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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, it's sad that so many startups are ignoring the huge market that China is. People on HN often critique the music/film industries for claiming to lose ridiculously huge amounts of revenues due to piracy. In this case, I am willing to bet that 99% of people buying from the Chinese website wouldn't have bought the original. Anyways, I'm not trying to justify what this guy did but simply suggesting that more startups should consider serving the Chinese market.

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What would a positive outcome of serving a group be when you know 99% of them won't buy anything from you?

I'd be very impressed if any outsider managed to sustainably serve the Chinese market, without the very hungry local competitors improving on the solution. Support by itself would be quite a challenge.

99% of them would not have bought the original product because their English skills are not good enough. They would buy a localized Chinese version, which is what the Chinese site from the story was selling. The moral of the story is, Chinese customers want a localized copy of your product. If you don't provide it, someone else will, and that guy might not feel like paying you any license fees.

You make it sound like someone who doesn't immediately produce a Chinese translation deserves what they get when someone pirates their app and adds a + to the end. Also, like translation is the only reason someone's app gets ripped off.

Not buying software does not mean that they won't buy anything. It simply means that particular business model (selling software licenses) does not work in China. But that's not the only possible model available, for example if you can package your software as training or something more tangible.

I wrote an article a couple of years ago with some ideas to overcome this issue: http://successfulsoftware.net/2010/08/12/selling-your-softwa...

Upvoted. I remember your article on SS. Good points.

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