141 karma · joined November 7, 2019
Let me tell you this story: October 2019 we did something similar, but took it to the extreme: We created 8 conventions on 8 days in 8 major cities in Germany to learn more about private investors and our customers. Time-wise, almost no rational person would've invested so much time.
We talked to almost 1000 real and some prospective customers. The learnings were amazing. In the following 4 weeks, we managed to improve product and reduce churn by 3X (~24% to 6%), which is generally unheard of. It was one of the best ways ever to build up user empathy and understanding real, underlying needs as well as a ton of UX problems.
Whenever I or one of our devs has a problem with AWS or configuration, there's a 99% probability that anyone had this problem before and I find high quality google search results. That's not the case for OVH, Digital Ocean, ...
With developer salaries at 350'000 USD/year, you can now calculate the massive amount of savings.
Wikipedia was a huge step in the right direction: making everything easier to understand. With lots of proofs and examples.
I think you could easily become billionaire by improving Wikipedia and the "make science and knowledge easily absorbable" 10X easier
They even have the YC logo on their website and claim to have funded Airbnb, Dropbox etc. Be careful to read their whole website. This whole website of MiracleMinus is extremely dishonest. I would be very careful not to be connected too much to dishonest and lack-of-integrity people like Qi.
LOL: even the website ycchina.co redirects to MiraclePlus. http://www.ycchina.com/
On a fairer note, I think YC got to ask: what unfair advantage do we have in this country?
Most of their advantages are network effects in SV and brand-awareness in the western world. Their advantages in the US are MUCH higher than in China, where you'd have to build much from scratch, rebuild the investors' and founders' networks. If Qi was supposed to bring all this -- which he undoubtedly had as ex-COO of Baidu -- why would he need YC at all?
I'm not going into the details of his personality or whether this is a gentleman's move or are the highest standards of honesty and integrity. You shall make your own opinion about Chinese business.
That to say, all of this -- just like any other comment here obviously -- is a hypothesis and nothing less. So take each comment with a huge grain of salt :).
Cheers