines. All members need to have a commitment to regular attendance and adherence to rules , if not you may find that things fall apart very quickly.

A minimum term should be agreed and there should also be a strict policy on non-attendance and or eviction from the group. If not, the mastermind can just become a casual chat by whoever decides to be there each week – and that’s not what you all signed up for.

If you think that there is a chance you can’t commit to a regular time for the mastermind, then it’s probably better that you discuss your application with the organiser.

The Good News

A successful mastermind can be rocket fuel for your business. I have personally been in over 4 masterminds in recent years. The commitment that is formed between business owners to genuinely assist each other can be unrivalled.

As entrepreneurs, it’s definitely not easy to find like-minded people who are prepared to support you and listen to your fears and help you through confusing decisions. Every business is unique in some way, even if that uniqueness is just you and your take on an existing business model.

By investing time in other members, participants get to know each other and their respective businesses in a way that completely surpasses any casual advice or short term consulting. When done correctly, a mastermind is one of the best ways to stimulate and challenge yourself both as a business owner and as a person.

This guest post is by Ryan Champion. Ryan spent 6 years in China as a business trainer at clients such as Standard Chartered Bank, Cannon, and LG.

He now runs KillerContent UK, an online marketing provider for digital agencies in the UK. He also writes for Eggplant Digital, a British owned web design company based in Beijing.

www.ryanchampion.me

www.killercontent.uk

www.eggplantdigital.cn

I’ve been hearing the buzzword “Mastermind Group” for a few years now and wasn’t really sure what it is. Later on, I joined a mastermind group for a while which is now finished, so I know more about it by now.

But I still would like to articulate to the ones who are not sure what this means, What a mastermind group is exactly and what you can get from it?

I made some research on this:

If you will google “what is a mastermind group?”, you’ll get to a lot of references to Napoleon hill famous book: “Think and grow rich”. Some search results quote from the book a sentence or two and then going on to the most practical info of how exactly you run such a group. I decided to check if these quotes are real and not rely on the “quotes” but looking into the source. Here is what I’ve found.

Napoleon Hills talks about 3 sources of knowledge to gain power and grow rich:

1. Infinite intelligence
   
2. Accumulated experience
3. Experiment and research

If you want to read more here is a reference to his book. The page specifically about mastermind groups is on pages 175 – 181

Why I’m telling you all this? 

Mike Michelini and I decided to open a mastermind group to link minded people. As Napoleon Hill puts this:

The “Master Mind” may be defined as: “Coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose.”

No individual may have great power without availing himself of the “Master Mind.” In a preceding chapter, instructions were given for the creation of PLANS for the purpose of translating DESIRE into its monetary equivalent. If you carry out these instructions with PERSISTENCE and intelligence and use discrimination in the selection of your “Master Mind” group, your objective will have been half-way reached, even before you begin to recognize it.

so, we defiantly want your goals to at least be “half-way reached”, with mastermind.

Two sources of knowledge will come into place on this mastermind: 

1. Accumulated experience – Mike and I will contribute from our experience and knowledge advising and helping the members of the group as well as gaining knowledge from other members. 
2. Experiment and research – As all members of the mastermind group are required to share details about their work, you will also gain knowledge from these as well. 

I don’t like the word “discrimination” in Napoleon Hill’s text as it has a negative context these days, but since we are looking for the right people we do have an application process in order to join the group.

What kind of results can you expect from participating in such a Mastermind group?

Mastermind group as you probably understand by now are all about the community. A community that you can trust and openly discuss business decisions you need to take, complete knowledge gaps and use other members networks. 

We think that this group may lead to:

1. Business breakthroughs
2. New partnerships
3. Ability to build a better product or focus on new audiences you didn’t think of. 
4. Long term relationships you can leverage towards your next business goals. 

What’s our commitment?

No, we are not magicians, so we won’t promise you things we can’t live up to

However we do know that with both of us being involved in the Chinese business world since 2007, we can contribute from our knowledge and connections to your business goals. Both Mike and I have been heavily involved in the tech sector in China for the past few years, creating our network and helping people grow through it. We will share our knowledge and network in order to make people in the group succeed and reach the next level in their businesses.

We will also carefully choose the group’s members to create a safe environment where people can share knowledge and dilemmas. We will open a Facebook group for all our members, which will stay open the whole time and not only during our weekly calls.

What will the weekly calls include?

Each week we will have a round table of each member sharing their struggle for the week and achievements. Then each week we will highlight two members where other members will deconstruct their business and make suggestions on how to improve it.

It’s important for us to keep this group small as we want to give the most value to this new group. Therefore this time, the group will include Mike and myself joining all calls, actively participating the Facebook group and working with the members and connecting them to the right people we know.

It’s only 8 people, so every person gets special attention from us and the rest of the group.

Application process only lasts until December 31st, when then we will start going over the applications and let people know if they got accepted. We can’t accept everybody, for different reasons.

The main one will probably be refused is that we want to make sure we can help your business with our knowledge. The 2nd reason might be that we want to make sure people in the group are coming from the same field or set of problems and can help each other.

Anyway, We will still keep your info for our next groups which we plan to open in the future.

Here is the link to the application form and where you can find all info needed for registration

Both Mike and I are open for questions on the process. Frankly, Mike is best to reach via his Twitter or China business cast email. I can be reached through the contact form, email, or twitter (@StartupNoodle).

Here is Mike’s side of the story on his blog

Now Over to you

Send your application to us, we can’t wait to get this great group of people together!

Image credit by modup.net

A Chinese Television reporter and a China mobile expert entrepreneur walks into a bar…. It would have been good opening for a joke I can’t finish but I had the privilege interviewing them (separately) for China Business Cast.

As I mentioned on my last post, China Business cast takes a lot of my time now creating quality content for you guys.

We’ve published already cool interview with Martina Fuchs, who is the english CCTV reporter (that’s not surveillance and security cameras, but China national TV channel…) . She travels a lot and interviews high level business man and heads of countries. She told us about her career and how you can join too and get to meet and talk with all these people.

Our current episode which was just published today is for the ones interested in mobile apps and internet in China. I’m certainly one of them and really enjoyed doing this interview.

I interviewed Andy Tian from PengPeng, who helped bringing Google to China back then , sold his next company to Zynga and became Zynga’s China GM.

His insights include growth hacking strategies in the Chinese market as well as how foreign companies can make it in China and much more.

Oh, BTW all the interviews we do are broadcasted live on my Periscope channel, so you can join in and ask the guests questions and give comments. It’s a fun one! All you need to do is open this link and click ‘follow’.

Tune in and leave a review, it means the world for us to get this honest feedback from listeners and also helps others finding this content.  We will be mention the best reviews on the show too.

EP. 26: NEWS AND BUSINESS REPORTING IN CHINA, INS AND OUTS WITH MARTINA FUCHS FROM CCTV ENGLISH

EP. 27. ANDY TIAN CO-FOUNDER AND CEO AT ASIA INNOVATIONS-云智联，“碰碰”

I always wanted to do a podcast. For the few times that I was hosted in different podcast I really enjoyed it. I feel it’s a great way to connect with your crowd and it’s also a lot of fun. So, podcasting was on the plan for someday which is eventually no day…

This was until my friend Mike Michelini from Global From Asia offered me to Co-host with him China Business Cast.

For a while now I’ve been working with him on this and I’m excited to say that we are finally online with the first joint episode speaking about the differences living and working in China VS. Hong Kong.

Click the link to find this recording and subscribe to get a new episode every two weeks. We intend to bring interviews with entrepreneurs in China and China business.

Wait, this is not all!

Our recordings are also run live on my new Periscope Channel. This is a great opportunity to interact with the people we interview and ask them questions.

All you have to do is follow me @Startup Noodle on Periscope (Open this link on your phone) and whenever I come live you will get a notification to join.

Have a look at Episode #25 recording – China Vs. HK (I’m now aware I should improve the sound on these scopes)

Subscribe here

Follow for live scopes

A few years ago, I had a friend coming and speaking with me about this great idea he has for a startup. This friend used to be a business partner of mine and he said it would be great if we had an app that recognises places coming from a crowdsourced pictures.

We then worked on building our own company that will run 15 projects at a time that we will oversee. One of the project was smart way of modelling famous placing using crowd sourced images. We then came to an Investor introducing this idea and he said: “How about having glasses which will record EVERYTHING and EVERYWHERE you are going?”

That was a pretty annoying statement back then. You want to do project A and getting a feedback of “Let’s do project B”, and we didn’t like that.

Both project A and B are viable products these days, and are changing the way we interact with computers and our environment. The product that that investor was taking about is called Periscope. If you missed the big news about it , read on then. He is how I started using it.

A few days ago I listened to a podcast by Pat Flynn. He was interviewing Chris Ducker about Periscope app.

I knew of Meerkat (Periscope’s competitor ) and Periscope before that and this podcast made me want to try it out (Regardless, Pay Flynn, is a great host and you should subscribe to his podcast).

I had many scopes already where the most exciting one was when broadcasting from 500 Startups party in Tel Aviv.

BUT, I first wanted to share with you how my first scope looked like and then a few quick tips I’ve learned in the past week.

Here is my first scope ever:

Pretty embarrassing, no?

I was even contemplating if I should delete that one or not! I decided not to eventually, but guess I can only improve from here.

Anyway, I’m going to cover a few topics here. You might be interested in only a few of them so feel free to use these links here:

1. What kind of broadcasts should I do on Periscope?

2. How can I engage my audience while on a scope?

3. How to interact and comment on a live scope to stick out from the rest of the viewers?

4. How to save your scopes online for more than 24 hours?

5 .How to share your scope on social media completely automatic in 5 minutes setup?

6. Does Periscope works in China?

7. How to find good content to watch on Periscope?

8. How to get the best results broadcasting / scoping from a public event?

9. Quick Tips for Beginners on Periscope

1. What kind of broadcasts should I do on Periscope?

Many people wonder what are the best kind of sessions to do while you scope in other words, what will you be broadcasting about ?

It all depends on what would you like to achieve for your business while you scope.

Here are the type of sessions I did for now:

1. Ask me anything – On this type of broadcast you state in the title this is an “Ask me Anything” scope and what’s your main subject of expertise. This type of session is good if you already have followers and online presence, as people will see what’s your expertise. This is the most popular one and most interesting one for me for now as you get to interact a lot with your viewers

2. Scoping my own blog post – This one is pretty straight forward. You go by one of your blog posts and broadcast it. However for this one you should practice for a few times as transforming something from a written from and speaking it can be challenging, especially when it’s real time!

3. Open working session – See me while I work (I’m actually doing it right now). People are participating in the working process. You can ask questions while you work and get more info for your work. The main challenge here is actually keep being focused while you work, it’s multitasking!

4. Podcast broadcast – I also broadcast when recording China Business Cast which I co-host. It’s great because you get to have people asking questions that interest them which makes the podcast more interactive. I’m still experimenting what’s the right balance between strictly recording and just let people comment and opening questions to the crowd from time to time.

I’m interested to know what other types of sessions you have in mind? Please share in the comments.

You also need to think of what are the things that will trigger your followers to share your scope with their followers?

One of the best ways to do it is engaging your audience while you speak.

2. How can I engage my audience while on a scope?

Since periscope is always live, some Scopers get “Stuck” of what should you talk about while you scope. I’ve watched many scopes that just show things and nobody really speaks and then it really depends what they are showing on the broadcast and not what they are saying.

But, if you do want to engage even deeper you should be more active and speak as well.

So you probably asking yourself: “what should I talk about to engage viewers?”

We already spoke about the type of scopes you can do. On these scopes you can also ask questions. This is a great way to make a connection and engage.

Here is a list of questions you can ask while you broadcast.

1. Where are you from ( Many users will already tell you where they are from when they join in)?

2. Are you new to my scopes? If you are new here type “new”

3. What do you think about X?

4. What would you like to see on my next scope?

All these are questions that create interaction and connection with your audience and can start a conversation.

Now, what about the interaction as a user? Yes, we are more on the broadcasts’s side here, but since you do want more followers probably you’d like to interact while you watch others Scopes as well.

3. How to interact and comment on a live scope to stick out from the rest of the viewers?

So, let’s Talk a bit more of how you should interact with other people on a scope you are watching.

Now, this is a great list of tips I’ve bumped into from Ethan Periseau during one of his scopes. He was speaking about how to be more visible when you comment. So, thank you Ethan!

Let’s talk first on WHY you want to be visible.

So, just like in every social network if you are interesting people will stat following you. It will be dependent on your periscope bio to actually sell yourself, but you’d first want to engage the other participants and then make them be interested in you and check your Periscope bio. Here are a few points he came up which you can use:

1. Write longer comments – When you write two lines or more of a comment your user icon is stretched and looks larger, this is good because of two reasons:

a. It sticks out and looks more inviting to click on.

b. Larger icons/avatar are easier to click on and therefore more likely to be clicked on.

So, next time you do that, keep in mind to write long comments, instead of just ‘yes’ and ’no’ , and where are you from.

2. Alternate between short and long comments – You need to remember that you’d want to stick out from the rest of the crowd. How do you stick out then? When everybody are putting in short comments, you should write a long one, that would look different from all the rest. This also goes vice versa. So, if many people currently put in very long comments you should use short comments (Also, at that time scrolling will be very fast, and people are likely to have enough time reading only shorter comments than longer ones.

3. Give value – Just like in every marketing effort, same goes here, you need to give value to other users and interact. You can use the @UserName and relate to what somebody just said and create a conversation on the feed. Another way would be to give your opinion on the comments on something that was just being said. Obviously it all need to be on the spot as this is all live, there isn’t really time to prepare anything.

Now that we’ve learned how to stick out of the crowd, I’ll show you how you can make your posts stick out more on social media. I’ll show you some tools you can use to automate the work on this.

4. How to save your scopes online for more than 24 hours?

So, Periscope is a relatively new and is lacking some features ( As example, only last week URLs on Periscope Bios became clickable). Also, Periscope is positioned as ad-hoc streaming app, meaning that if you missed the chance to watch a scope you can watch it later on but only within 24 hours, afterwards it’s not online any more.

Another problem that Persicope has is that you can’t really see all the comments people gave while you scope after you broadcast unless you watch your whole scope start to end.

Periscope player is pretty basic currently and has no way for fast forward your scope and sceem through the comments quickly.

Update: Periscope team is about to release a new feature where you can skip forward when watching a reply, so you will be able to see the comment you get afterwards. I still find it pretty annoying, as I’d like sometimes just to read the comments one by one.

Pericope does have a feature to save the scope offline on your phone, but the video is saved without the comments though. So this is also not such a great solution.

Fortunately, there is a solution for this called Katch.me Katch does exactly what Periscope is (still) not doing:

1. Save scopes online with comments.

2. Has a video player that you can move back and forth on your stream.

3. Aggregates all the scopes comments, where you can see them all together one by one.

Katch is VERY easy to use. You basically sign in, connect your Periscope account to it and voila, you are ready to go!

Let’s talk about how to share your scopes with your social media followers and automate the process.

5. How to share your scope on social media completely automatic in 5 a minutes setup?

Ok, so you’ve seen what’s the way to see and get most of your scopes AFTER they are done.

Now, question is how you share it with your followers. Since Periscope is is owed by Twitter the integration with Twitter is very easy and once you start your scope an auto tweet with a link to your scope will be tweeted out.

Since we don’t want to only share our content with our Twitter followers but also will probably want to utilise our LinkedIn and Facebook followers as well we as example need to find a solution for sharing that tweet there as well. I’ll show you how.

Two solutions I know of come in handy for this: Zapier and IFTTT (If This Then That).

These two connect online services one to another, so one triggers the other.

As example, I get an email from IFTTT whenever there is a good deal for flights flying out from Tel Aviv on FlyerTalk.com . This is relatively simple and actually does similar job as google alerts. But you can do much much more complicated things with it. Here is an example, you can send an automatic LinkedIn invitation to anyone who sends you an email.

II’ll show here how to connet your Twitter to your Linkedin and Facebook page, so after Periscope automatically tweets to your Twitter followers , later on it will tweet to your Facebook and Linkedin followers inviting them to watch the reply (Or the live broadcast if it’s long enough).

I’m going to show you the process on Zapier, though IFTTT is somewhat similar. This example will be for Linkedin, but is similar if you wish to connect your Twitter and Facebook as well.

Automate your work!

Step 1: Click “Make a Zap” and choose Twitter as your trigger and LinkedIn as your action app.



Step 2: Choose the trigger and the action. Please pay attention as there are a few option for triggers. You should choose ‘My tweets” as the trigger and “crate share update” under LinkedIn.



Step 3: Once you chose your action and trigger you need to choose which of your accounts you would want to connect. Add them in.



Step 4: Since we don’t want EVERY tweet to be also shared to our LinkedIn followers, we need to filter our Tweets and choose only the relevant ones. This step is a little tricky, as there are a lot of ways to go here.

Since Periscope automatically adds #periscope hashtag to each of the automatic tweets, we need to filter all these out from our Twitter feed, and this is how you do it:

Choose on Custom filters ‘Text’ then choose [Text] [contains] and then write ‘#Periscope’ . This is how ALL your tweets that have are generated by Periscope will be shared with your LinkedIn followers.

Step 5: Now you need to choose how the shared tweet will look like. The simplest one is just copying it, and therefore you can choose ‘text’ as your output update. This means that the update on LinkedIn will look exactly as your Twitter tweet that Periscope is generating and sharing automatically.

Step 6: We are almost there. Now we just need to test our Zap and make sure we get the right output. Click ‘See Trigger Sample’

Click on each of the 3 samples and make sure that you get a ‘success’ on the samples. Also, click ‘See action sample’ next to the LinkedIn icon, make sure you see your Twitter tweet, but this time this is how it will be shown on LinkedIn.

If you see your #Periscope hashtag there you are set and good to go!

Step 8: Name your Zap and turn it on! Give it a name you can recognise out of all your lists of Zaps.

Here are my Zaps and the LinkedIn Zap I just created is the first one on the list.

6. Does Periscope works in China?

When I started using Persicope the first question I had in mind was if it works in China and I assumed it’s not. As Periscope is owned by Twitter and since Twitter is blocked in China, people will not be able to login to their account because of that.

So, good news here. Periscope IS working in China!

I bumped into my first scope ever from China of a student and she said it’s working in China. The reason is because it’s also possible to use your phone number to register in the app regardless of your Twitter account. That was great news for me and I’m going to broadcast from China when I’ll be visiting there at the end of October.

BTW, if you are looking for scopes from China there are still very very few. I’m researching to see what’s the China version of Pericope as I’m sure there is one and probably more popular , but for now, whenever I see a scope in China I join in.

7. How to find good content to watch on Periscope?

There are a few ways finding content streamed on Periscope by other people.

1. Global view – If you click on the map icon on periscope you will see the world map and all the ongoing broadcasts at this very moment. The red circles on the map on each region/country are showing how many broadcasts are online currently in the region. If you will zoom in you can see more accurately where this broadcast is from. If you click the red circle you’ll see the broadcasts list in the region and can choose one of them to watch according to the title of the scope and the number of people that are currently watching.

Zoom into a region to see the live scopes	Click on a red circle to see Scopes titles and number of people watching currently

This option is good if you want to look for content under a certain region. As example: at the time of writing these lines there is a flow of refugees moving from Arab countries to Europe because of the war in their home country. Therefore there are a lot of broadcasts from countries in eastern Europe from different borders and train stations showing these refugees.

2. Search – If you will go to the users screen on Periscope you’ll notice a search button. This is where you can type in a keyword and find broadcasters according to your interests. Important to say, these are not necessarily current broadcasts, but you can follow these users coming up in your search and when they come live you get a notice and able to watch their live scope.

Be aware that for now you can only look for other users and not a subject. So, only if the keyword you are looking for is in their user name they will come up in results. I guess Periscope team will make this search more an more robust over time.

3. Recommendations – That’s the best way to discover new content, as somebody already told you it’s a good broadcaster to follow. Here are a few of my favorite ones that I follow:

a. PatFlynn– Pat has a very successful blog called www.SmartPasiveIncome.com , he claims to be an introvert but actually very outgoing on his podcast and scopes. He is talking about entrepreneurship and building a successful online businesses. I also listen to his podcast every week.

b. Chris docker – Chris is a business partner of Pat Flynn – I didn’t see him broadcasting too much, but he is frequently mentioned on Pats podcasts, so worth following as well.

c. Discovering Israel – This is a channel of a friend of mine, so glad to recommend it. He now has over 170K followers and broadcasting from different places in Israel. This is a very active channel you can easily find yourself with a more than 300 people in the room.

d. Ethan Pariseau – Ethan has scopes speaking about Periscope. Interesting insights (And always showing his wife’s bunnies…)

f. Shlomo Freund – Startup Noodle – Yep, that’s me. I talk about entrepreneurship, startups in China and Israel. Follow me!

8. How to get the best results broadcasting / scoping from a public event?

I had a chance to broadcast also from events quite a lot and I also broadcasted a TEDx event which lasted for 8 hours. I’ve learned a few tips from the mistakes I’ve made that are specific for these kind of events.

1. Sound – When you are broadcasting from an event keep in mind that your sound quality that your followers hear is not the same as the you hear the speaker at the event. You are limited to your phone or earphones microphone and this is what they will hear. There isn’t a lot to do here on this, but at least don’t make it harder on your followers. Find a good position, where people can see and hear clearly what’s going on.

2. Battery – Pay attention to your battery power. If you are about to scope for a whole day, be prepared! Bring portable batteries and keep your phone plugged in throughout the day.

3. Phone tripod – This one is crucial for long events. Using a tripod can really make a difference between a good a bad broadcast. Tripod keeps your phone at the right height and let you rest your hand on something when holding it. This will improve the quality of your Scope. Your followers will see less of the back of the person in front of you and more of what’s going on on stage.

4. Scopes length – Does a few short scopes better than a single long one? I didn’t really think about this one until I heard it a from a few of my followers. They said it’s definitely the latter. Why? The reason is that every time you start to broadcast, your followers get notified. If you are doing many short scopes they will keep getting your notifications on their phone over and over.

This is quite annoying and at some point they will stop to come and watch your scope. If you do a single long scope people will come and go into your scope because they keep seeing you “live” on the app. I agree, you can’t really hold your phone for 8 hours straight, but be aware of that and choose before hand which sessions on a conference are the best for your audience and broadcast these. Having just 2-3 scopes of 45 minutes each is better. You need to find the right balance.

9. Quick Tips for Beginners on Periscope

While starting to broadcast I also learns a few tips that can help other people who begin scoping as well. Here is what I’ve learned, read on!

1. Go to Airplane mode – Each call coming in the middle of your broadcasting will interrupt it. So, to avoid getting those call, switch to airplane mode and then turn phone data back on. BTW, I found that Shmooz app is a great way to do it with a single click.

2. Make sure you have enough battery – I had my phone almost die on me while I was broadcasting. Not that great….

3. Increase your data plan – Periscope is a live streaming video app which will eat up your data. Make sure you know how much you can use and see how much you pay for overuse.

4. Use of headphone + microphone – Learn how to use them. I thought that if I put the microphone of the headphones really close to my mouth people will be able to hear me better. That’s not the case! My followers kept compalining on back Audio quality. Keep the microphone AWAY from your mouth!

5. Change your profile text – I found out that most of the people on Periscope leave their profile text empty. It’s then less likely that people will follow you. The ones that do have nice description tend to have more followers.

6. Connect it to your IFTTT or Zapier – Periscope was bought by Twitter and as such they work very well (But not perfect) together. In order to get more followers you can setup that the scope would send a tweet immidiatly when starting and inviting your followers in. Now what about Facebook, Linkedin and other channels? You can connect then and fire that tweet through IFTTT or Zapier. There is one catch however, these don’t fire immediately and you will need your scope to last at least 5 or 15 minutes (depends on the plan you have) and then this action will happen (If you missed section 5 above, I explain the whole setup process in detail).

7. Interact with other scopers – I already met a few cool people through Persicope ( I mean, REALLY meeting them!). It was great. All this is thanks to interaction that you have with people coming to your scope. Talk to them and welcome them when they join. Now when I’m joining a scope people tell me they also joined mine. So it’s a two way street.

8. It’s all real time – When you are in a scope it’s all real time so if you have something to say, plan it ahead. It doesn’t have to be perfect with a setting. Periscope is all about casual uneddited live streaming. But some planning ahead would help get the message out.

9. Batch responses – When you start out it’s overwhelming to see all people’s comments and then respond to them while you live stream. But, it can also be very distracting, and cut you in middle of sentences if you keep jumping and responding to comments. Try to stick to your planned broadcast and batch your responses every few minutes.

Now over to you

What’s your Periscope story ? How do you use Priscope in your business? What’s your Scopes are about? Write that in the comments and share. Also, add in interested scopes you are following in the comments. I find more and more hidden gems out there all the time.

Image by Chris Brown

Let’s GO!

It’s coming! Even if you ever thought that your adventure in China would last forever or be a really long one, deep inside you know that one day you will have to go back to your home country and old life.

But wait, China is so exciting! “I want to stay here forever.” This is correct, China is exciting! But on that day when you have to go back home for any reason, you’d need to find a way to say goodbye and come back when you can to this excitement.

A month and a half ago my wife and I left Beijing and moved back to Israel. It wasn’t an easy step for us and it’s still not. We moved back because of family reasons which we feel was the right thing to do.

China was a great adventure for us for almost 3 years and it will always be part of our lives. How big a part you ask? Well, LARGE part of it.

Basically, since coming back we continue to work at the same things we did while living in Beijing.

My wife is working for the same company who hired her in Beijing. We are grateful to them for letting her work remotely. She loves her job and there was no reason for her to leave the company except of the fact that they don’t have an office in Israel. So, she asked to work remotely and it worked. They are a global company anyway, so video calls are something everybody are used to.

I kept both of my ‘jobs’. AppInChina.co is live and kicking and I’m managing my team remotely. We have some of the team in Beijing and some of it in Canada and US .

Also, in the last year and a half I’ve been working very closely with Chinese investors and helping them find technological ventures in Israel. Now when I’m in Israel most of the time, I can do this even better. I get to meet more startups in Tel Aviv and in Silicon Wadi *** and help find the best ones to go to China.

Also, I even keep organising our ‘Lean Startup Beijing meetup’. It has expanded and now we have 2-3 events in Beijing every month. I obviously can’t attend each and every one of them but I’m in close touch. I follow the events, promote them, decide on dates and so on. This is all thanks to my partner Richard***  who runs it when I’m away.

Here is what I do to keep my China experience alive.

1. Keep learning Chinese

When I was in Beijing Mandarin was an important part of my life. It was important for me to keep making progress in it. Now that I’m based back in Israel and travel back and forth it’s even MORE important. I’m at the stage where I invested a lot of effort in it, so wouldn’t want to lose it on the one hand. On the other hand, it’s not at a high enough level so I’d remember it forever like my mother toughe. So, effort is still required.

2. Keep your China connections fresh

I’m frequently in touch with friends and business contacts in China. The fact that I don’t live there any more doesn’t mean I’m not interested in it and what’s going on. I keep open channels of discussion and fly when I need to do face to face meetings (This post is written flying to Beijing, BTW).

3. Keep following on events, conferences and industry

As I mentioned I still run the Lean Startup Meetup. I enjoy doing it even though I now can’t attend every event. I follow conferences and events related to mobile in Asia and plan my trips accordingly. GMGC, GMIC and Tech in Asia in Singapore are happening at the end of April beginning of May and I hope to be there as well.

(Update: I made it to GMIC and GMGC but not to Tech in Asia conference)

4. Visits

I guess you can’t avoid those. Even in today’s globally connected world. Come for a visit from time to time see what’s changed. I really enjoyed living in Beijing, so I’m looking forward flying back. This is my first trip back since we left 2 months ago and I’m really excited.

(Update: I’m now planing my 4th trip at the end of October, so things are going well)

5. Acknowledge

Yes, acknowledge this. Some things are different now. You can be frustrated because you had to move back or you can decide you make the most out of it and make the effort to keep the experience alive in your everyday life as much as you can. Beijing is a very transient city, I know MANY people who left town. It’s part of the reality. People come for a few years and then leave.

It might look like a sad subject to write about. Certainly not an easy thing to cope with if you liked the place where you lived. The point is that it’s not sad, it’s just different. You are in a different place with a different reality and you need to adjust. The most powerful skill you can have as an entrepreneur is flexibility. So adjustment is a good skill to have. Moving back home certainly develops this, until the next time you feel it’s time to move on.

Now over to you

Did you just come back from a long stay somewhere far from home building your business? Was it successful for you? How do you leverage your knowledge and contacts from there? What’s changed for you since coming back? Would be great if you’ll share it in the comments.

Here is what this post is about:  Hiring is the said to be the #1 thing a startup CEO should do. I agree on this. In this post I’ll cover best practices for hiring your first few employees and address some issues related to China specifically.

Hiring is tough and exciting at the same time! It’s one of those things that are hard to tell if you made the right decision. If you made the wrong decision here, by the time you realised that it’s probably too late….

Here is how we do our hiring which so far proven to be very successful. My team is great and they give AppInChina.co it’s uniqueness and quality.

Here are 4 things you can do to successfully hire in China.

1. Write a professional and awesome job description

When I decided to do a hire I wrote a basic description, then I gave it to my friend Richard.  Richard is a good friend and an amazing person. Oh, he is also a native English speaker which really helps when you need to have stuff written in proper english (and guess what?! It comes with a cool accent too!)

Richard was super helpful with rewriting the description and making it really professional. We didn’t agree on a couple of stuff that should be there but these were minor.

The most important thing is making your description appealing. You want to attract the best people which would WANT to come and work for and with you. These are the people you will be spending most of your day with and will share your successes and failures. So, to some extent they are your support team as well. So, it’s better getting someone with the right vibe for that.

2. distribute EVERYwhere!

The next thing I needed to do after writing the awesome job description is making people know about it. Richard (again!) was very helpful and sent the JD to his ~3200 mailing list of people (Update: The list has now 23000 people. send me a message if you’d like to do your hiring through this unique list), on top of that he listed it in many other places I hadn’t even thought about. In addition, I emailed every person I thought should know about it and can perhaps introduce someone relevant.

The next thing was to publish the JD on we chat (the Chinese whats app) and Richard even changed his profile pic to the JD!

I then started getting candidates resumes to my inbox realising I should choose the best ones. About half of them were irrelevant. People sometime don’t read the JD and just send their resume without going through the requirements.

3. Interviewing

What are the things you need to address in an interview. I’m certainly not a master on interviewing people and admit that it’s hard to asses a person just from meeting him for half an hour.

Still when I interview there are a few things that I go over.

A. Be Clear – explaining VERY clearly what the job is and what the candidate will do. On most cases we also give them an excise directly related to their work. Our best experience was with hiring our operation people and gave them hands on excise showing them what exactly they will do. Some the the candidates decided that this work is not for them which is actually….Great!     We found this out very fast, and let them decide they don’t want to do it.

b. Visa status – Because in China the whole visa process is very complicated it’s important to know which visa the candidate has and how/if this align with what you can assist them in your startup.

Related post:  Entrepreneurs in China – Which Chinese Visa Would be Best for you?

c. Future plans – This is self explanatory, but still important to ask about.  You want to see that the candidate is really here to stay (if everything goes well), especially if you are investing in issuing a working visa for him by your company.

d. Availability – Not all candidates that are looking for a job are ready to start ASAP. So ask about their availability. Perhaps, they plan to go on a short vacation first, perhaps they need to finish their semester, perhaps their family is coming for a visit. I’ve seen it all! All you need to do is asking about this.

e. Expected Salary – Setting expectations is why you ask about expected salary. It’s pretty straight forward asking about this. I’d recommend here that if your job description does not include how much is offered for the position, it’s better asking the candidate on the phone when having the initial conversation, even before the interview comes. That would save you a lot of time.

4. References 

Look for as many references as possible on the candidate. I admit, we are not diligent enough about this, but I had some candidates which I wasn’t sure about , so speaking with a reference about them really helped making the decision.

One general remark here and VERY important one

New candidates coming to your company are looking for a nice work environment. This role in your company might be the one that they dreamt of. They tell about that to their friends and family , and are looking for their next career opportunity.

My point is that be a mench . Start your meeting with them on time, smile, and give them all the time they need to ask all their questions in the interview.

On interviews that I don’t personally do , I at least try to join for a few minutes introducing myself. We had candidates saying they really appreciated the fact that the CEO of the company joined and it let them feel good. Treat them the way you would want to be treated.

Now over to you

What is special about your hiring process? What mistakes you’ve done and what are the things that helped you get the best candidates? share it in the comments with everybody. I’d really want to know.

Image credit by 1418 Friday Joke

It’s July again, Startup Noodle’s birthday celebration on July 19th! (My birthday is also coming up a few days apart…)

Every year, before writing the yearly summary post I read the previous one and it’s amazing to see the progress and changes happening from one year to another.

If you want to see the whole picture see the first two posts summarising my journey:

1st year: 525,600 Minutes, How do You Measure a Year? The Story of SUN

2nd Year: Growing! Startup Noodle 2nd year summary

So, what we have we had so far?

This year I published 15 posts on the blog. Not so many… one of them was a guest post. Still (Surprise!) traffic is now growing steadily , which is great!

Here are the 10 most popular ports after 3 years:

Startup Noodle, 10 most popular post/pages

Looking at the most popular content of this year, two interesting things happened:

1. The post about how to use Gmail in China is killing it! (It’s a great post if you are looking for a VPN to use while in China).

In the 6 months that it’s up it managed to get massive amounts of traffic that even outnumber the main page. I get lots of traffic from searches like “How to use Gmail in China” ? This is a guest post from by Marcus Habert from BestVPNProvider.co and I should thank them for it.  I let them post it here as I knew it was valuable to readers of this blog and they did it to support their growth. Well, it also helped with my growth. So, thank you guys!

2. The 3 most popular posts from last year stayed at the top 10 most popular posts this year but only one of them is at the top three.

Here are the 3 top performing posts this year:

1. Access your Gmail in China – A Guide to Workarounds

2. The IELTS Magic! or How to Earn Really Well in China as a Foreigner

3. 6 Killer Tips on Attracting Chinese Investors in 2015

I also made a summary post about the Dim Sum project and still looking for volunteers to keep it going. Contact me to apply via the contact form.

Looking backwards….

First to the most significant change that happened, I had to move back to Israel because of family reasons, so I spend most of my time now around Tel Aviv and its vibrant entrepreneurs community. But, I do keep in close touch with Beijing and travel roughly every 3-4 months. I love those trips!

Looking back at my plans for this year, I definitely met two of my goals.

AppInChina.co is a stronger and larger company serving larger clients, with a better set of services.
It’s a live and kicking startup. Last year we were 3.5 people, and now we have 4 full time employees and 3 part time. Things change!

This year we served (and are still serving) companies like Microsoft, KLM, Wunderlist and Flipagram . I hope that next year will bring other brands recognising the value of our service. It’s a great feeling working with them and a great responsibility at the same time.

Also, LSM (Lean Startup Meetup) has also grown tremendously. It’s now the 2nd most active Lean Startup Meetup group after San Francisco.

I’m still running it though I now can’t attend every meeting now. We’ve grown to more than 1570 members! We now have more events going on; Besides our monthly event we also have 2 community dinners every month. We added this as we felt that people are able to connect on a more personal level and less stress over dinner rather than at a networking event. This has definitely proven itself.

We are also looking for sponsors for the group who wants to reach the local entrepreneur community in Beijing. Get in touch with me for more details. last thing regarding the group: Credits to Richard who runs the show when I’m not there. Thanks Rich!

Another change is that we moved to a new office. Richard opened Manning Co-working (曼宁地产） in a beautiful building in Beijing and we were one of the first companies to join. Here are some pics to share.

AppInChina.co team

Our Office building

Looking forward….

This is a tough one. Yes, growing AppInChina and LSM even more are my goals for the year, definitely. I do my best to keep them running professionally and diligently.

Another goal of mine is to release my first online course about the mobile market in China. I’ve been mentioning it several times during the last year and it’s still in the works. It’s going too slow in my opinion, and I hope to release it in the next few months.

For SUN, I still feel I don’t know my audience well enough and want to better understand how can I help my readers. I try to help as much as I can, but I think I need to find a more scalable way helping a larger audience…. This is where you come into the picture, let me know why you are here, what you are looking for and how I can help.

I kept the best for last though! Both AppInChina.co and SUN are going through a major design changes. SUN will be up very soon with a new design and AppInChina.co next month. It’s been a few months work and it will do good to both brands (If you read it after the new design is up: SUN doesn’t have a footer now…)

Now over to you

If you just missed my last request, now is a great time to leave comments, follow Startup Noodle on Facebook, or get in touch through the contact form.

Also, If you are in Beijing come join our meetup or come say hello when you visit Israel.

Feature image credit by Emilio Küffe

If you are a foreigner living in China, there are 3 main topics that you will talk about with your friends:  Your Chinese level, The air pollution and on which visa you are  (Whoever thinks differently raise their hand, or just comment…)  This post will address the latter where policies change once (and even twice) a year.

Since there is no “Entrepreneurship” visa in China ( Like in Korea, as example ), which enables a you to stay for a relatively long period of time and work on your startup, there is a need to use different methods to stay in China. Be aware that this post is written from a first hand experience and getting to know the expats community in China and not as a recommendation of what you should do.

So, which solutions people use in order to be able to stay in China long term?

Internship – There are many agencies that find internships for you in China. For AppInchina.co , we use these agencies to find interns as well .  The Agency is taking care of the visa and issuing a request letter as well to the candidate. Obviously while people are doing their internship they come to learn more about china and what kind of company they wish to open.

Study in China (Student ‘X’ visa)  – Some people are working while studying in China in different jobs. You need to apply to an official school and they will help you get the student visa. Officially, it’s forbidden to work while you study and permitted to work only under a work visa ( Called a ‘z visa’)

Short stay business visa (Business ‘F’ Visa) – Sometimes the way to stay in China is actually not to stay. What I mean to say is that you can get a business visa with a short stay each time of 30-90 days and need to leave China every time and do a ‘visa run’. There is also an option for you to extend your visa a few times after entering , so you can save some on the flights out.

Foreigners living close to the border in places like Shenzhen or Guangzhou can do a short trip to Honk kong and back. After your visa is expired you can request a new visa in Hong Kong as well if needed, this is a very common way.

Also, in the last few months a new long term visa option is now available. Americans can apply for a 10 year Chinese visa with multiple entries, each time for 30 days stay.

Work Visa (Work ‘Z’ visa) – This is the ideal solution. It enables you to stay long term in China for at least a year. All this assuming that the company you work for has the permit to give such a visa to foreigners. Entrepreneurs working on their own startup, can work in a company for the visa and continue to open by themselves their own Chinese company (a whole saga by itself) which can then give them the desirable z visa.

The problem today is that China’s visa policy is becoming stricter and stricter and therefore you should want  as an entrepreneur to open a company as fast a possible so you will have the ability for a steady stay without running around your tail for a visa.

Fortunately, the Chinese government these days is easing the requirements for opening new companies in China as they understand that their future is dependant on the innovation of those small companies with their new products in the market.

As example, previously, it was required that the company’s initial capital will be invested in one time in the company while today you can make this investment over a couple of years.

As mentioned there is no current solution for entrepreneurs in China to stay unless they ‘belong’ to a certain company. Therefore foreigners who are looking for ways to stay there long term find creative ways to do that. If you are on your way there, think which kind of China visa application would be the best for you when you apply at your local Chinese embassy.

Photo credit by Kate Harding

Traveling gives you interesting perspective, and this time I’ll use it to compare mobile conferences. China VS. the US head to head!

In the last month I’ve been to 3 different conferences. 2 in China and 1 in the US, All of which were practically back to back.  This gave me a perspective by just observing the eastern VS. Western style of organizing conferences.

Since I’m in the mobile space, all these are mobile specific, so I can’t comment on any other conferences or other industries. Still, I believe you can learn from it about this market.

I’ll give a short intro to where I was and then will jump into insights and the nitty gritty!

Where I visited?

GMIC (Global mobile internet conference) and GMGC (Global mobile gaming confederation) are two major conferences organised in Beijing each year around the end of April , beginning of May. Both are pretty big.

This year there were 35000+ people joining in to GMIC.  Also compared to last year, the size of the conference was at least 50% larger, a 3rd day was even added to the exhibition VS. 2 days in previous years.

These conferences are the place where major companies launch their products and make special announcements about the market.

Right after these two conferences, I flew to the US for another conference, Apps World in San Francisco (there was also an attempt to go to Tech Crunch disrupt in NYC the week before, with no success. I have a few words on that as well…)

Here are the key differences I noticed between the conferences.

1. Ease of getting your tickets

When you need tickets in China for an event you find a way to get them. You can either hook up with one of the sponsors and get a ticket or buy one (which most of the people visiting don’t really do…) .

In the US on the other hand getting tickets to Techcrunch disrupt was impossible! Even though the tickets were very expensive, you couldn’t even get any. All my attempts to get a ticket failed.

On the other hand, getting tickets to Apps World was very simple. Just register and get a ticket for free to the exhibition. Then they try to up-sell to you all types of services to network while in the conference which were not cheap. But frankly, when I was at the conference itself I kept wondering where would paid tickets get you. I didn’t notice ANY difference.

2. Exhibition style

US get a move on, China is right behind you! This is crystal clear when you visit US and Chinese conferences. Chinese conferences are energetic, fun, noisy (with many scantly dressed models).

The US ones on the other hand are heavy, quiet and calm. It feels like the US is the old world which for years was on top of everything and there is a runner behind it coming at full speed ahead. Wake up America! You are about to lose the race!

This reminds me of a question I was asked by a relative of mine on this trip, if what’s being said in US media about China taking over America is true. She was asking if this is correct or just America being paranoid.  Here is my view on it (and this is what I told her as well). “No, they are not paranoid, China is taking over.”

Some would claim though and I respect that, that I didn’t visit many other US conferences, which might be larger and more energetic. So, I did present this question to a bunch of other people. I even had a meeting with a colleague who had a booth at TechCrunch disrupt in NYC and met him out of the building in a coffee shop. He said it was somewhat quiet / sleepy….

As I mention before, scantily clad models are a very common sight in conferences in China, obviously also impacting the vibe. While in western conferences they used to be much more common but became socially unacceptable in recent years.

If you’ve been to conferences in Europe or the US in the last year, I’ll be glad to hear what you think, leave a comment, it would be nice to compare.

3. Content of exhibition – more of the same

Content was not missing on all exhibitions. when you walk trough the booths on the exhibitors floor you find an Ad network, then an analytics tool, ad network, app marketing agency, Analytics tool, ad network, analytics tool, marketing agency, etc. It’s all of the same!  Competition is fierce and you really have to work hard to figure out the differences (if any…) between the exhibitors.

China had some advantage in including more interesting presentations such as robots and drones.

4. Stages

I found a big difference in the way that Apps World organised the stages VS. GMIC/GMGC . Apps World had 4-5 different stages with different streams going on. They were in the exhibitors hall in an open space. fairly modest.

China has a completely different standard, grand stages , with the best technology and screens behind. A totally different league.

5. General feeling from the participants

GMGC and GMIC market themselves as being international, and though there is a vast change from previous years where this year there were more foreigners in the show, they are still not really international. It’s very Chinese, which is actually a good thing!

And when I say ‘Chinese’ what do I mean?

–       Almost all booths are in Chinese, team members are also Chinese speakers. If you only speak English, people at the booth will try to locate an English speaker to explain things.

–       Most of the talks are in Chinese (But you can still find simultaneous translation devices).

–       You see very few foreigners walking around compared to the number of locals.

I spoke to a friend who went to MWC Shanghai and asked her how did it go and how international is it. She said it’s very international and not so much China oriented. We concluded that in order to get to know the mobile and internet world in China, the conferences in Beijing reflect it much better.

Apps World – Speaking to a few of the exhibitors, many people were disappointed from the turnout and felt it was weak. The first day which is suppose to be the one with the most people , was disappointing to them. I also felt the same. Not so many people….

For me personally, I wanted to speak with more developers and except of the indie games area which was dedicated to them it was hard fisng them out. I did meet some clients and partners there, so it wasn’t a waste of time, just was hoping to achieve more.

Oh, and speaking of the indie games , there was one guy there, Scott Stevens, who is a one man show with a really really fun game for  iPad called 2Play Tap. I came back to play again and again every now and then when I was bored (and even some meetings came out of it after we started playing together and had a joint match? . (Update: 2play Tap is now live on iTunes!)

Scott , your game is great! lots of luck!

To conclude:

If Apps world is to represent the heart of America’s mobile industry (it was in San Francisco after all), then it’s just a matter of time , and perhaps it’s already happening, that China will take over. The facts are Apple sells more iPhones in China then in the US, and half of all  the money Android is making comes from China, so it seems pretty clear where the market is heading. Still, I’d expect a decent fight!

If you are reading Tech entertainment stories from TechCrunch or Venture Beat you might be overwhelmed by the amount of advice that you get as an entrepreneur. Do this, do that…etc. Still at some point you see the same websites over and over again. I decided I want to try and create something different….

I created an agregated list of good advice for entrepnurs and was trying (as much as possible) to avoid the major websites and walk off the beaten track.

Jump in!

(…And don’t forget to add your own at the comments, possible with a relevant link.)

Work

1) Raise money – Creative Ways To Raise Money For Your Startup

2) Work hard – The Truth about Hard Work and Entrepreneurial Success

3) (or) Work Smart – 5 Unusual Ways to Start Working Smarter, Not Harder, Backed by Science

4) Build a team – What no one talks about when building a team: letting people go

5) Be lean – Why We Love The Lean Startup Method (And You Should Too!)

6) Measure ROI – GROWTH TALKS #01: HOW TO MEASURE CONTENT ROI? WITH ROY POVARCHIK

7) Hire smart people – How to Recognize Smart People for Your Startup Team

8) Learn to code – My Advice for Young Entrepreneurs? Learn to code

9) Or don’t  – Should Entrepreneurs Code? Founders Share Their Views

10) Speak at conferences – Why You Should Speak At Meetups And Conferences

11) Get a mentor – Finding The Perfect Mentor: Stories from 4 Successful Entrepreneurs

12) Join an accelerator or incubator – When is The Right Time to Join an Accelerator or an Incubator?

13) Blog – All Entrepreneurs Should Blog

14) Make a to do list – An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Building an Efficient To-Do List

15) Make a not to-do list – Effective Entrepreneurship: The Not To Do List

16) Improve your pitch – How to improve your investment pitch

Inspiration

17) Listen – The Art of Growing Your Team – Listening

18) Be honest – Being Honest Makes You a Better Entrepreneur

19) Be Transparent – How to Build a Transparent Company the Buffer Way

20) Find a co-founder – Why you can’t find a technical co-founder

21) Find work life balance – How to find work/life balance as an entrepreneur

22) Value investing – This $1 Can Change Your Life; Personal Finance 101 for Entrepreneurs

23) Be happy – Helping entrepreneurs to succeed – and to be happy

24) Care – When Caring is the Work

25) (or just) Don’t do it – Why should you not become an entrepreneur?

Habits

26) Mediate –  10 Reasons You Should Meditate Every Day

27) Write everyday – The Ultimate Writing Guide for Entrepreneurs

28) Save money – Start-Up Savings: 10 ways entrepreneurs can save money through broadband Internet

29) Sleep – The Beginner’s Guide to Getting Better Sleep

30) Eat healthy – Put Down That Ramen! Top 10 Reasons Entrepreneurs Need to Stay Healthy

31) Exercise – Why Every Entrepreneur Should Go to the Gym

32) Set goals – How to Set Entrepreneurial Goals in 2015 (and Keep Them!)

33) Or not… – Entrepreneurs: Don’t Set Goals

36) Don’t leave your email inbox open all day long – An Interview with Craig Jarrow, The Time Management Ninja

37) Wake up early – Rising Early: Why Successful People Do It & How You Can Too

Now, if you are in China you defiantly have a few more!

38) Get a visa to stay (This one is difficult and requires a separate post) – China’s New Visa Rules Screw Over Startups and Entrepreneurs

39) Learn Chinese (a little cliché, but some Chinese skills would help) – Why Skritter App Makes me Spend $518.49?

40) Find your community – Lean Startup Beijing Meetup . (Disclaimer, I’m the organizer of this group, come check us out)

41) What else?

Photo by Wicker Paradise

From May 2013 till August 2014 we ran a project called “The Dim Sum Project”. It was aimed to open a window for entreprsnus who wish to understand more about entreprnship in different fields from a first hand perspective.

This is how it worked

We had young entrepreneurs who wished to learn about a certain topic connected to an experienced entrepreneur. It was their chance to ask him anything they want and get an advice one on one. In return they had to bring in an interview with that person, about his business or venture.

This helped in 3 ways:

– Young Entrepreneurs learn about something of their interest.

– The experienced entrepreneurs got exposure to their venture.

– Startup Noodle got more relevant content we could share with our audience.

Everybody were happy!

We had interviews on various topics:  NGOs, Food and beverage, Tech, tourism, design and a few more. Very diverse!

It was then run by Kevin Lee who did a great job on this and left to do his masters degree (加油 Kevin!) .

I’d like to start this project again and looking for somebody to manage it voluntarily. It’s an opportunity to be exposed to the entrepreneurship world and use some of your journalism and editing skills as well. If you are interested please send me a message through the contact form or email me directly.

Here are all the interviews we had. Enjoy!

Tech

Entrepreneurship?! Not Sexy! – One on One Interview With Richard Robinson from Youlu

Food and Beverage (F & B)

The secret to opening a store in China? Find a good landlord! – Interview with Brick from the Beijing Drive Thru

NGOs

Set up a Non Profit in China – Dream Big, But Start Small; An Interview With Irene Shao From BEAM

Tourism

Bringing Culinary Tourism and Social Entrepreneurship Together – Interview with Adlyn Teoh of Hias Gourmet

Design

The Challenges of Setting up Your Own Design Consultancy in China – Interview With Andreas Thomczyk of anyScale

Environment

This interview is for the memory of Mike Murphy who passed away on March 2014. He made a change!

Getting to know the King of Clean Air: Interview with Mike Murphy of IQAir

Photo by adamclyde

The last few weeks were very special for me. A week ago I came back from the first trip to China since we moved back to Israel. It was a hectic trip! Such a difference if you re-visiting vs. living in a place. Anyway, the day before I left I spoke at the Entreprenur conf Asia in Shanghai . Since Appinchina‘s clients are all international clients, I’ve been asked to speak about how we got those clients as a company that is based in China (BTW, this is also a loose definition now. As we are spread out in China , Canada and Israel…) I didn’t think I had the best insights on this as we never thought of us as “global” and have this client differentiation. There wasn’t anything special for us getting ‘international’ clients. For us they were just ‘clients’. When starting to work on the presentation I figured that we did make an effort on this unintentionally from day one. And well, it works!

So, how do you get global clients?

1. International team – Our team have all lived & studied abroad. They all understand western and Chinese culture as well and can bridge that gap. 2. Global team – Although we are a small team we are still spread out in 3 continents.  So, if there is a need to meet a client or setting up a call we do it in the timezone and place convenient for our client when we can.

3. Around the clock – Since we are located on different time zones, there is almost always somebody online. We mainly use it for our chat service, Zopim, to help our users get immediate response on their questions.

4. Partnerships – We have great partnership with CodeNgo. CodeNgo is an awesome company and does distribution for apps all around the world. We are helping their clients reach to China as well.

5. TALK to clients & chat – We speak with almost ALL of our clients. Our service is very personal and this is how we know what’s the best solution for them. I guess this should be labeled as ‘Good listening skills’.

6. Lead generation service – Until recently we have used a company that helped us getting leads and get exposure. We’ve reached thousands of companies and developers with them.

7. Content marketing (Fancy way of saying ‘Blogging’) – Our blog is one of the most useful ways to connect with our audience. Chinese mobile market is an Enigma (Which we are about to solve ) to many people and we try to simplify it to our clients in a clear and easy way to understand (yes, it’s HARD!) 

8. Media coverage – The main coverage that we try to get is on international websites aiming a global audience such as here, here and here. Many developers find us through these channels.

9. Conferences – This one goes without saying and the better version of it is: “Speaking at conferences” not just going to them. This time was the first time we were exhibiting in a conference and had a booth. We were glad to try out this channel as well and got positive feedback as well. Here is the presentation I gave. Enjoy! If you find it useful leave your comment and share more ideas.  

 The Great Firewall of China is the tool that the Chinese government has built to prevent those living in China from being able to access the entire content of the Internet – and the material that is critical of the government.

While the firewall is formidable and extensive, it is possible for you to get around it. For the readers of this blog, who are looking to live and work in China, can you imagine landing in China and not being able to access any of Google’s services? That’s right; no email, no search, no Gchat, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

The Great Firewall of China: What does it block?

To give you a complete list of everything it blocked in this article would be exhausting. Take a trip over to Wikipedia for a complete breakdown. Here are the websites which are blocked that impact most business people:

• Dropbox
• DuckDuckGo
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Instagram
• Hootsuite
• Netflix
• New York Times
• Twitter
• Wall Street Journal
• YouTube
• Many Wikipedia pages

All that and Gmail too! Try out the Great Firewall of China website to see if a tool essential to your business is blocked. If you don’t have a plan to get around the firewall you could very well find your business never taking off in China.

How to get around the Great Firewall of China

The easiest way to get around the Great Firewall of China is to make the servers inside of China that you’re connecting to not know what websites you’re visiting. This means encryption of your Internet traffic must take place as soon as it leaves your computer.

The easiest way to encrypt your traffic is with a VPN provider. A VPN provider will encrypt all of your Internet traffic as soon as you connect to it. With the firewall unable to detect which websites you’re visiting, it can’t block you.

Our website looks at the best VPN providers around, but the situation in China is quite different from the rest of the world. While all VPN providers encrypt traffic, China has gotten around this by blocking some VPN providers as well. We had to look at what is actually working in China right now.

Update: Please see an update about the affiliate links at the bottom of post.

We can confirm as of this writing that these 5 VPN providers work in China:

1. IPVanish: Rank well due to numerous servers in area
2. VyprVPN: Also provide numerous servers in Asia (July 2020 update – 75% off )
3. Private Internet Access: Privacy champions only have one server in Hong Kong
4. PureVPN: Many servers in Asia, awkward software holds them back (75% off for Startup Noodle readers)
5. StrongVPN: Once blocked by Chinese government, now running on mirror site

Those were ranked in order of best at the top, downwards. Each one has different strengths, but they are all currently functioning within China to get past the firewall.

The other way to get around the Great Firewall of China

Users who are looking for another method to get around the Great Firewall of China, either as a backup or free solution, will need to look at proxy servers. A proxy server can be had in a number of ways from nearly countless providers.

Most proxy servers being used today are free add-ons for browsers. While they do have the ability to get around firewalls, they are slow as free online services tend to be. The other issue you’ll face with them is that ‘free’ also means no support. Many of them have been blocked in China. Since they’re not making any money, no one tries to fix them.

I could recommend a proxy to you right now, but there’s a very good possibility that it will wind up blocked by the time you read this. This list of unblocked proxies was once of 100, but 23 of them were blocked when the page was last updated in 2012!

Doing Business in China demands a plan

Being in China and doing business can be exciting. The prospect of expanding your business, and working on exciting ventures that are specific to the Chinese way of life is always enjoyable.

In order for your business to be as productive as possible, you need to have a plan in place to get around the Great Firewall of China. This will give you access to all the tools on the Internet. Not to mention the fact that you can still contact people back home!

Note: This VPN list was formed before the affiliate links were added. If you will purchase through these links I’ll get a percentage of the sale. This helps me keep running the blog and supports it. I appreciate and thank you for that.

This post was written by Marcus Habert from BestVPNProvider.co

Now that China officially has the largest economy in the world it’s a good time to examine how to attract investments from that country’s growing investor community. There is a lot of capital available in China for outbound investment, but a labyrinth of regulatory and cultural issues mean that actually securing investment is not so straightforward.

Here are a few points to pay attention to when attempting to raise funds from Chinese investors:

1. Make sure your company takes a ‘stake’ in China

Chinese investors can help you break into the Chinese market, period. This is probably the reason you want to establish a presence there in the first place, because it’s a huge market. But what Chinese investors are interested in above all else is a company with some sort of a stake in China.

Are you going to produce in China? Are you going to develop a product overseas but issue a license for its distribution in China? Are you going to develop the technology in China?

Chinese investors are a conservative bunch who tend not to invest in ventures overseas just to make a quick buck. They prefer to see their investment bear fruit locally and enjoy the exit when the time comes, if not now then 2 or 3 years down the road.

2. Show traction!

Many investment pitches to Chinese investors fail because the project in question is too early-stage. As I mentioned before, Chinese investors are conservative and cautious by nature, and prefer to wait and invest later at a larger valuation with lower risk. Many of the companies I worked reported that deals fell through because investors claimed ‘It’s too early’.

Even if you have a business up and running in China with paying clients, investors will wait patiently until they’re convinced you have secured solid traction in the market.

3. Be very, very patient

People talk about this a lot, and for the most part it’s true. Dealflow in China is slow, drawn-out affair and requires vast patience on the part of foreign companies. This is part local mentality, aimed at developing business relationships slowly over time, and part negotiation tactic.

4. China wants you to invest in it, too

If you have decided that China is your target country, invest in it. I meet companies that sell primarily to the West but want to raise funds in China. Don’t fall prey to short-term opportunism. If you’re a small company that doesn’t have the resources to invest in the Chinese market – don’t do it.

5. Assume that your product already exists – and differentiate

Take it for granted that your idea or product or service already exists on the Chinese market – and not necessarily because it was stolen. It might be of lower quality to yours or have less features or goofy graphics, but it’s very hard to come up with something entirely new. Entrepreneurship has exploded in China in recent years with a rate of development to match. But remember, it’s a humongous market and there is likely room for multiple players in your space and opportunities to team up with bigger players to help you leverage your competitive advantages vs. local competitors.

6. Make sure your investor has a USD fund (as well)

Most of the investors in China I’ve spoken with have a USD fund, but not necessarily. Companies with RMB-only funds find it more difficult to invest out of China, and the investment would probably be in a joint venture company in China. In addition, investors with USD funds tend to be more Westernised and therefore are easier to work with.

Now over to you

Have you ever thought of attracting investments from China? Is China a target market for you? Share it at the comments.

Also, I found China Global Investment Tracker Map which is an interesting interactive resources showing China’s investments breakdown by country.  Enjoy!

Image credit by Sarnil Prasad

Yes, this post has a catchy title., but frankly saying since launching AppInChina I’ve learned a lot about the Chinese App market and the android stores.

We decided to share and release a series of posts with this knowledge, as we know there is a lot of confusion regarding the Chinese Android market because it’s so different from anywhere else around the world.

We will add more and more posts as needed and according to questions we find coming more often than others.

Enjoy!

1. How is Chinese Android Market Different From the Western Market?

2. What’s the difference between an exclusive launch and a joint launch?

 3. What Kind of SDK You Should use for Which Kind of app?

4. What’s the Revenue Share That Stores in China Take for Purchases From Developers? 

5. What is Alipay and When Should I use it in my App?

6. Why do I Need a security Solution for my app?

7. How Come my app is Already on the Chinese Market without my Permission? How Come I Have Traffic From China?

Would love to get feedback on these and of course more questions!

Shopping at the market

Note from Shlomo: I heard my friend Kevin Dewalt speaking a couple of times about why other startup hubs should not be looking up to Silicon Valley .

The reason for that is because Silicon valley has Silicon valley’s problems , not other places problems. So, each place is special and can create it’s own unique eco system for specific problems they handle with.

This post will show you how particular you can be with your Eco system and how promising it is to any entrepreneur.

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I decided to take some time off and travel to Myanmar together with my wife.  It’s a special country that slowly opens up to the world, Internet is scarce…(Running AppInChina from here while traveling has it’s own challenges, but this is a subject to a different post. )

This country had less than 800,000 tourists coming in 2009 and more than 2.1 million tourists coming in 2013. It’s ~300% growth!

One of the most touristic places in Mynamar is a place called Inle lake with a small town of 19,000 people called Nyuang Shwe being the base for traveling around the lake. This town is expected to have 2.5 million tourists next year. You probably imagine how the streets look like. not a pretty sight… Resutarants and hotels all around.

Inle Lake has a unique culture of floating villages growing floting agriculture on the lake. When you take a boat on the lake you see mostly tourists and not really the villages and their uniqueness.

Min’s village

We almost left this area because of how touristic it is and how much we didn’t like it, until…the flight we wanted to schedule was fully booked and we were stuck there for another day.

We were strolling up and down the main street thinking of what to do and discovered a small office of Mr. Min cooking classes. Still frankly, these streets here are full with “tours”, so our expectations were not that high.

We spoke with Min understanding what his cooking class offers and decided to join a class along with another friend we’ve met on the trip.

I’m not going to tell you everything about the class which was great on it’s own. What was amazing here was the vision of one entrepreneur running a small low tech business with a great vision!

Min,27, who comes from one of the floating villages in Inle lake, also works as a guide. Sometimes his work is to bring his clients to a place also offering cooking classes. These cooking classes are VERY expensive ($100/person), and give less value to the clients. You would think he is only competing over the price (There is a lot of margin on a $100/person class, monthly Salary in Myanmar is about $100) which is pretty straight foreword.

The cooking class Min is compting with don’t take the clients and buy the groceries at the market together with them and offers only 4 dishes you make instead of 10-13 (!!) Min is making with his clients.

boats everywhere!

Now, here comes the best part. Min, is taking his guests to his village on the lake hosting people next to his parents house. He built a special place for the classes and the whole family is part of this business. His Sister is helping him while he is giving the class, his brothers are driving his clients to the village on their boat, his nephew is helping out with the Kanoo trip that is included, in their village.

The amazing thing is that this family of 10 siblings saved money to send Min to school who is the 2nd youngest. The rest of the family are not educated at all but they are all supporting his business and he is supporting them and his village.

Min’s older brother is driving the boat

It’s important for him to show the rest of the people in the village how education is important and can lead to a better life (for now most of the kids learn till 4th grade and then go to help their parents being farmers in the village. The parents don’t value education as they need their kids to work).

And it gets even better…

His vision for his cooking class goes beyond his family to the whole village. He wants to expand and have more families supporting themselves by hosting cooking classes in their floating village!

Meal is almost ready…

How do I know all this from a cooking class?

Min, is not selling a cooking class, he is actually not selling at all and this is what so great about it! After the cooking class is over he joined the meal and we spoke about his culture, the village and plans for the future. It was fascinating!

Min’s sister assisting in class

His story and the culture of Inle lake are hard to be seen if you are not a rich tourist. We got to know the real culture of the lake and learn about the villagers through the eyes of a local.

[Tweet “This story taught me how local and simple entrepreneurship can be, and how much vision there is behind it.”]

When talking to Min it feels like he can move mountains in the future just because of his vision.

Ready to eat?

Now over to you

What’s your vision behind your Startup? How “Local” is it? I’m curious to know and amazed to see such small businesses and stories. Share them here on the comments.

Anyway, I can’t do without a warm recommendation to this amazing guy who is a true entrepreneur. ‘Like’ his page and get in touch with him if you are traveling to Myanmar (AKA Burma)

Image Credit: Myself, Shlomo Freund

I wrote previously about why cool ideas don’t make money . This subject came up when I was mentoring at startup weekend , where Mike Michelini was organising it all with volunteers from the lean startup meetup.

It was also the first time I ever met Mike after we have been in touch for quite a while. I invited him to visit in our office in Beijing.

We had a lot to,talk about and at the end of the visit we recorded an episode for mike’s Global From Asia podcast (Yes, give him a like!)

It’s not the first time I record a podcast with someone.The Previous time was an episode for China Hang-up and I realised, I really enjoy doing them!

Anyway, Mike’s podcast is great and you can learn a lot on how to build your business in Hong Kong from it. AppInChina is in Beijing but Mike made an exception. Hope his listeners are ok with that.

You can find the podcast here with Mikes comments. Also, special request , leave a review to Mike it helps more people finding this great material.

Enjoy!

Here is a message I got from Andrew 2 weeks ago. Basically Andrew wanted to take the chance and share some of his experience as an entrepreneurs which is great.  I asked his permission to publish his message as well with his post and refer to this: Why you need to find courage to contact me?!

Hi noodles! My name is Andrew, I am a young entrepreneur from Melbourne, Australia. I’ve been following your site for quite some time now, but have now found courage to contact you and ask whether you would be interested in publishing an article of my own. Since I am a beginner and have struggled with establishing brands through traditional marketing in the past, I would like to share fresh opinion on where (according to me) the industry is headed. Would such content appeal to your reader? Let me know what you think! Kind Regards, Andrew C. Newitt

I’m not sure why I’m so scary guys but if you want to get in touch people, just do that. I answer (personally)to 98% of the messages I get with various questions.  I put this out here to wake up all the silent readers out there who are looking to coverage of some sort to get in touch. You need help ask for it, you have a question ask it! That’s the point of this blog!

BTW, I do get a lot of requests to publish posts from freelancers and companies on the blog. With these, I’m more careful of what’s their interest. But having readers publishing here is amazing! So, thank you Andrew for reaching out (and finding courage )

Take it from here Andrew!

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Jumping into the cold waters of marketing immediately after finishing my college degree was a struggle to say the least. I must admit that I went in with certain expectations and ideals that I have built during my studies, which (and I’m sure I’m not the only one out there) were immediately crushed by the corporate world. Although this sounds bitter, I am perfectly aware that this is simply the way the outdated system operates, and it’s hard to convince the “old foxes”to try out new ways since this model has been working out pretty well.

But traditional marketing is in desperate need of a change, especially due to the rise of internet and social media, which have taught us how to provide potential customers with relevant content in the most natural ways possible. In this article I would like to briefly explain the 2 things that have caught my attention, which I believe we could all improve on.

Bonding with Your Audience

Traditional marketing has been focused on pushing content onto the public, which was mostly a one-way communication with the audience being a receiver, without any possibility to respond in any other way except buying the product.

With the rise of online marketing, customers have finally acquired the means to directly respond (and more often than not criticize) the brand, which has resulted in open-wide debates and interaction between the two parties.

What we need to do with our approach, is find new ways in which clients can respond to the brands in real life. This would involve getting out there and trying out new strategies, which surely are more expensive, but at the same time have the potential to yield greater results.

In his Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World, Gary Vaynerchuk mainly talks about online marketing strategies, but his tips can be easily applied in traditional marketing.

According to him, “there is no sale without the story; no knockout without the setup”. Brands must actively engage with their audience and show them exactly why they would want to (not: not should) remain loyal. From the consumer point of view, knowing that the brand you are interested in doesn’t see you as a mindless sheep and is willing to go the extra mile in order to be a part of your life is a great feeling, and can result in a long-term mutual benefit.

Experiment with Your Brand

 While we are on the topic of trying out new things to acquire new customers, experimenting with the ways the brand is pushed out there is key to surviving the traditional marketing drought. Drifting away from one-way advertising techniques such as TV ads and billboards, it would be wise to give conventions and events that are connected to your brand a chance.

However, just like with any other marketing campaign, it is important to set yourself apart from the rest, and in this manner, secure yourself a safe spot in your potential clients’memory. A company that offers marquees for sale for example, will achieve greater results during a convention not by installing a booth and distributing fliers, but instead offering to provide a free marquee for every company present. In this particular example, there aren’t possible services offered, but rather a full presentation of the product in the most appropriate way.

This can be applied to virtually anything. If you are offering electronic gadgets, (especially wearables) such as smartwatches, instead of giving a short demo on how they perform, at the beginning of the convention hand out free samples which are to be returned at the end of the day. Your potential customers will be given a full experience of your product, without fully committing to it, which will not only generate a real word of mouth (the holy grail in our industry), but will filter out unsatisfied clients, resulting in a larger percentage of positive feedback.

Traditional marketing is still relevant, however a lot of effort is required in order to truly succeed in that field. This process involves lot of experimentation with the brand’s image, not to mention a larger financial investment, but if you play your cards right, you will surely be surprised how well things may turn out.

Andrew Newitt is a young entrepreneur from Melbourne, Australia. You can catch him rambling about the newest tech and cat memes on Facebook and Twitter.

Image Credit by Andy Farnsworth

When we launched AppInChina at the beginning of summer of 2013 we were the first foreign company offering other foreign companies to distribute their android apps to the Chinese market or so we thought….

Must say I did searches and didn’t come up with anything exactly like this service.  This happen after a friend coming for a visit to Beijing gave me the idea building it.

Anyway, a few months afterwards we started discovering copycats of our website. I’m not talking about legit parallel services building their own website, and offering . I’m taking about websites copying our graphics and text.

See this as example:

Original AppInChina.co website

Copycat website

Pricing plans at AppinChina.co

Copycat website. At AppInChina we also used to have 1, 5 and 10 store plans

First FAQs section we had at AppinChina.co

Same text?!

1. Market size – If you picked your startup wisely one of the parameters you should be looking at is market size. Appinchina is defiantly a growing market and a huge one. We are fortunes ( and challenged every day ) to work on a market of more than 0.5 billion clients. This is the target audience for our clients that they want to reach to and it keeps growing. As example: from May until August 2014 the number of android phone users in china has grown from 450M to 541M devices. That fast and large growth!

2. Offering – When your offering is out there to clients you need to realize that your offering might work for one type of people while your competitor will be good in attracting other type of people. Sometimes it’s not event about types, it’s just because you use a design the your client likes more ( which another person would dislike).

As example, we are using Zopim as a way for our clients to reach us the fastest way they can. We are there most of the day when somebody is up for a question. Now, just like zopim there are dozens of other services doing basically the same thing: A chat window in your website. The market is big and each service has a different offering appealing to different people.

3. Change – completion is won by staying fresh! I often been asked about how to fight IP infringements in China. So although for apps there is a way to prevent your app being hacked which we offer our clients. But frankly saying this is not full proof. People can always take the same app change the characters and have a very similar app. So the way to do it is keep coming up with new offerings to your clients.

Take a look at our websites first version. It was a basic one and offered our basic service. It was a great website manually coded to validate our service which was very successful. Then all the copycats started to show up that I mentioned previously.

We then realized that we should move on and Sky our developer moved us to WordPress platform so we can make changes and add content and pages more easily on the website.

We were then able to also change our services and have different offering. Different and better than the copycats. We now offer much more services than before. Our offering has changed and we deferentially ourselves from our competition. We are fresh, and will keep fresh!

4. Clients – as you get more and more clients you build your credibility which leads to more clients coming in and this is great branding. Nobody of the copycats can claim that they helped Uber or Duolingo bring their android app to the Chinese market. Yes, they can say that on their website but things like that go around and hard to lie about.

It’s a famous saying that if there is a competition there is a market ( and you probably doing something right) if there is no competition…well…you get it!

Now over to you

What’s your experience with competition or copycats? How did you feel when you discovered it and what did you do? Did you feel you had to differentiate yourself?
Featured image credit by Pascal

I’m mentoring this weekend (I’m posting late I admit! That was two weeks ago) at startup weekend Beijing. Great atmosphere around, people are working on diverse ideas! It’s great!

All is led by a great team who are members of the Lean startup Meetup and the one and only Mike Michelini who came especially from Shenzhen! Kudos to Mike!

Been talking here with a good friend and experienced entrepreneur about the projects that were chosen here on Friday night. I wasn’t here when it happened but he told me that people voted for each of project and the ones that got the most votes (stickers!!) are the ones people are working on now.

And then he says: “…and the project I liked the most got zero votes, and that’s a project who can actually make money.” (paraphrased)

I’ll keep it short here, and won’t over analyze. But my point is, when you are thinking about your idea for a startup it’s important to see how you make your first buck quick, this is the best validation there is.

Once you’ve got that validation you can then develop it further.

It doesn’t have to be very Sexy sometimes, it doesn’t have to be an app or a new social network , it can also be a new business model for an existing market which doesn’t require a lot of development and certainly quick to validate. So, next time you have a non-cool, non-sexy idea give it another thought. This might be the right one!

Also, wanted to share a cool video mike made at the event (Spot me there to get a “like”). Enjoy!

Now over to you

Do you agree with this? Or you think that if the idea is not cool enough a person might loose the passion doing it?

What about not cool ideas that became very big (Amazon as example is just a large on-line store and started as such…)

I keep wondering over and over what is the value of our decisions. Speaking with other CEOs some mention the fact that they need to make many decisions in a day to just make progress. Which is extremely important time wise.

Making decisions is something that I don’t like and I feel this is a quality one should develop to make good decisions in a short time. . So what you do when you need to make
a decision? (And hopefully the right one…)

Gather more info on the matter – Key thing is finding out the info you are missing. 

When you would skip this stage? In two conditions:

a. When the time costs will be too large
b. When the mistake cost will be pretty small if you made a mistake.

I’ll give an example.

I had to print new business cards at the same time we made some changes on our website (AppinChina.co) . One of the changes we made was changing of fonts at the top. This also required changing the fonts on the card design.

Side note: This is also a good opportunity to announce we re-done the AppInChina.co website. It’s more user friendly, has more info and…yes. You can still find one of us on the chat to speak with (Usually me…) 

The problem is that changing this on the card might look weird on print. So I wasn’t sure what to do. Then I realized, we are talking about a business card which costs $8 to print.  These $8 are my mistake cost and not worth the time reconsidering how to make the card. The worst case would be that we will print them again.

Also, things don’t need to be perfect they need to be good enough. The next step is improving those…

This is just a little example but means a lot. Obviously, the more we go over to strategic matters instead of tactic matters the cost of mistake rises and more info needed to be gathered to make the right decision.

And still sometime you have no choice. Sometimes you can’t really get the info you need because it’s not available and you need to rely on predictions most of the time useless. Sometimes getting the info itself is too expensive.

So the art here is to balance all these factors to make the right decisions fast. In order to get to that balance we also need to recognize the fact that we will make mistakes and that it’s ok. Making mistakes is part of the process and improving all the time is the more important thing we need to pay attention to. Keep learning!

Now over to you

How good are you in making decisions? How do you get better at it? I’m curious to know how you personally asses these kind of thing. Share it in the comments.

Image credit by dalioPhoto

Note from Shlomo: This post is published slightly late (read on to see why).

SUN anniversary is on July 19th, glad to celebrate the 2nd one and going into it’s 3rd year. 

What a year! I’m looking at my plan for this year on last year’s summary  and…mmm…well….things don’t always go as planned. Still, I feel I’m much more focused (but not enough) than I was last year.

I must say that it became harder for me to maintain a pace of more than 2 posts a month, largely due to lack of time especially when running AppinChina.co. This is much fewer posts than I’d like.

So, what have we had so far?

This year I’ve published 31 posts, of which 3 were guest posts.  This is about 25% fewer posts than I posted last year, which I’m not happy about. Maintaining a writing routine is something I have tried to do over the past year, sometimes I succeeded, sometimes less so.  Still, I care a lot about my readers and have tried to keep providing as much information and guidance as I can.

The comments & questions I get from the SUN community are what keep me motivated, so keep those coming guys.  If you are a silent reader (one who doesn’t leave comments), leave a comment, share your thoughts and experiences. It’s a great booster for myself and the community!

Here is the most popular content on Startup Noodle after its 2nd year:

Interesting. Aside from the main page and the about page, 3 popular posts from the first year remained popular over the second year as well. It’s winning content, I guess, and I’m glad you like it.

Here they are:

The IELTS Magic! or How to Earn Really Well in China as a Foreigner
Why Skritter App Makes me Spend $518.49?
5 Blogs Every Tech Entrepreneur Should Know in Asia & China

Among the more popular posts were two new ones from the DimSum project, a project of ours in which students interview successful entrepreneurs in China.  These particular interviews were respectively about running a nonprofit in China and running a food and beverage business in China (in this case, a bar).

Good Job guys!

Looking backwards…

I’m trying to sum up the major things that worked and didn’t work from the previous year. If you look at last year’s summary post
you’ll see a list of things I planned for the coming year; some worked and some didn’t.

Translating SUN (Startup Noodle) to Chinese was stopped because of a lack of resources as well as how I see SUN evolving (more on this coming up).

Also, I never got to develop the Udemy course I mentioned: “Entrepreneurship for non Entrepreneurs.” 

There is a really good reason for this; AppinChina.co, which was then mentioned as a service I just started  has become a thriving starutp!

Some other things have changed as well:

Last year, I had the privilege of working with Steve from ikuraMedia. Since then, as I said AppinChina.co has become very prominent in my life and Steve has moved from Beijing to Singapore. Steve is doing great(!!), BTW.

BUT!

I moved my office into a shared space with the ever-helpful Richard.

This has been a major change for me. It’s not only a change of working space, which was great, it has also allowed me to achieve some work-life balance, separating my work and home to two different environments.  Rich has become a good friend and partner who aids me in various matters. He is great for advice and for thinking through many aspects of the business.

We support each other personally as well; I feel I can rely on him for whatever I need and he will do his best and more to help me!

We have a weekly Monday morning talk where we share our thoughts about our businesses and personal life, understanding that these are connected, and this helps us to be more successful as entrepreneurs.

He has therefore also been added to our list of people on the team, and is quite deserving of this recognition!

Oh, and he also does a great imitation of Golom from the Lord of the Rings!

I’m still organizing the Lean startup Beijing meetup, which is a great community of entrepreneurs here in Beijing. Last year we had 450 members in our community, and we are now at almost 1000 members!  It’s a vibrant community and we have lots of people coming to each event.

I’m very happy about this community and hope it will continue to grow and thrive.

Looking forward….

I’ve read last year’s post to see what has changed.

As I mentioned AppinChina.co has developed into a startup. We are already at 3.5 employees.

A “ an App distribution service in China”  is mentioned there. It didn’t really have a name yet. Since then AppinChina.co has become a real startup instead of a side business, and is now my primary endeavor.

We provide a top service for companies who have apps they wish to launch in the Chinese Android market. It’s been an exciting journey and we’ve gotten to work with some really awesome clients, such as Uber and Duolingo!

We are also expanding the set of services we are able to provide our clients, in order to provide a soft landing to app developers and publishers who want to bring their app to this huge market.

You also know that you are heading in the right direction when you start to be imitated. Every now and then we discover a new website copying our wording and graphics and opening a new website with the same services. Competition makes things harder, but it also encourages us to constantly strive to be the best of the best at what we do.

Here is how I want my next year to go (Hoping to stick to the plan this time):

Develop appinChina.co to be the best app distribution company for foreign developers and publishers, expanding our services even more to being able to enable our clients to navigate the Chinese Android Jungle without difficulty.

I want to continue growing the Lean Startup Meetup community and have a deeper integration between that and SUN.

I have realized in the last year that communities like this one, made up of both native-born and expat entrepreneurs, are needed in many places around the world. It’s important because it provides an opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other and create something unique to that place. It’s a way to make startups successful.

Essentially these communities consist of “moving entrepreneurs”. People who leave their home country to move to a new place and create their dream project, just as I have. It’s not only in China, it’s everywhere. I’d like SUN to be a home for these entrepreneurs and the locals who host these entrepreneurs in their countries.

SUN will become an online community of such people. That’s the plan.

Now over to you

This is a special thank you for reading and keeping up with SUN. It’s awesome getting emails and comments from people saying that they like something I published or that it helped somehow.

A special request I really look forward to getting your comments. Comments are a great way to stay relevant to my readers and being able to answer their questions. So please don’t hesitate to say what you think, and don’t be afraid to ask.

I hope to stay relevant for you in the coming year. See you on the other side!

Image credit by Hannah Nicole

Last week I realized how important it is to add a happiness task in your day.

What is a happiness task?

This one is quite simple. A happiness task is a task that makes you feel happy because you achieved it.

My Partner and I tend to disagree about the type of tasks that suppose to make you happy and feel productive.
On that day I had a list of 11 things to cross out, and I managed to do every single one of them.

Sharing it with my partner , it felt like an achievement as I really managed to do them all. Usually I cross out about 70-80% of the tasks , so this was quite unusual.

Right after that I told him I don’t feel happy about reaching this achievement and finishing all these tasks. I said I feel I didn’t make any progress.

He was asking why, since I progressed in so many things that day.

I said I felt that all the tasks on that day were bouncing back things I needed to take care of, Some of them were big important things and some were small things. These were emails I needed to get back to people and proposals I had to send.

The problem was that non of them were creating something new of myself, something that would actually make people respond to me and be more valuable on the long-term.

Take this post as example. It’s 7:20 in the morning , I woke up a short while ago so I’m at my most focused time of the day. It’s the time I create the best. After I’m getting into the office finding the time and muse to sit and write is very difficult. There are so many distractions!

Anyway, this post feels like something new I create, which my readers will respond to and be out there long-term for people to read. This is progress for me!

I’m trying to get better and better at choosing my tasks for the day and have at least one happiness task on a day and hopefully archiving it first thing in the morning.

The guys at The Sparkline split their day also this way. Morning hours are dedicated to create things that will eventually be published and build an ongoing value and require more focus. Afternoon is dedicated for tasks like emails, meetings and things that require less focus.

The tricky things about happiness tasks is that they are often less urgent than the other tasks and tend to link with longer goals.

Let’s take this post again as example. I could have written it next week or next month and it would still be ok. Nobody is forcing me to write it down on a certain time .

Still, understanding that these tasks are important ( but not urgent) I dedicate to make the time crafting the post right now. It has much more value on the long run adding readership to Startup Noodle and a good way to connect with my audience, therefore it’s a happy task.

Now over to you

What’s your experience with managing your time? Which tasks you prefer doing over others and which you count as more important for you? What’s your happiness tasks? Share it on the comments down below.

Image credit by Incase

Note from Shlomo: This is a Guest post from Nick Ramil from The Elevator Life . Nick and Tim are amazing guys who specialize in manufacturing goods and wine Import & Export in China. They also teach other entrepreneurs how to build such a business in China which I greatly appreciate. 

In Addition these guys have launched several KickStarter campaigns building awesome products and pre-selling in hundreds thousands of dollars. I like what they do and just like I’ve been wanting to help Tech startups reach and succeed in China they do a similar thing with The Elevator Life for Import/Export starters (Which I know nothing about…)

Two weeks ago I finally met Nick after being in touch for a long time as he was coming for a wine show in Beijing. Nick Interviewed me to their show. We were trying to intro the Beijing tech scene in less than 10 minutes. Challenging!

Anyway, it was a lot of fun. You can watch it here. Don’t forget to like and leave your comment. 

Last thing, they’ve just re-opened their entrepreneurs community Enter China. So, check that out! 

Nick take it from here…

There is no question China is one of the most opportunistic markets in the world.  This is a gift and a curse for newcomers to China.

Year after year, we see countless people come to China full of ambition and wide-eyed based off all the news about China’s exploding economy.  After a few months, they return to their home countries, defeated and convinced there is no way to be successful in China.

When my business partners and I first started our company in China, we jumped from business to business like it was going out of style.  Some of these potential businesses include:

1.  A hangover drink line (developed a recipe + started to work with a factory)

2.  Floating Mannequins (visited 3 factories and made sample orders)

3.  Tablet cases (purchased MOQ and set up e-commerce shop)

4.  Night club (consulted top club designers in Las Vegas)

5.  A restaurant (raised more than 6 figures USD of investment)

I don’t know about you, but I see no connection or correlation between any of these!  Let’s see why this happened.

We suffered from Entrepreneur ADD-The inability to focus on just one prospective business.

The biggest mistake people make when they come to China is to try to do too much.

This was our biggest problem when we started and what we see plague newcomers to China time and time again.  We jumped from opportunity to opportunity whenever a new, “better” one would approach us.  We didn’t gave a single business enough time to grow or thrive before we’d put it aside when the next, shiny opportunity would pop up.

This happens on a much more frequent basis here in China where everything continues to develop and change at a breakneck pace.

What was the end result? We made a bit of progress on every business until we spread ourselves too thin and eventually they all lost momentum overtime.

I remember two years ago I asked a person (now a good friend) I met at a networking event what he does, and he said “I have a real estate company, a modeling agency, a sourcing company and events company.”

When he told me this I thought “Damn!  This guy is doing everything.”

Fast forward to today, all of these businesses no longer exist and now he works for a large real estate company.

At the time, I was so impressed because he ran so many different businesses.  The reality was none of them really operated as a business and he never had the time or resources to appropriately run them.

It’s all too common for people to arrive in China with an idea and a vision; the next week they’re onto a whole new business plan in a completely unrelated field where they have no experience, e.g. a contact of ours come to China to source a product and the next week wanted to open a frozen yogurt chain.

They, as we did, let the big projected numbers get to their heads and chased the money instead of the knowledge or passion.

We developed Enter China for this exact reason; to truly help beginners in China find their most expedited path to success and stay on track. There is no better resource than to be surrounded by those who have done what you want to do.

If you’re planning to start your entrepreneurial journey, please be prepared to turn off “the next best opportunity” mentality.  You need to focus on what you believe in most and drive it home! Our biggest mistake/fault was our Entrepreneur ADD; it delayed us from finding real success in China much sooner than we did and I hope this doesn’t happen to you!

Image credit by Frits Ahlefeldt-Laurvig

People say that you really become committed to your startup only when you do your first hire.

You’ve got employees now and you are responsible for them, their happiness and even thier family. They count on you…and that’s tough!

I’ve mentioned that my role have changed now that I’ve done my first hire. This past month and a half brought a lot of changes on AppInChina.co, good changes! We’ve made tremendous progress and get to serve great clients (Duolingo is one of our latest ones, thanks guys!),  along with those came many fears regarding hiring.

Related Reading:
What You Should be Working on When Your Startup is Growing?

Some things come to mind:

– Was that a smart decision hiring somebody to help?
– Is the person I hired is suitable for the job? (Oh, ya!)
– How would it be now when I’m the ‘Boss’?
– Am I listening enough to my employees, helping them grow and keep them interested enough for them to keep working for me?

I really don’t have answers to ALL these questions and there isn’t really a right or wrong answer here as well. Management styles vary and different employees are attracted and handle better with different management styles.

I believe employees should CHOOSE to work with you. It’s your job to make them happy and want to come to work and It’s your job to support them and listen to them.

Employee who chooses you is worth much more than one that you just choose him. On the day that this emplee stops choosing you and feels like there are other options around, it means you failed in being a good boss. Perhaps I’m taking this to the extrmes as everybody leaves thier job at some point for different reasons, so it’s enavitable, it’s like you’ve failed before you’ve started.

The point is that listening is hard and help your employees growing their personality and skills is hard too. You need to give them the best environment to flourish and succeed in their career and life goals. It’s not about you, it’s about them.

The longer you are able to listen and help them grow the better until the next employee comes and you start all over again, more experienced and with better assets in your company assuming you’ve done the previous hiring right.

So, listen. Always!

Now Over to you

What was your experience when hiring your first person? Are you a good listener? How responsible do you think you should be to your employees happiness and life goals? Add those in the comments.

Image credit by Uitleg & tekst

Note from Shlomo: Startup CEOs are pushed up the scale as they grow and need to work on totally different tasks when growing their startup. One of those tasks is “Strategy”. I always wondered what this word means and what people mean when they say “strategy”, expecailly for a startup. Here is what “Strategy” and the “Bigger Picture” is like for me in AppInChina.co . Read on and share your thoughts as well. I might be totally wrong…

What is Strategy?

All Men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what non can see is the strategy out of which Victory is Involved  

-Sun Tzu

[Tweet “All Men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what non can see is the strategy out of which Victory is Involved “]

I’ve been working on the bigger picture now that AppInChina.co have grown to 2+ people!

Frankly, so far I had the privilege to know for most of the time what I should be working on. I had a client, I worked on the sale, I had a project, I needed to finish it on time, I had a lead , I was following up. The routine is very clear and you are in this routine the whole time.

Now things are different…

Suddenly you are not operational so much. I see my role now as most important in two things:

1. Infrastructure
2. Strategy

To those of you who are not sure what I’m talking about I’ll elaborate. Also, don’t worry if you are not sure what these mean. Frankly, I don’t either…It’s just what I think these mean and I’m not sure every start CEO would see these roles the same way (Tell me how you see your role, perhaps there is a better way seeing it…).

1. Infrastructure

Infrastructure is everything that need to be made to run the business smoothly. It will prevent future problems and make the company more efficient. As example, yesterday I spent the whole day looking for a simple CRM system to manage all our leads and sales (any suggestions?). I spent a lot of time comparing different systems, features and prices and eventually chose Insightly, at least to start with.

It’s not that we can’t work with an excel sheet for now (though I’m really bad at managing clients this way) managing leads and sales. It’s not that we can’t then search the last email with that person and see what the status is, or even record it directly on the excel sheet.

But, growing forward involving more people in the process of sales and/or getting leads complicates things and makes things hard to follow. So, we WILL need it at some point to be more efficient. We need to spend less time on search for our opportunities and more time just identifying them from a smart system managing it all and being very clear where is each client in the sales cycle.

I still haven’t finished setting it up and would probably make some mistakes along the way, but this is a good example of infrastructure.

2. Strategy

Strategy means looking at the big picture. Where the company is headed? Should we offer these services? Should we go with these partnerships? Should we raise money for the company?

But, what this means on a day to day basis?

It’s mainly research and finding the right people to answer different things you need to check. As example, we have a client who asked us to get him million downloads in China within 6 weeks. We do have the channels that we know reaching this goal.

Still, there are many other channels to promote Apps , such as App of the day newsletters, App walls on other Apps and so on. These can be interesting channels for AppInChina clients. The work now is seeing if these channels give better results and cheaper than others. This requires research in finding these services, comparing them and finally offer the relevant ones to clients. Obviously some channels might fit one type of client while others fit a different one. Anyway, it’s more about finding the right opportunities helping our clients monetize their app the best they can

Sales

There is still one role I’m deeply involved in and this is sales. If you don’t sell, your startup is dying…. I still see this role under the “operational” category and not under the strategy category.

I’m in constant contact with our clients (therefore the need for a CRM system) understanding what they need and offering them the best service that will suit them to make their business successful.

Yes, you can give other people do sales and they hopefully will be even better than you. But when starting up it’s super important to understand your customers best, and this is done by talking. Lots of talking!

I learn so much about different business models, industries and problems I need to solve just by having these conversations. This enables AppInChina keep offering what people would actually pay for! And most important we keep being challenged ourselves by talking to our clients understanding how to be the best amortization and distribution company in China, bringing in most transparency to our clients in this fragmented market.

Sales role therefore, is labeled very high , on the lean startup method we are worried and busy about customer development. Talking to clients and making sales is also customer development as well. 

One more reason for working on sales is that you can train your staff better to do sales as well and take over at some point. I enjoy talking to clients and learn from them about their problems and helping them solving those.

Now over to you

How did it feel different for you when doing your first hiring? Did you keep working the same way but just did more of the same? Or had a totally different set of tasks/ workflow? Share that on the comments, I’d love to learn from you.

Image credit by Frits Ahlefeldt-Laurvig

I’ve recently became a Quora junky. I love this website and how much info you are able get and learn from.

I’ve been exploring what people know about China’s Mobile app Market because Of AppInChina.co obviously and added my 2 cents as well.

I found these following 9 questions to be interesting also because I hear those questions often from my clients as well.

Here are 9 questions to educate yourself about China’s mobile App Market

Q1. What are some good ways for billing on my free Android App in China?

Q2. Do the Android App stores in China support in App billing

“If I put all your money in my startup, what’s going to happen in the future if my startup fails?”

Let’s be honest about this. It’s really scary when your future is not determined and you are yet to succeed with your startup. Most startups fails and it’s a financial risk compared to collect the pay check once a month.

Here is a principle that can ease it on you on the long run, personal finance 101 for entrepreneurs to the rescue! Read on!

I think that I read “Rich Dad Poor Dad” of Robert Kiyosaki about 10 years ago. I enjoyed reading it since it was a great eye opener.

If you were living on another planet since then, “Rich Dad Poor Dad” is a series of books basically all  saying that you need to build assets in your life to generate more income for yourself in the future. Building assets is a way to grow your capital instead of just changing your time for money wither with a job or with with doing consulting work.

These have have 2 problems:

1. If you stop doing so, you would stop having an income.
2. It has a limit. As you just change your time with money and since time has limit the potential of your earning is limited as well, there are only 24 hours a day.

Since then, I’ve learned a lot about personal finance and how to handle my income much better.

Before reading the book  I just thought that every couple of month after saving X amount of money I’d just spend it all on my next trip. This is how I wanted to live my life.

Afterwards and even more today I know it’s a mistake.  I learned that if you invest your income (even the tiniest) it would worth much more in the future and would enable you to do much more with it. You create assets!

Why Personal finance is so important for us as entrepreneurs? 

I felt that personal finance is essential for entrepreneurs out there.

Here is why:

We are ambitious, raise money, create products  and services….  So, we do all those things that create value to others but at the end of the day, what we do with our money and what we earn?  Handling it wisely can be your “insurance” that if your startup fails  you are still left with some assets and perhaps even more.

So, what is this asset you are talking about?

Asset is something that makes money even when you are not directly working on it. It has a very sexy word these days: passive income.

For example, If you buy a house and you rent it out you get passive income. It’s not related directly to your job, and even if you stopped working the income from renting out your house would keep flowing into your bank account (assuming the tenants are paying…)

Another type of asset are stocks and there are many types of them. Yes, they fluctuate but some of them pay dividends every certain amount of time which is paid back to your account. These dividends are paid to you just because you held the stocks at the right time when the company paid dividends to it’s shareholders.

Are you kidding me?! I’m entrepreneur I don’t have money making investments. 

Well, I can’t argue with that. Entrepreneurs are fighters! We usually don’t have extra money for investments, but even if you put aside a small amount early on it’s so much worth it for the rest of your lives.

Let’s say you have $1 to invest. only $1…

what happens if you invest it and get 10% interest for it over a year?

At the end of the year you will have: $1.1

Invest that $1.1 again for a year at a 10% interest and at the end of the 2nd year it’s worth: $1.21

Did you see what just happened? The revenue of the 1st year was $0.1 but on the 2nd year it was $0.11
So, your money grew at a larger sum just because you left the original amount + the first year interest for another year of investment.

Let’s do the same thing for the 3rd year…

Take our $1.21 and invest that in a 10% interest rate for a year. At the end of the year we will have: $1.21 + 0.121 = $1.331

By how much our money grew each year?

1st year: $0.1
2nd year: $0.11
3rd year: $0.121

We can keep going on and on with the example. The point it that every year we earn more than in the previous year. Our money actually grows exponentially because of an effect that is called Compound interest.

Here is what’s going to happen after 20 years:

Compound interest after 20 years of investments – It grows faster!

After 20 years you will have $6.73! This is 673% than your original investment!

Here is how I made these calculations (we won’t get here into formulas here…). I invite you to do the calculations and see for yourself. change the numbers and plan your future.

What’s the conclusion then?

Very simple! Start early! Start saving that $1 early in your life, because the more time the compound interest is working for you the easier it gets and the more money you make passively!

Now imagine this $1 is actually $10, $100, $1000 or even $10000. Multiply each by 6.73…Not bad, huh?

Why am I telling you all this? 

Personal finance is an extremely powerful thing to master. Even if you don’t consider yourself an investor on the long run it can be the difference between you struggling your whole life or living well. So even if you are poor in your early life it’s important to put aside $1, just $1!

Note: I’m thinking of creating a personal finance course for entrepreneurs. If you resonate with this post, please let me know in the comments. Also, add your questions. LOTS of questions!

Photo credit by Alexandre Normand