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It’s been two weeks since we slipped into beta with Popup Chinese, my new company that provides free Chinese podcasts, HSK test prep materials, listening exercises, annotated readings (with sexy mouseover popups) and much more. If you still haven’t visited the site, our goal is helping students bridge the gap between basic communicative skills and actual fluency in mandarin, and by fluency I mean the sort of conversational and written skills that give you your pick of great jobs in China, not the sort of fluency that people generally refer to when they’re trying to sell an introductory course. We’re different!

I want this post to be less about Popup Chinese than about some things I learned in the process of developing it, because it’s been a uniquely Chinese experience, even down to the places I’ve lived while working on it (even taxi drivers here can’t find 东坝). While I read about tech development causing other people frustrations, it’s actually been very easy-going here: our biggest hurdles have been administrative. China has this innate talent for making even the simplest things rip-out-your-hair frustrating. In just the last month, we’ve had banking documents trapped in diplomatic customs disputes (I now recommend labeling any materials sent through the post as “documents” to avoid these sorts of problems), difficulty wiring money internationally (who on earth would ever want to send HKD to HK?), and even problems getting paid. Something as simple as accepting Paypal is actually a challenge when your bank is based in Hong Kong but your company technically isn’t. The HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong is so gorgeous it almost feels like a privilege to do business there. Still, the solution to these problems usually involves sheer persistence and a stubborn refusal to take “no” for an answer. If you’re polite, friendly and - most importantly - don’t ever leave, staffers will usually try to figure out with whom you need to speak. Knowing how to avoid ending a conversation is a useful skill.

On the tech side, I’ve found the process of developing Popup Chinese interesting for a few reasons. Oddly enough, the process confirmed a lot of the things I’ve learned about what makes for effective and ineffective tech development. I swear by the principles of iterative and agile development, with a focus on putting basic architecture before site design, cleanly separating backend and frontend functionality, and making an early push for full usability and in-house testing. Developing in this fashion gave us a fully functional site more than month before we actually launched (more time for bug-testing!). Even now (two weeks into our public test) the architecture is letting us make non-trivial changes to our interface as users come up with better suggestions on how to do things. One of the simplest and most powerful examples of this has been our decision to pull display preference controls out of the profile section and right onto the lesson pages. Since we already offer people the ability to view all our stories, dialogues and transcripts in traditional Chinese as well as pinyin, the ability for people to switch between display modes on the lesson pages themselves makes sense. And we can generalize about user preferences from the choices they make here instead of asking them explicitly elsewhere.

Beyond the challenge of getting the business up and running, one of  my big realizations has been how different perceptions of the educational market tend to be among different types of students. Whenever I end up talking with someone of my plans, I generally get one of two reactions. The first is what I’ll call the “market is saturated” deer-in-headlights view. These people tend to look at the learning market from the perspective of basic learners and evaluate products in bulk. They see value in materials but don’t know enough Chinese to be able to tell the difference between good materials and bad materials. Companies that target these sorts of students generally focus on the mass production of indifferent educational products (generic lessons arranged in hierarchical learning structures) and then market the hell of them. The dominance of these companies in the field is the largest reason I think there’s so much opportunity to create a better learning service. This is certainly the only reason I can think of why people are buying Rosetta products. And that’s not a dismissive statement - I bought them when going through undergraduate too.

The second reaction is what I tend to get from people who’ve either been in China for a while, who have good Chinese, or intermediate or advanced students who have worked hard to actually master the language and realized - hey - learning is very personal activity. And what’s interesting about our product to them is that there are still very few good resources for diligent students of Chinese who need more than a podcast telling them how to introduce themselves. And among these resources there are very few cost effective ones. I’m talking here about students studying for the Chinese government’s HSK scholarship, or working in specific fields like chemistry, physics, economics or political science, and needing much more specific and targetted lessons to survive and flourish in their chosen niche.

I think what we’re really talking about is the emergence of two completely different markets. The first is focusing on the mass production of indifferent educational materials, and uses organizational and marketing strategies to push it onto users who have yet to really take learning into their own hands. The second is a strategy that focuses on niche materials produced at low cost, but with extremely high value to discriminating buyers.

Tags: Chinese podcasts, hsk scholarship, popup chinese, test prep materials