I originally came to China as a way to continue my Chinese language study and pursue a career in consulting, government work, or perhaps an NGO. After getting involved in a startup competition at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center and interning at a startup involved in the ChinaAccelerator program in Shanghai, I changed directions and started working on building a skill set that would let me reach my goals of joining a startup and hopefully one day building my own.
In August, 2015 I joined my first startup in Shanghai, Stubank. Stubank was one in a new wave of fintech companies working to make digital transactions real. This was around the time of the iPhone 6 release, and the implications of phones that could be secured with finger prints was just being realized by the market.
The idea behind Stubank was that Alipay and Wechat Pay were still largely used for paying for online services, and the opportunity existed to bring that convenience of paying via app offline. Targeting college students seems counter-intuitive at first, but on further analysis makes sense: they spend in small amounts and would be quick to see the advantage of abandoning loose change for a mobile wallet, a larger percentage are early-adopters, and their lifetime value is greater than adults.
To get money into the hands of our consumers, we had built a micro-loan platform into our application. Students could take out loans up to 10,000 RMB after a review from our credit team. The long term goal was to collect data on consumption behaviors and credit worthiness and use that data to build a credit-rating system.
Growth hacking was crazy. We built ways to import contact lists, share passcodes that would give away cash to new users, and even built a wrapper on top of Taobao’s website to enable quick purchases via our app using our loans as payment. Our marketing team was visiting 2-3 colleges per week. Each college would result in 2,000-3,000 new signups.
The Taobao wrapper was hands down the coolest growth hack I’ve ever worked on. After entering the Taobao purchase page, the user would be prompted to login via the Taobao website login page. The app would intercept the server’s reply and check to see whether a captcha was needed or if the login was successful. After login, we would push a new view controller onto the stack, keeping the webpage running in the background. Through javascript functions downloaded from our server, we would open the user’s shopping cart, scrape and parse the data, and feed it into a native table view. The whole process was carried out via native view controllers with a webview running in the background, controlled by javascript functions. It was a really clever implementation that no one else had built.
Unfortunately, after only a few months the company closed down after our founder sold to a competitor. I’m forever thankful to him for giving me the opportunity to enter into the local startup ecosystem. The experience confirmed my desire to work in startups, and confirmed my opinion that the Chinese market is the future of mobile consumer business.