Idea Discussion: How I aim to accelerate ideas exchange beyond the language barriers?
As Kevin Kelly mentioned: flowing, accessing, filtering and sharing are INEVITABLE.
That's why I start a company Y Media, on a mission to accelerate ideas exchange beyond the language barriers.
When I work with Chinese speaking startup founders, they are desperate to keep up with what's going on in Silicon Valley. The problem is they are prevented from the Internet Wall and language barriers. Since traditional publishers only work on big books and media release, I translate and summarize tweetstorms and blogs from English into Chinese.
The benefit for those original content owners is to raise their personal brand awareness in China market and build a potential connection with Chinese business people.
What're your thoughts on this idea? I've only started this company this year and still in the progress of developing products and business model.
I think you have a strong proposition. Giants like Disney and Activision demonstrate a certain desperation to maintain access to the Chinese market. It thus stands to reason that smaller operations might seek a service like yours to make inroads.
That in mind, you might have a way to sell the idea on both sides. Grassroots marketing campaigns gain in power with each passing year, so there could be real value in making it simpler to ply those campaigns abroad. And if Chinese founders want to consume or study those campaigns, they may pay from their end as well.
So yeah, it makes sense to me! How do you see it working? A legion of translators, or is there a way to automate parts of the process? Is there a risk of the Internet Wall coming down on you, or will you have to vet clients for compliance with CCP standards?
Hi Solomon,
Thanks so much for your reply. Yep, China is a huge market for anyone who'd like to achieve exponential growth. Even target one small town like some of my entrepreneurs' friends did, they acquired more than 1 million users in a short time period.
I think I'm in a good position with this language barriers pain point. Moreover, the information overloading problem and full of fake news from traditional media companies in China will add a more competitive advantage for a small company like mine.
At the moment, I manually filter and translate information via newsletter and podcast. But I'd love to work with machine learning experts to automate the process and develop a product in a SaaS model. I don't think there is a risk since I won't talk about politics. Yep CCP standards are not that difficult if you don't talk about politics at all.
There are many media companies that do translate western news in China but the quality of the content is unreadable since the majority of them only hiring interns to translate and pick up news who don't familiar with startups culture abroad.
I aim to be Morning Brew type of digital media company in the China market and reversely, I could also provide China news to English readers.
I've seen Morning Brew advertised on YouTube. Seems like a great news delivery model, and you seem to know the landscape well. Wish I had more to add than "I think this is a good idea." I'll be keeping an eye on it; cross-continental marketing is only growing more important!
Thank you! All the best to you too!