Fed up with China, this bug-testing startup finds a warmer welcome in Hong Kong

Not everyone is rushing to the mainland China market. Larry Salibra, an American entrepreneur, took his business out of China and moved over the border to Hong Kong a few years ago. “When the internet started going downhill in China, we had to start thinking, ‘Oh, we can’t do jquery from Google because they’re blocking that.’” As web censorship piled on, he found his startup team being forced to worry about a lot of things that don’t matter to the rest of the world.

When Salibra took Pay4bugs from the mainland China city of Guangzhou to Hong Kong, he was also attracted by the territory’s more progressive approach to startups. The business, which runs a crowdsourced platform for app testers to report bugs, got a Hong Kong investment visa with no deposit or fixed capital required. “You just have to convince them that you’re going to be an asset to Hong Kong – that your business is going to be an asset to Hong Kong – and that you have enough money to make what you’re trying to do happen,” he explains. It took three months to get that investment visa.

With that done, the four-person Pay4bugs team found Hong Kong to be not as expensive as you might think relative to mainland China. First off, the actual internet bills are cheaper in Hong Kong – and the web is faster and totally uncensored. “There’s a lot of stuff you get here [in Hong Kong] for free that I was paying for in Guangzhou. For example, there’s really great public healthcare here in Hong Kong. It’s essentially free and it’s open to people that aren’t permanent residents,” he adds.

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Bug hunters

Now, Pay4bugs is run out of Hong Kong and New York, where co-founder C.S. Hsia is based. “It’s very useful that someone is in the US, in another timezone,” says Salibra.

The duo has been working together since 2006. Initially, Pay4Bugs was a side project from Appartisan, which is their software development company. But in August last year, they wound down the other projects in order to focus on Pay4bugs. The bug testing service used to be self-funded from those other projects, but now it pays for itself.

The service currently has over 5,000 crowdsourced testers who make money by squishing annoying app bugs – like crashes or dud buttons – on the web, Android, or iOS. The startup’s clients are a mix of startups, small and medium-sized businesses, and major corporations who need real humans to test an app and find things that automated software might miss. It has seen a total of 1,000 paying clients so far, mostly in the US, Europe, and Australia – plus a handful in Hong Kong.

Salibra says that this kind of testing is cheaper for a company than doing it themselves – for a small business or startup it means minimizing head-count, and for big companies it allows their developers to focus on tasks that have more value.

Some startups try to do the app testing themselves, either by roping in friends or fans. But both can be unreliable. Xiaomi incorporates feedback and bug reports from its 100 million users, but the sad fact is that many startups are too small or obscure to have any fans at all.

Pay4bugs used to be bilingual, with a Chinese-language service aimed at the mainland China market. “It became apparent there’s no demand in the mainland – at least the way we were doing it,” quips Salibra. So the Chinese version of the site was retired, which helped speed up the evolution of the bug-squishing service.

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