> It's just a wordpress website. You don't need nothing fancy to be successful.
I've observed similar products myself, often ones that are more successful versions of my own creations. I've seen stuff built with spaghetti PHP code, yet it was marketed well and more people were paying money to use it than my own. Yet when I looked at it, the first thing I saw was an SQL injection vulnerability that would allow me to drop the entire database.
It makes me wonder though, if instead of looking at entrepreneurship from the software development side of things, maybe instead I should be trying to build a marketing and advertising agency that builds software. These types of companies seem to make more money than I do.
Yet at the same time, in the marketing companies that come to my mind, the weaknesses in their products tend to be sustainability. I think overtime customers are going to become frustrated with their lack of good support and ability to maintain code and add new features.
Just my thoughts when reflecting on all of this. :)
As an engineer I find it an appalling when you realize that quality engineering means nothing in terms of financial success. I used to think that if you build a quality product the users will pick it up and it will become successful when in fact it couldn't be further away from reality.
Thus, bugs and quality are secondary. Why spend $ on engineering and fixing bugs when you can spend that on marketing for much better ROI.
I encourage you to stop thinking about the world in binary terms. how much engineering matters for financial success is a continuous function of several parameters. It's never about either not mattering at all or mattering 100%
I agree, and to carry it a little further: the essence of engineering is good tradeoffs (can I build an adequate bridge for the needed cost? If I can carry more cargo in this plane, can I make the fuel requirement grow linearly or better? zip we cut the range 10% we can cut the op ex 20% -- will that still work? Do I really need to spec precision resistors or can I compensate somewhere else?
The trade off skills apply outside the engineering domain as well.
Except with engineering you're often dealing with non-monetary tradeoffs. The plane serves a valuable purpose outside of making someone some money. The quality work/better marketing tradeoff is all about making someone money by providing negative real-world value to others.
Engineering tradeoffs are very much about costs. I could (well once upon a time I could :-) design a bridge that's stable up to a (not very) nearby atomic blast; more stable than the bedrock it's built on. But that would require an unnecessary level of resources (unless atomic resistance is in fact a design requirement). I could design the most super-awesome web site that scales to 40 billion unique visitors...but it's unlikely to be needed (though if some of the uniques are robotic, perhaps it is). Simply choosing an alloy that's simpler to work with the tools on hand is a rescue tradeoff, and those resources are time and money.
Likewise, the plane (I assume you mean airplane) has only one valuable purpose (transport people or goods that someone wants transported) and that is denominated in money. Make it cheaper and more people can fly, or pay less for their gadgets or fresh shellfish.
It's incredibly naive to to say that marketing is some zero-sum game. If you have an amazing bandage that is cheap and saves lives you still have to get the word out.
> If you have an amazing bandage that is cheap and saves lives you still have to get the word out.
The core topic in this subthread is focusing work on marketing the bandage instead of making it cheaper/save more lives, because marketing has much better ROI than actually providing value to people.
And the word can get out fine by itself, actually. The word of mouth is a pretty effective thing - and a lot of marketing is trying to game it, getting increased profits by destroying its usefulness.
Here's an example with the metaphor where marketing is not zero-sum:
1) Person A makes a crappy bandage (Y units of quality) with X units of budget and markets with 9X units of budget
2) Person B makes a decent bandage (5Y units of quality) with 5X units of budget.
If person B were to also market the bandage with 5X units of budget, they will take a larger fraction of person A's market share than if they don't, thus providing more value to people. Yes you can argue that if person A didn't exist, then they wouldn't need to spend this money and the bandage could be cheaper, but this is clearly an example where adding marginal marketing can be a net benefit to society.
Yes, I agree that adding a marginal marketing can be a net benefit to society. But the problem is, in the real world, the person A wins - marketing has much better ROI than investing in quality. I argue against the marketing precisely because of its power to paper over the problems with the actual good/service.
And I'm saying that's a tradeoff (marketing, sales, engineering, development vs maintenance, etc) that's as legitimate and at least as complex as the purely engineering tradeoffs I mentioned.
> And the word can get out fine by itself, actually.
Umm, good luck with that. There are only a few, small, specialized businesses for which that is true.
> The quality work/better marketing tradeoff is all about making someone money by providing negative real-world value to others
I don't think a blanket put-down of all marketing as negative value is really true.
Of course there are instances where marketing is dishonest or harmful, but by and large, how do you expect people to discover goods and services if there isn't someone who's willing to pay for the cost of dissemination of information, whether it's a marketer, or Google's search algorithm, or the consumer?
I think bringing up marketing-as-information-dissemination is a red herring, because it's only a small fraction of the whole thing. The cost of telling people about a product/service should obviously be paid by the product/service provider - but we've solved that thing with a printing press, in the form of yellow pages and newspaper classifieds. Google's costs per company indexed are probably even cheaper.
Marketing is by and large about gaming the way people select goods and services, so that you can sell more regardless of the quality of your offerings, or of whether the client actually needs it.
> Marketing is by and large about gaming the way people select goods and services, so that you can sell more regardless of the quality of your offerings, or of whether the client actually needs it.
That may be the objective function of the marketer or salesperson, but it doesn't follow that marketing itself is a simple net transfer of wealth from consumers to producers.
> I think bringing up marketing-as-information-dissemination is a red herring, because it's only a small fraction of the whole thing.
The marketer is not paying to move bits to a consumer, the marketer is paying for the consumer's attention, which is much more limited than our ability to move bits around.
Do you have an alternative fair and equitable way of allocating that scarce resource? For example, if we went with your suggestion and restricted marketing to only classifieds and other forms of print advertising, then we would expect the cost of placing ads there to skyrocket as everyone competes for scarce space. Also, the same risks of manipulation and dishonesty apply just as well there:
> Do you have an alternative fair and equitable way of allocating that scarce resource?
Yes. Not allocating it. What you call trying to "allocate" consumer's attention is, from the point of view of a consumer, people purposefully attempting to distract you from living your life in order to extract money from you. In all other contexts of life we would call such people "assholes". Classifieds have the benefit of consumers paying attention only when they want to pay attention.
Time is the most precious thing we have in life. Attempts to take it away from other people should be treated more seriously, IMO. It's never just one marketer - they're competing for attention just as they would compete for classified space.
Even if we restricted all advertising to classifieds, we still need to decide whose ads get shown, how many pages they get, etc.. That's what I mean by allocation.
And that would still be subject to the problems you identified: the advertiser might be dishonest, they might not have the consumer's best interests at heart, etc.
As for how to achieve this objective--have the government rigorously define advertising and ban it in all forms? That just shifts power from advertisers to bureaucrats then, with all the risks of regulatory capture that implies.
Let me pose the question in a different way: let's say there are a hundred different kinds of toothpaste. There is a cost to figuring out which kind is the best kind(s), and then letting everyone know the ordering. Who does the work of figuring that out, and then how do they get compensated for that work?
Advertising and marketing is one possible answer by creating a signalling equilibrium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#Introdu...): all else being equal, the better toothpaste should have access to a larger marketing budget. If consumers know this, then seeing someone's ad is actually a (perhaps weak) signal of quality.
There are also other models, like Amazon reviews; but there are plenty of ways to game that system, and you're really depending on Amazon to police it effectively.
Or you can actually pay someone to review products, like the Consumer Reports model, where you only get access if you pay up.
But each of these models has a tradeoff; Consumer Reports works best when everyone subscribes, but then as it becomes more popular, producers will be tempted to buy them off; Amazon reviews are subject to bandwagoning and cheating; classic marketing is expensive (in time and cost) and unreliable.
Isn't the market itself supposed to sort this problem out? To take your toothpaste example - customers will pick different types, perhaps randomly, and slowly gravitate towards best quality/price option. The word of mouth is pretty effective locally.
Now obviously, humans being humans, there's no way to prevent companies from trying to influence that word of mouth mechanism. But there seems to be a benefit from keeping it a shady (or perhaps illegal) practice - the society in general will shun corporate shills and attempts at influencing people's opinions. Which seems to be a better option than what we have now, where marketing is actually a respectable occupation, and people get assaulted with advertisements.
> all else being equal, the better toothpaste should have access to a larger marketing budget
This doesn't work because the definition of "better" for the market is different than "better" for the consumer. A market!better product is the one that sells more than alternatives, while the consumer!better product is the one of greater quality/usefulness. Market!better gives you profits which increases your marketing budget which increases market!better - you have a positive feedback loop here that bypasses the consumer!better variable entirely - hence the observation that investing in marketing has better ROI today than making something that's actually useful for the consumer.
> Isn't the market itself supposed to sort this problem out? To take your toothpaste example - customers will pick different types, perhaps randomly, and slowly gravitate towards best quality/price option. The word of mouth is pretty effective locally.
> This doesn't work because the definition of "better" for the market is different than "better" for the consumer.
I think these two points of view are incompatible.
The first quote implies that consumers can distinguish between two toothpastes, and moreover, they prefer the better one by being willing to pay more for it.
If that's the case, then given two initially otherwise identical companies, the one making the better toothpaste will have more sales, and then a larger marketing budget, etc. -- basically, the initial condition of producing a better toothpaste, combined with the positive marketing-sales feedback loop that you identify, leads to the better product winning.
Of course, this only works if consumers can tell which product is better, and there might be other factors that prevent product quality from being a strong enough initial condition (e.g. it's really hard to displace incumbents even with a better product).
> the society in general will shun corporate shills and attempts at influencing people's opinions. Which seems to be a better option than what we have now, where marketing is actually a respectable occupation, and people get assaulted with advertisements.
People who use aggressive tactics like cold-calling usually get paid minimum wage precisely because the signal-to-noise ratio is so low. In a sense, the market already strongly discourages blindly blasting people with noise.
Compare to the success of Adwords--advertisers only want to show ads to people who will be interested. The tradeoff here, of course, is reduced privacy for the consumer.
In some situations, it is about 1 or 0, because the output of that continuous function at a certain time t is put through a thresholding function: either buy or don't.
I'm simply pointing out that it's more accurate to look at the world in terms of degrees.
"never" and "always" have, I believe, a high degree of built-in denial.
I learned this the hard way when I moved from a company that sold software to the manufacturing / health industries.
Companies that don't sell software, see it as a by-product and have zero worries about its quality, what matters is that at the end of the it delivers the outputs the actual business requires.
So beware of presenting prototypes in such industries, their are always the final product and code refactoring is not something that usually makes them sell more stuff from their actual products.
Also the code tends to be pretty horrible, because a lot is developed by external companies that usually tend to implement a just single set of features. It is almost impossible to write properly safe code, because no external is able to grasp the whole codebase in the required timeframes for delivering the new feature and leave to another customer.
I'm willing to entertain that this is true, but it's also possible that the companies that sacrifice good engineering are setting themselves up for big costs later, like, for example, if someone uses one of your security holes to destroy your site and you can't easily fix them because they are so numerous. It could also presumably cause major scaling problems (if you are lucky enough to have that problem), which could impede growth significantly at a critical time.
That said, as someone who highly values a well built product, this may be wishful thinking.
That's the geek fantasy: that a security vuln will take BigCorp to their knees and they'll finally accept how important it was.
But the reality is that companies are getting pwned over and over and nothing bad happens to them. Actually looking at cost-benefit it still makes sense to get to market quickly.
Very true. I have to admit to having had similar fantasies when I was a younger software developer working for BigCorps who just didn't care about the things I cared about. "One day, the company will collapse in ruin because we ignore the 800+ compiler warnings in SoftwareProjA, and have memory leaks. KILOBYTES of memory leaks! Soon, I will walk among the rubble of this once-great company and tell all you managers 'I told you so!' SOON!"
Of course, as we all know, it never happens. BigCorp continues to churn out buggy, leaky, unoptimized code, and customers keep giving them money for it. I suppose you can handle this in a number of ways: 1. You can accept this and re-adjust what you consider to be "good enough to ship", 2. You can get jaded and dismiss all software customers as morons, or 3. You can start your own company that TAKES SERIOUSLY the proper use of namespaces, and see if that lets you outcompete the competition.
An interesting counter-point, but rather poorly written, and far too short. You need to flesh your ideas and accusations out properly, and your ending line makes for a lazy and frankly rather pathetic conclusion. You should invest a lot more time into editing and review.
You know what an awesome product is? It's full of bugs, lacks features and is frustrating to work with. Yet customers are ready to pay money for it. You know why? Because despite all the quality issues, it solves their problem.
That's pretty much exactly what the OP said. A completly shitty product that does just enough that people over look how shitty it is because it 'works' for them. Once it becomes embedded it doesn't even matter if someone comes along with a product that also solves their problem without the bugs and annoyances, because 'they do the same thing.' so why switch.
Engineering quality really doesn't mean much to people, so stop worrying so much about it once the core works without killing the user.
I would encourage you to think os engineering as a necessary but insufficient state for a company to thrive. At the end of the day you still need a functional product that solves a real problem in a novel way. Even the best marketer in the world can't hold a gun to people's heads and force them to buy.
Yeah I totally agree. Personally I want to find a way to do both. Build a great product that's well marketed. If anything, when you build something great, don't totally ignore the marketing side of things like I often do.
I think one way to do both of these is market your product well, yet at the same time develop it in a sustainable way so that this piece of crap is becoming something that eventually looks great on the engineering side of things.
To use the ever-present car analogy, shoddy engineering didn't harm British Leyland - until it did. And now there's no native British car industry to speak of.
But people don't care about engineering - they care about how your product will affect their lives today. If you can prove to them that it will solve that problem they have, they don't care that it's made out of biscuits.
Just look at all the bugs and unfulfilled promises in games released. They make a ton of money, but as much or more money goes into marketing than into the programming.
That's because they're selling the experience of hype, not high-quality software. Nobody even cares about software quality for games. Some people even prefer buggy ones.
To an extent. I like buggy games if they let me "cheat" in the game, as long as it's single player and the game is finished besides bugs.
For multiplayer, there should be no bugs or exploits and those should be fixed immediately.
Honestly, I hate hype and would prefer people to stop spreading hype and promises from the devs that they may have forgotten about. I would prefer devs and designers to be the ones leading game development, not publishers that want them "as fast as possible." That mentality needs to stop and games need to possess more intention than being a semifun money grab.
they're not secondary, they just need to be sufficient.
think of the extremes; you could develop a technical masterpiece and keep it under covers, making $0, having spent every single bit of available time/money/resources on it.
"It makes me wonder though, if instead of looking at entrepreneurship from the software development side of things, maybe instead I should be trying to build a marketing and advertising agency that builds software."
Many people do this already and it's a highly competitive space. Stories like this are neat because it seems like a lot of money (and it is for a 16 year old), but many of these things are too small to fit into a marketing agency model to make them worthwhile.
> I've seen stuff built with spaghetti PHP code, yet it was marketed well and more people were paying money to use it than my own. Yet when I looked at it, the first thing I saw was an SQL injection vulnerability that would allow me to drop the entire database.
Ironically, unless they're doing a side business in Microsoft product keys, specialname.cn was hacked until at least a couple of hours ago (according to Google's cache).
People always state things like this to imply "it's not what you know, it's who you know." I think it's quite the opposite - she grew up in a family environment where the fundamentals of business were part of the culture, as much as literacy and education.
If a kid grows up understanding finance, business development, how to pitch an idea to investors etc. they're going to be lightyears ahead of some kid who grew up being taught to 'do well in school so you can earn a good hourly wage'.
I think this kind of proves the point, though. These kids know their entrepreneurial and business-minded parents from birth (i.e. "what they know" comes from "who they know"), as opposed to those of us who grew up as children of "salary-parents"
Great counter point - people tend to discount parental influence as being "who you know" if it isn't direct nepotism. It's essentially like being born with a fantastic mentor from Day 1, and those of us fortunate to have that spirit of embracing entrepreneurial pursuits from a young age are, well, fortunate.
I've always heard the "who you know" used as a way to state that contacts are more important than skills, but as you point out, a good mentor blurs the lines between them.
But that supports the "it's not what you know, it's who you know." idea. Most people I think see that saying as meaning that if you take somebody, like this girl for instance, and swap her out for somebody else who didn't accomplish anything like this, that the new person could more easily be similarly successfully to this girl.
That most definitely helped her get early clients and commercial success, but I think it's still very cool that a young girl was able to plan, build and execute a business idea.
Most 16 year olds are just using their phones to send silly snaps to their friends and watch porn.
My wife is Chinese and has told me many of the ridiculous English names people have. We've heard Cinderella before. My favorite that we've encountered was a young woman named Pancake.
It's not just a problem of limited access to information, but also limited knowledge of what qualifies as a good English name. All of the people we've encountered were from Hong Kong, which has no Great Firewall to contend with. We've also seen many people using names that haven't been popular in the West in a long time, like Eugene or Doris.
I have friends named Dolphin, Fish and Shadow and they know perfectly well that their names are funny. I'm certain that Pancake does too. Having an English name is a bit unreal for them just as it would be for you and me getting a Chinese name, so why not get a funny one?
Also, naming in another language is difficult. Microsoft knows that, as "Bing" means disease in mandarin.
"Bing" as it is commonly pronounced in English doesn't exist in the Chinese language. Words with the pinyin 'bing' does, but saying it means 'disease' in mandarin is somewhat disingenuous, because it could refer to any of the four inflection and the very large number of words under each of those, like the word for ice, soldier, sideburns, guests, etc.
It kind of does. As previously stated no Chinese word is pronounced as the English word "bing". Mandarin makes heavy use of tonality and the same roman transcript (or pinyin) can have many meanings. You would really need to dig far to find an accent-less syllabe (for the lack of a better word) and not find any negative connotation. Heck, in Chinese even many numbers can be used as insults.
Add to that the fact that the Chinese love to substitute similar sounding words to make puns, and it's completely impossible to come up with a name that doesn't admit some negative reading.
The 'bing' in cn.bing.com and the logo at the top of the same page isn't read out in English by a Chinese person, but in Chinese, and it has neither tone nor hanzi. "Disease" is a meaning that easily springs to mind when seeing it and it is therefore an unlucky naming choice.
I guess that one could regard that as the counterpart to the odd Hanzi tattoos Americans get without having the slightest idea of whether they are done right.
And plenty of Americans choose odd names for their children--out of TV shows, movies, comic strips.
As an example of one such name becoming common, it is hard to find reliable instances of the feminine first name "Madison" before 1984: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088161/
> We've also seen many people using names that haven't been popular in the West in a long time, like Eugene or Doris.
Those are both proper names and awesome though, it's a far cry from using random english/engrish nouns (or the reverse, getting random — and miswritten — hanzi inked on).
My mom (Cantonese) once told me at least part of the reason many restaurants have "garden" in their name is because the sound of the word is pleasant to the Chinese ear. "gar-den" means nothing in Chinese (or at least Canto) but it just sounds good, and in the English language it means a pleasant place, making it a good choice for a restaurant name.
Status-symbol names aside, I wonder how many of these names get chosen based on the pleasant sound aspect?
I don't see why this is "ridiculous". It is the most natural result of not having the cultural and linguistic background. It is the same for English-speakers choosing Chinese names, or any X-speakers choosing Y names, for that matter.
It may sound stupid or funny to the native speakers, but there is nothing wrong with the names per se, after all. With so many languages that are not English, there are bound to be many weird English names. I personally like the "ridiculous" names because they are adding something interesting to long list of boring "proper names".
Also, Eugene is a pretty common name here in Singapore, where English is the official instructional language for schools.
Nothing wrong with the name Eugene, but it isn't as popular in the West anymore. According to the Social Security Administration, it peaked in popularity among American men at 20th most popular from 1927 to 1929. In 2015, it was 822nd most popular.
Do you have some context about when a Chinese person uses their English name ? e.g. do their friends call it them, is it only for when they interact with Western websites, etc.
It depends on the person. Some will use it as basically a replacement for their actual name, others will use for only for business with people who can't speak Chinese.
Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be as strong a correlation as you'd expect between a person's use of an English name and their command of the English language.
I used to work for a startup in Shanghai where no one spoke a word of English, except for the English names of the other employees. Office chatter was entirely Chinese, with a sprinkling of "Tony", "Leon", and "Francis." At the other extreme, I had a friend who was from Chongqing, but grew up and went to school in the west, who refused to take an English name at all because she didn't see the value in going by a fake name to all her friends.*
However, by her own description, this was somewhat unusual, as it meant that people called her by her full given name all the time. And according to her (this could be wrong, I'm just repeating it, and its hard for me to verify as I'm not Chinese), Chinese people generally address each other by some kind of nickname. So bringing it full circle, an English name is not only kind of cool, but doubles as a nickname, which was already a part of the culture anyway.
*I can see the merit in this. If you're going to befriend someone, especially someone of a different cultural background, telling him/her your name is basically the first chance you get to introduce them to your culture and language. But I digress.
The Chinese people I know mostly say they took the names so we wouldn't butcher their Chinese names. My wife for example has a name in Chinese that's simple for English speakers to say, so she never took a "proper" English name.
> At the other extreme, I had a friend who was from Chongqing, but grew up and went to school in the west, who refused to take an English name at all because she didn't see the value in going by a fake name to all her friends.
Interestingly enough, an old friend of mine was the opposite.
She's from China, came to the US when she was in sixth grade (she's still here), and I met her in high school. At the time, she mostly used her Chinese name. She only used her English name a little bit and never in class. She graduated a year before I did, we lost contact (this was before social media was a thing), and then a few years later, when Facebook became a thing, we found out we were going to the same college, so we reconnected. The first time I talked to her after that, I called her by her Chinese name, just because that was what I knew her by. She laughed and said she hasn't heard that name since high school. Turns out she dropped her Chinese name like a hot potato as soon as she graduated and has been using her English name exclusively since. I haven't called her by her Chinese name since.
As an aside: much later, she got married, and she took her husband's last name, which is a western practice that isn't done in China, which really sums up how much she considers herself American. I never asked, but I get the impression that she felt that all parts of her birth name just othered her and she couldn't wait to get rid of it.
This is the "cellar door" phenomenon. Turns out that when you divorce certain names or phrases from their meanings, names for mundane or gross things can actually sound quite beautiful.
The canonical example is "cellar door", which is frequently considered one of the most beautiful strings of syllables in the English language. Tolkien was one of its most famous proponents, but a good many writers have said the same thing. And another has said the same about "salad or" (as in "would you like salad or roast vegetables with that?"), which is almost the same thing.
Just forget about the meaning and respell it as "Selador" (it's better if you pronounce "cellar door" with a non-rhotic accent), and you've got a quite pleasant fantasy name.
As someone who doesn't know China very well, how important is having an English name? Is it legally their name, or just like a nick-name? Is it use daily or not at all?
It generally has no legal status and is mostly used for interacting with English speakers; some more Westernized Chinese people who go back to China might choose to use their English names in daily life though.
Another place an English nickname crops up is in online identifiers like e-mail usernames, since for a long time Unicode support was lacking.
(I find it interesting that there are a non-zero number of women called "Steve", because obviously the first thing you do is search for your own forename/surname!)
I am curious to know why so many Chinese people find it necessary for their children to have English name to visit US/UK in future. Do most of the outsiders in China have Chinese name?
My understanding is that us non-tonal language speakers butcher their names anyway, both in pronunciation and in remembering them. I've asked multiple Chinese acquaintances of mine what their Chinese name is and I struggle to pronounce their names properly even with some coaching, and I very rarely remember them afterwards. And I'm pretty good at languages in general.
These names exist in a linguistic spectrum that is different than Indo-European languages, which our brains are tuned for. It's just a lot more practical for Chinese people to get a Western name.
It's less necessary, because there are more Chinese computer systems that correctly support ascii names than English computer systems that correctly support GB/Big5/UTF16
It did make me do a double-take the first time I found out that Chthonic's blood-soaked bassist was called Doris. Taiwanese band, not Chinese, but this particular cultural quirk does seem to carry over. There's a Freddy, Zac and of course Doris herself just in Chthonic.
People also underestimate the market for baby name resources. It's true in the US as well, something I didn't realize until I had my own child. Add to that additional uncertainty about a different culture and language, and it probably amplifies the market appeal.
> A young man asked an old rich man how he made his money. The old man fingered his worsted wool vest and said, "Well, son, it was 1932. The depth of the Great Depression. I was down to my last nickel. I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the apple for ten cents. The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5 pm for 20 cents. I continued this system for a month, by the end of which I'd accumulated a fortune of $1.37. Then my wife's father died and left us two million dollars."
who owns the Great British Teddy Bear Company and Big Red Bus English, offering language tuition to children in China.
so not quite a rags to riches story, but she's still got a website that fills a need and is able to monetise. A lot more successful than many silicon valley start-ups :)
More successful by my standards (and yours, I guess), but not by the standards silicon valley uses. I assume lots of objectively stupid businesses are run by people who are capable of doing something profitable, but profitable isn't the goal.
In anywhere else where people don't throw billions into moonshots it is the goal. Nobody forces you to work on your small business all the time, you create it, you hire someone to do it, you collect money. If your only goal is to lose as much money as possible, as that means "pre-profit", then good luck.
Thank you. "Random working class girl with schoolteacher parents succeeds as an entrepreneur" is a very different story than "Already rich girl with an internationally well-connected businessman father and famous mother succeeds as an entrepreneur". Kind of changes everything.
Judging by the amount of well written Chinese text on the page this girl is either a native speaker or she had help.
Nowhere does the page indicate the names are paid. However clicking though the flow takes us several seconds and requires us to agonise over five different qualities. By this time we are now sufficiently invested in this site. We are now so invested and curious we consider paying the 68 RMB price anchor. Luckily there is an ongoing "promotion" that allows you to buy your name for only 9 RMB, what a deal!
I had a look at the website (specialname.cn for those interested), and one thing that stood out is that she's definitely trying to hide the fact that it was founded by a 16 year old girl.
Normally, I'd say there's nothing wrong with that and also absolutely no need to mention it, but in this case she's specifically misleading people who visit the site.
Scroll down to the bottom (or view the about-us page - http://www.specialname.cn/about-us/) and compare the picture there to picture in the bbc article. One of those pictures is not like the other.
The blurb is then even more misleading - saying she's been visiting China regularly for the last 12 years and is often asked by colleagues to give English names for Chinese babies.
Now, given her father's business, I'm sure it's quite likely that she's been visiting China for 12 years, but I'm pretty sure she didn't have many colleagues when she was 4 years old.
Mad props to her for setting up a site like this, and I can see the reasons for wanting to bend the truth with her background, but it just rankles a little to see this being done.
Why does that rankle you? People are biased and you have to work with that. This is no different than one person companies using the royal "we" in the website copy.
I think there's a difference between a solo freelancer saying "we" and said freelancer presenting a picture of some random people in a random office as "his team".
I think it's far beyond a royal "we", and in fact I would even argue that a royal "we" is acceptable usage for a company to use - even it's only a single person company.
It's in a whole other league to say this is me and this is my team, and this is my history, when it's not. I'm not sure if you read Chinese, and maybe that's why it's harder to tell the difference between "we" and this. It's not just the picture, the blurb provided is misleading at best and false at worse.
Yes, people are biased, but this is a situation in which there was no need to be misleading in the first place. She could just have easily written some respectable copy without needing to resort to deception, and so it rankles me she chose to be misleading when there was no need to be.
She never explicitly says this 'this is a photo of me and my team', however a Chinese reader with no other context would make that as the natural assumption.
It says stuff like 'under the supervision and guidance of our CEO and Founder Beau Rose Jessup, our team of experts will analyze the characteristics you're looking for in a name and blah blah blah'.
Then there's a single shot of the same woman with text that begins "I am Beau Rose Jessup the founder and CEO of Simple Name" and then goes on to detail her 12 year history of visiting China.
It's very heavily implied that these are the people behind the site.
I can't read the text on the site, but these pictures might have the same function as stock images on other sites that happen to show people; you're not supposed to believe that these people actually work for the company. Unless the text claims that these are actual pictures of the people involved...
But something else doesn't add up. The 60p fee includes printing two certificates on paper, and shipping them to China? Or contracting with a print shop in China and arranging for mailing? Perhaps when the article mentions "made £48,000", that's gross revenue?
A reverse image search shows they are stock images, but Chinese text implies that this is a picture of the founder and that is her team e.g. it starts with "I'm Beau Rose Jessup the Founder and CEO of Special Name".
> But something else doesn't add up. The 60p fee includes printing two certificates on paper
The 60p fee appears to be a mistake in the article. If you put in an order, you're taken to a checkout and the cost is 68 RMB, (about £7-8 or USD$10).
>我是英国Special Name 公司的CEO和创始人-Beau Rose Jessup。在过去的12年中，我经常到访中国。每当我在中国的时候，经常会被同事要求帮他们和他们的孩子取一个特别的英文名。
It literally says that she's been visiting China for the last twelve years and every time she goes to China her coworkers would asking her for English baby names.
It is quite clearly suppose to let the reader think that Beau is the middle aged woman in the stock photo.
Fair point, though there's no way that her site would have taken off without the misleading blurb. In an essentially culturally Confucian China, the task of naming a child is commonly relegated to the most senior/elderly person in the family, then education, then preference. No matter how well marketed the site may be, its doubtful it would have taken off if she stated her age honestly.
The thing is, for this sort of website there's no need for this to even come up. I'm sure they could have written copy and/or used pictures that gave an air of respectability without needing to actively mislead.
You are in no position to criticize someone who is successful. Nobody can say for sure what would have happened if they didn't do what they did. Your passive aggressive tone just reads like you are hiding your own insecurity about some 16 year old girl being more successful in an area you are trying to get successful for many years.
>But Beau doesn't know which names are the most popular on her website, and she's "happy about that".
This could go hilariously wrong. Her algorithm attempts to match names with personality traits. Some personality traits will be more popular than others, therefore some names will be more popular. Depending on exactly how it's all weighted, some names may be heavily biased towards or against. Without feedback and adjustment to maintain a sensible distribution she could well end up naming every third baby the same thing. Without anyone ever noticing until the next census.
Which gives me an idea for a website! "namemybabyaliceorbob.com"
For that to happen, an awful lot of Chinese parents will need to start using the service. Anyway, it already happens in Western countries without algorithms.
A bit of reflection - If I were in the same situation as the girl was, I would have named the baby and left it there. Hmm.. No wonder how many opportunities I am missing every day.
Yes, the text is also misleading, but again it seems more to hide the fact that she's 16. Her father has businesses in China so it's likely that she has been visiting China for 12 years. I doubt she's been giving English names to Chinese babies for that long though.
I'm confused, how did her website get around the restricted internet in China? The article mentions there are other similar baby naming websites, but China does not have access to them . What makes her site special?
It most likely doesn't. I'm sure the other naming websites aren't blocked either and the line about restricted Chinese internet sites was just 'journalistic licence'.
The reason her site is more popular among Chinese is likely to be a function of targeting Chinese people, rather than the other sites which are geared towards native English speakers.
The article makes out that the girl built and designed it herself. This is not the case, it's a slick, locally designed site ( Chinese language etc ) even the link at the bottom is for a parent company of some sort. It's a highly developed and tested site, this is no one person, overnight success.
The big difficulty here is letting people know that the project even exists. Most people here could build it, but figuring out how to bring in customers is the hard part.
It's kind of a problem. I knew a Chinese girl who chose the English name "Squirrel." When I told her it wasn't a real name, she didn't quite understand.
Yep - Douglas Squirrel (http://douglassquirrel.com/) is a guy in London who does a lot of work with startups, and he is mostly known just as 'Squirrel'. Really cool guy, by the way, if you get the chance to talk to him at a meetup.
Well, my SO calls me that as a nickname. I have ginger hair and I am kind of impulsive. That and a squirrel came eating out of my hand one of the first times we met.
What's "not a real name?" A name just something you are known as so there's no 'fake' names by definition. Some of my family have totally nonsensical names. I don't tell them they have fake names. Squirrel is pretty 'normal,' people have been taking animal names forever.
The minimum age to register a company in the UK is 16.
The minimum age for part-time work in the UK is 13, with exceptions for modelling and acting. Age 13-14, the most common job is delivering newspapers, since at this age there are big restrictions on working hours. At 15, it's more common to work in a small supermarket, but I think it's become a lot less common than 10 years ago. (Of course, there are unofficial jobs, like gardening and cleaning cars.)
If this girl pays herself the whole £48,000 as a salary, the tax would be £12,693.20 leaving £35,306.80. Under 16s don't pay National Insurance (healthcare + unemployment etc tax), they would take home £39,600.00 from the same salary. The first £11,000 of salary is tax free, regardless of age.
In general, 16 is actually the more important age in the UK in practical terms.
At that point, one can move out from their parents, no longer attend school, have sex, marry, join the army, consent to your own medical treatment, and apply for a passport without your parents' consent.
Though it's generally not considered good life choices to be doing most of these this young.
No clue for #1, but for #2, the English name is typically given in addition to the Chinese name, and since it's in English it doesn't have any particular tones.
"does the money legally go to the girl or her parents/guardians" - what a funny way of looking at things. An employer with a 16 year old employee would just pay that employee and wouldn't recognise the parents as having any right to it.
How is she accepting payments in china? Does AliPay have a good system for that? I'm more interested in how one sells into china easily from the outside. Does paypal work ?
Looking at the html of the payment screen, it appears there’s some kind of "payment_method_alipay_cross_border" woocommerce payment plugin, which suggests that AliPay are handling it somehow.
But since her family has business links in China, it probably isn’t a big deal if she gets paid in ￥ - there’s probably something they can spend it on over there & the family can compensate her here in £.
The concept of marketing to an international audience fascinates me. I head up a small web design + development agency in South Africa, and recently I've set my sights on finding international clients, specifically in the US. How do people generally go about this?
What kind of marketing went into this girl's business to do so well in a country that she doesn't even live in?
I used to live in China and met some students with very unusual English names. My favourite of which was 'Finger'. When I asked him why he chose the name he answered 'I like Kurt Cobain and he played the guitar with his finger'. Not sure what was wrong with Kurt.
The website isn't even loading. The influx of HN readers must be overloading the low-bandwith servers.
Edit: Finally made it on.
Clicked a few icons (for which I believe represented personality traits) and then I was asked to pay money. Who would actually purchase this unintuitive random name generator? Chinese are absolutely delusional for using this, then again they'll eat anything up that comes from the Western World.
Imagine if your son or daughter asked you how you came up with their name. Your response, "bought it for $11.99 on the internet".
Not so much so in the UK though, where she lives. 198 girls born in 2015 with the name putting it at #249 (more popular than Mary, Kate, Diana or Michelle - all top 10 names at one point in the past).
It's very unusual for girls, probably because it literally means "male"
No, it is from French: literally, "handsome," or the masculine form of "beautiful." Still an odd choice for a girl. The definition you quote is what it has come to mean in English, but it is really a shorthand.
- It's just a wordpress website. You don't need nothing fancy to be successful.
- Unknown niche market instead of 'going with the flow'.
- A 16 year old is capable of making a 'good enough' algorithm for a new market.
- Her (amateur?) pricing strategy/conversion funnel seems more balanced than some made by professionals.