Take a page out of Alibaba’s marketing book

Red Credit Cards and Dollar Note in the Jeans Pocket - LargeWe just received a coupon we can use to take 15 RMB (about $2.50) off of a purchase on Alibaba’s Tmall or Taobao, but it’s only good on 11/11 — Singles’ Day. Last year Alibaba made headlines when shoppers spent an incredible $5.75 billion on Ali’s sites in a single day.

With Alibaba now listed on the New York Stock Exchange the value of another massive day of spending will be seen not only in profits, but also in a stock boost. Indeed, the stock boost has already started with investors expecting sales to reach $8.2 billion on Singles’ Day this year.

Alibaba does a great job of using this day to generate sales and headlines, and there’s an excellent growth hacking lesson to be learned here.

What can you do to set a fire under your users to get them spending money on your site? Or maybe for you it’s all about signups, or something else — how can you use the calendar to give them a nudge? Can you follow Ali’s lead and use that to generate press coverage?

Lean Startup vs Lean Thinking at Toyota — reflections from someone on the inside

It’s been about nine months since I left a job in Toyota’s Strategic Finance Group for an opportunity to return to China to work for Originate China. At Originate, we create innovative web and mobile apps for clients and also based on our own internally generated ideas, and we also work with entrepreneurs to support their growth by providing strategy and engineering expertise. We are an agile development shop and focus on being nimble, which makes the Lean Startup methodology a great fit for our work.

While working in various business functions at Toyota for over 5 years,[1] I was able to see first-hand how Lean Manufacturing and the Toyota Production System has been applied to non-manufacturing functions. I learned how this methodology can be very effective within Toyota, but also how the Toyota approach to Lean Thinking in a business context with a focus on consensus-building can sometimes slow decision-making to a crawl, making the business anything but nimble. I am therefore in the unique position to apply the Lean Startup methodology to our business in China while avoiding some of the features of Toyota’s approach that aren’t ideal for startups.
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Monetizing apps in China – The Freemium model

There are many challenges facing web and mobile startups in China, including an incredibly dynamic market, keeping your staff from leaving you for one of your competitors and taking your Intellectual Property with them, and copycats that will appear within days of you gaining any interest from consumers or the press. But even if you are able to overcome these challenges and are able gain traction with your mobile or web app, it can be very difficult to get Chinese consumers to pay for your product or service.[1]

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