

Ask HN: Selling B2B Software to a Chinese company - jayzee

So my start-up sells B2B software for small to medium-sized companies, primarily productivity tools for researchers.<p>Now an institute in China is interested in the software but they are insistent that they want to host it on their servers. Pros/Cons? Yes/No?
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jhancock
rambling late night thoughts from someone who has done lots in China:

Do you expect more customers in China? If so, find a partner in China to
handle sales there.

I would expect most any Chinese customer to want to have your solution hosted
in China..either by themselves or at least through a China based server. They
do have good reasons for hosting it themselves that have nothing to do with
stealing your product.

You will always risk your product being copied. This is a good reason to find
a China partner that manages this process for you.

B2B software sales in China is an "ok" market. Chinese companies do spend
money on specialty software and there is usually a purchasing officer at a
company that makes money off the process of spending money. If you do not
understand how this works, best to find a local partner.

Ultimately though, even if they do copy your product, it may not effect sales
to other markets.

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jayzee
Thanks jhancock. It is true that it may not affect sales in other markets but
I was hoping to make money from sales in china for my company!:)

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Edmond
They want your source and will almost certainly pirate it:)

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jayzee
Thanks! yeah, thats what I was thinking but was hoping that people would say
otherwise/offer reasons why they would be insistent on hosting it locally.

