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German working at a startup in Beijing here. That's a daft case of C2C (copy to china) you've got on your hands there. You probably won't be able to gain them
by 50CNT 11y ago
German working at a startup in Beijing here. That's a daft case of C2C (copy to china) you've got on your hands there.
You probably won't be able to gain them as a Chinese subsidiary, they'll think you're delusional, hell, that sounds delusional to me.
Them having investors (if they do), doesn't mean much if anything. C2Cs of startups with traction are generally seen as a safe bet by investors, hell, there's teams specializing on it. Money is sloshing around, the silliest things are getting funded.
Litigating is probably pointless. Best case they get scared, drop the thing and another C2C gets sent the code they have.
Clones are to be expected, and as other comments have said, it might even be the Chinese IT company you're dealing with that started the thing, or maybe they've started building something internally. They're probably looking to screw you over as well.
Really, if you're looking to compete in China, you break out your copy of Sun Tsu and leaf through your Machiavelli. Out-engineer them, get some boots on the ground, find some Chinese to work with, lob some nuisances their way, grow in China and squash them. That'll put you in a stronger negotiation position with Tencent/Baidu/Ali/Whoever as well. Your advantage is that whilst chinese coders are cheap, and they can throw 20 engineers at the problem, most of them aren't very good. If you don't allow them to grow more than you do, and you're pushing features whilst they're accruing tech debt, they will loose that war of attrition eventually. Especially if you go for things that are hard.
Good luck man.
PS: If your business plan looks like the work of a paranoid madman, you're on the right track to compete in the land far east.
- bflesch 11y agoThanks for your blunt advice, much appreciated. It really shocked me because we don't have any significant cash flows at the moment, so they must be buying into our vision (which is a good thing). Let's hope we can keep the pace and don't waste our potential. Best of luck to you as well, will ping you when I ever put foot to Beijing again.
- 50CNT 11y agoIt's a nice city, wonderful air. If finances permit, I'd still do some Chinese registrations though, just so you're covered on that front. I recommend at least getting a small foothold over there, just in case that once you're big, they decide that haogege is chinese and legal, and you're not. If it makes you feel better, lots of Chinese are just as clueless about the "West" as we are about China. Met a guy at an event last Thursday who asked me and a friend about the feasibility of selling phone cases in Europe and the US. To be fair, they are a big fashion accessory in China, but really only in China. We told him that if he thinks that going into a saturated market with a low margin product people don't care about that gets replaced maybe once a year sounds like a fun time to him, he is welcome to try. I'm not sure whether he got it. There's also the thing that really competent people over here would probably not care to copy a German eSports startup 1-to-1. They might have some mediocre PHP programmers and probably someone who knows enough frontend stuff to copy over all the assets. If you drop features, you should watch out for how long it takes them to duplicate them. If it takes as long as it took you to write them, be worried. If takes far longer for them to step up, you've got an edge. If it's instant, you might want to redouble on your security.