Focusing on China

Kitten: In super-duper-focused mode. Credit: TheJump

With limited resources — be it time, money, and/or manpower — what will you focus on for your startup?

That’s the question I have been asking myself in recent months. Many of our readers might remember that at PO, we used to cover stories from China, India, Indonesia, and Japan.

But slowly, our coverage tends to skew towards China.

Naturally, our switch in focus upsets some of our friends and readers from Singapore, India, and Indonesia who have asked us if we have given up on Southeast Asia and India.

No, we haven’t done that – because we’re still very pumped to cover startups across Asia. Whether it is in Laos, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Japan, or Singapore, we’re happy to spread the message (good or bad) for fellow entrepreneurs. You’ll notice that our redesign has an ‘Around Asia’ section – and that remains in place.

Like most startups, our resources are limited so we have to be laser-focused on what we want to achieve. With a five-man team (3.5 bloggers, 1.5 biz dev), it is best to breakdown Asia in parts, focus, and conquer.

But why China first? It’s a rational choice on our part. Like it or not, the world wants to know about China and China-related stories tend to have more click-throughs. (Yeah, we actually spent months tracking this.)

It’s just a case of – and we don’t mean to stroke our own egos here, or compare our coverage with any others – our team being strongest in China tech. And that supports our reasoning why we should continue our good work in the Middle Kingdom.

But with that said, we’re still humbly building our network and learning the ropes as we blog along. I don’t think any blog out there has the balls to claim that they know everything tech in China.

(And for the record, there’s no such thing as the “Michael Arrington of Asia.” And no one should aim to be that either — Live your own legacy!)

So the bottomline is that, like any small startup, we have to focus on things we do best and make an impact. Sure, we have a lot of aspirations to do this and that. But our current resources wouldn’t allow us to realize them — So yeahhh, for editorial content China is our focus, along with startups across Asia.