

Ask HN: how do you reach Asia? - duiker101

There are many people in Asia, huge countries with many people, many possible costumers.
But our societies are so different that i find it really hard to reach them. And the language doesn't help. This seems really two distant worlds.<p>Has someone ever succesfully entered their market? How?
======
autalpha
As a Vietnamese American, I've always been interested in the Vietnam market
since the number of internet user's growth is astounding! The country's
literacy level is very high and majority of people are either online or trying
to be online daily. But this is more of a developing country and the majority
of regular Asian population.

The biggest problems I have with Vietnam and Asian developing countries right
now, and this isn't unique to just Vietnam as far as I can tell: 1\. The
postal system isn't uniform/consistent throughout the country, so there's a
real problem in mapping people with a clear home address. 2\. Not having a
clear home address combined with a lackadaisical sense of infrastructure
planning, it's making things like loans and credits and ultimately credit card
ownership is very difficult. So online transaction can be difficult. There is
a population of Vietnamese population with ATM debit cards, but the commitment
and buy-ins with online transactions are still at an early stage. As far as I
can tell, most transactions to push money to an online vendor still go through
a brick & mortar proxy (go to shop, load up on digital points --> pay with
points like old school phone cards) 3\. Speed/ownership of private internet
connections is also an issue. A lot of the general population are still using
the internet from internet cafe. As more and more people are getting personal
internet connections at home, this is getting better; but it's a long way from
where we are in the US. Imagine the early AOL modem era.

I don't disagree that the market is huge and there are countries and locations
that are ready: South Korea, Hong Kong, Philippines and Malaysia etc. But the
big market you're looking at are still made up of low to middle Asian
population, which is getting ready but not there yet in term of online-
marketing ready. FYI, a lot of successful services for Vietnam right now are
mostly free or supported by ad revenue.

These are just a few of my personal thoughts though. Perhaps someone else with
more solid data on Asia would really be insightful for everyone.

~~~
duiker101
And what about japan? china? This question came to my mind after i developed a
small mmorpg for android and published it asking for beta testers, one of the
people who contacted me was a chinese guy who explained me something i didn't
know. They have many mmorpgs already published in the android market, and i
never seen or heard of them. So i stared thinking of how many things we are
doing parallel to them but without(except some occasion) touching.

I gained a lot from this experience and i think that opening to each other
would be good for everyone but there are many obstacles, like language,
different minds etc...

~~~
autalpha
I think Japan is definitely ready. Big cities in China is ready. But since the
social classes gap is very wide between the rich and the poor and it may come
as a surprise to a lot of people, but majority of the population in countries
like China and Vietnam is poor.

Btw, I hear South Korea's internet is much better than what we have here in
the US.

~~~
vanni
You heard well: South Corea 16.6 Mbit/s, USA 4.6 Mbit/s.

Source: [http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/11/12/real-connection-
speeds-f...](http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/11/12/real-connection-speeds-for-
internet-users-across-the-world/) \- Raw data source:
<http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/>

------
kaptain
I live in China but I am an American. My business partner and I intentionally
decided not to pursue business here, instead focusing on an outsourcing model.
The most obvious reasons are culture and language (I'm referring to the
culture and language of your typical customer), but, at least for China, these
aren't the biggest reasons.

The biggest reason is government/law. China likes to talk a lot about the rule
of law but the rules are ambiguous and not everyone plays by the same rules. A
lot of business here is ruled by who you know and how much back-scratching you
can do. Even if we (my partner and I) were able to accurately understand
language (we're coming close) and culture (this still needs more work), we
would be at a huge disadvantage.

I am not so naïve to think that corruption doesn't exist elsewhere, but in
China it is systemic. I know college grads who talked about _paying_ someone
for a job, the idea being that they will eventually make more money than they
paid for the job. Thus the job isn't necessarily given to the highest
qualified (or even baseline qualified) applicant, but rather to the person who
can provide the greatest amount of financial gain for the gate keeper. This
type of thinking is pervasive everywhere in society: your future customer will
think like this too... which is why it's so hard to sell software here.

I don't have a problem with developing 关系 (relationships) with others. That's
part of the recipe for any type of business transaction; having a good
relationship with your clients/service providers just makes life better. But
in China, it seems, even from my lowly perspective that the demands from this
kind of game are extremely high. This is a cultural/language issue in itself,
but it's for the business side.

The culture/language problem in relating to potential customers is very high,
but even if that issue gets solved, the disadvantage that a Western (i.e.
American/European) business faces in terms of understanding the business
culture is so high that it seems very risky to try to enter the market here.

------
auganov
That question is so general, you could write 10 books answering it.

If you're selling a simple service/product that solves a technological problem
and it doesn't really need customer support then it could be relatively
simple.

Now if you are going in the lifestyle direction or your service is customer
support heavy then you're in for a mess.

And Asia is a big place itself, I guess you mean south east Asian countries
like South Korea, Japan, Singapore, HK, China, Taiwan etc. But those are
already disconnected enough.

There is very very little overlap in web infrastructure between those
countries. Even HK, China and Taiwan are completely different in those
matters. You might be doing great in HK without getting a single customer from
China or Taiwan. So it's very hard to focus on a single market.

As you're saying you find it hard to reach them then I guess your product is
not easy to adapt to foreign markets. Unless you're already doing great in the
US don't waste your time.

What makes you think Asia is a good idea? Maybe we could help you more if we
knew what're you're after. There's definitely many cases in which entering
Asian market would be a terrific idea.

~~~
autalpha
I completely agree with @auganov. If OP hasn't looked at the map for a while,
Asia definitely is HUGE :) Perhaps start with 1 country--the question would
then become "How do you reach Vietnam?" or "How do you reach Japan?" Which is
much more answerable (even if the answer would be pretty long).

------
nandemo
> Has someone ever succesfully entered their market? How?

Why, yes, of course. There are plenty of Western megacorps doing business in
Asia. What do you really mean?

~~~
duiker101
i do not mean megacorps i mean normal startups like many, for example i create
a new product and start selling it in the US/EU but i want to start selling it
in Asia, open for a larger business... how can this be accomplished?

~~~
nandemo
People are downvoting my comment but I really think you could be more
articulate when writing your question. Now that I read your other comments
it's a bit clearer but still...

For instance, if there are megacorps successfully selling their stuff in Asia,
then maybe Asia is not such a completely different world as you seem to
assume? Not saying that it's easy, but then it's not necessarily easy to sell
your stuff in (say) Brazil or Italy either.

For instance, Google and Yahoo have a big market share in many countries. But
social startups don't tend to fare that well, probably because of network
effects and not because of specific technology. Amazon is big in several
developed countries but has no presence in the developing world. You would
think that they could easily reproduce their business model in more countries
and make money.

I wonder if you're selling your stuff outside your country already?

By the way, I live in Japan and I have thought of a company who would help web
and tech startups to enter the Japanese market. There are plenty of companies
who do translation and localization, but I don't know of any that does
something both more comprehensive (PR, advertising, possible deals with local
companies, etc) and more specific to web companies.

------
bo_Olean
If you are focused on finding a similar societal group as yours it is going to
be a tough search, but if you are searching for similar in technology use
groups - it is a easy way to reach here.

Language won't be a barrier. These days 4 out of 10 people in Asia use English
for day to day communication (my assumption as Asian). You need to first find
those 4 with whom you won't have language barriers. Then, figure out whom to
partner with. It's easy.

------
chadp
Visit, travel, spend time or move there to get to know it.

------
Geee
I'd really love it if somebody made a website which successfully connects
these two 'worlds'; particularly in the hacker/startup context.

------
object404
By boat.

