You Have an Overseas Expansion Guide Waiting for You | BlueRun Ventures' "Globalization" Portfolio Event
No fluff, all substance.
Almost everyone is talking about going global, but substantive discussion of the actual execution remains scarce — which markets to target? How to build local capabilities? How to choose categories and channels? BlueRun Ventures' recent third installment of its post-investment series tackled these questions from two angles: hardware and software.
The "Hardware Going Global" panel was moderated by Cao Wei, Partner at BlueRun Ventures. Founders and executives from BlueRun portfolio companies — Cheng Haotian, founder and CEO of Gaussian Robotics; Yang Jianbo, founder and CEO of Keyi Tech; Li Haoqian, founder and CEO of Oladance — were joined by Peng Yiheng, China Strategy Representative & Senior Advisor at Kickstarter, and Wang Zhiyu, General Manager of Anker Innovations Manufacturing, to share their overseas expansion experiences.
In the "Software Going Global" segment, Yan Shixing, Senior Vice President at Lazada; Han Qing, co-founder and CEO of Kyligence; and Zhou Xiaosi, CTO of QingCloud Technology, delivered thematic presentations from different perspectives. Shi Jianping, Investment Partner at BlueRun Ventures, and Gao Ning, a former well-known VC SaaS investor and operator of an enterprise services founder community, engaged in a spirited discussion on the hot topic of PLG (Product-Led Growth).
Over 100 executives from BlueRun portfolio companies participated online, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. So we've compiled a transcript of the event — no fluff, all substance — hoping to genuinely help entrepreneurs with global ambitions.
Jui Chan (Managing Partner, BlueRun Ventures): First, the pandemic and its secondary effects have had a lingering impact on the domestic market. Entrepreneurs, including manufacturing supply chains, have needed to look externally for more opportunities. Second, this relates to entrepreneurs' horizons. Many founders and teams today are post-90s, and compared to the previous generation of entrepreneurs, they naturally possess an international outlook.
The overall market is undergoing significant shifts. For instance, geopolitical changes — people are gradually recognizing opportunities in markets like the Middle East, beyond just infrastructure. Additionally, there's the spillover of China's engineer dividend. As the domestic market gradually enters an era of hardcore tech innovation, the playing field is changing. But along the way, it has cultivated a substantial pool of well-trained engineering talent. For them, exploring overseas markets represents a genuine new opportunity. While the environment facing domestic internet companies is constantly evolving, having more markets to diversify risk is always the more prudent choice.
Worth noting: the destination for IPOs has shifted noticeably in the past two years. If a company can foresee that it will inevitably go global, it may be worth thinking ahead about practical matters like listing location, headquarters, and branch office setup.
Cheng Haotian (Gaussian Robotics): We initially chose Southeast Asian countries including Singapore as our first overseas destination. The first reason was policy support. Singapore began developing its Smart City initiative around 2013–2014, offering substantial government subsidies for energy-efficiency equipment. Compared to Europe and the US, Singapore's labor costs for ordinary technical positions aren't particularly high. Without this policy support early on, users would have had little incentive to purchase robots as human replacements.
Second, Southeast Asia has lower certification requirements, making it relatively accessible for startups. To do B2B products professionally, seven or eight years is normal. So when going global, you can start from Southeast Asia and gradually transition to markets like Europe, Japan, and the US that have high demands for product professionalism.
Peng Yiheng (Kickstarter): I'd advise against overly complex geographic overlap. I saw a home robotics company whose product had voice interaction capabilities and needed to serve both Japanese and European users simultaneously. They ended up finding that the voice packs and memory were insufficient, had to change certifications, and a whole cascade of problems followed.
From a product perspective, most Chinese companies naturally gravitate toward hardware. This year, we found that by the end of November, Chinese hardware companies' crowdfunding totals exceeded those of all other regions worldwide for the first time, just breaking the $100 million mark. Indeed, Chinese hardware companies excel in maker-oriented products that spark user creativity, capturing considerable market volume; but in reality, D2C brands are expanding from electronics into many other categories. There are still numerous categories on Kickstarter that remain untapped by Chinese entrepreneurs — plenty of room remains.
Cheng Haotian (Gaussian Robotics): In the beginning, if your product's innovation and intelligent features are strong enough, customers have a certain tolerance for early products. But in long-term competition and market penetration, the capabilities that need building must eventually be built — after-sales, service, and operations. Every market has plenty of "easy money" early on, and overseas markets especially so. You need to keep raising your own standards.
In overseas organizational structure and talent profiles, it's easy to go down wrong paths. On capability building: which do you develop in-house, and which do you empower channel partners and collaborators to develop? On talent profiles: what specific capability does this person actually elevate for the company? This is a systems question — the cost of trial and error overseas is extremely high.
Yang Jianbo (Keyi Tech): Validating PMF (Product-Market Fit) is a very easy pitfall to stumble into. There's often a gap between your own assumptions and how users actually feel. There are lighter-weight ways to validate PMF. For instance, before launching on Kickstarter, we tried running ads on a small webpage to accumulate potential users' email addresses. Once we had accumulated enough, we conducted focus groups — generally preferable in person. For example, renting a small bar in San Francisco during daytime hours and inviting online-registered users to come chat offline proved highly effective and valuable.
Having a high-efficiency team is also crucial. Before our new product "Loona" launched, we probably revised the configuration no fewer than ten times. At the time we had just one product manager, one engineer, and one data analyst — the engineer also doubled as media buyer and handled backend infrastructure. Three or four people got it running, low cost and fast. So you definitely need to find an efficient, nimble team and make good use of various tools.
Wang Zhiyu (Anker Innovations Manufacturing): Using agents to do qualitative research can have many issues — after all, design isn't something that can be copied across every category, nor does it apply to every scenario. Pricing is also critical. If you price based on online logic but also need to accommodate offline, the price becomes absurd; if the price is too low, channel partners have no incentive to push it.
Then there's the overseas time lag issue. For example, manufacturing takes two months, ocean shipping another two to three months — that's five or six months total. So you need to forecast sales six months in advance. Under-order and you stock out; over-order and you tie up capital for half a year. This creates massive financial or cost risk.
Yang Jianbo (Keyi Tech): One channel is overseas media. Some YouTube KOLs can be more powerful for traffic and branding than top-tier media. But most importantly, the product must be fully ready before launching, because there aren't that many top-tier KOLs — if something goes wrong with the product, there are no second chances.
The most cost-effective way to build a brand is through community. Facebook Groups are essentially community strongholds; accumulating community early on is very effective. But at a certain stage, you need to shift the conversation toward vertical, product-specific feedback — Discord is an excellent platform for this.
Wang Zhiyu (Anker Innovations Manufacturing): Building a brand isn't short-term work. It's like making deposits in a bank — until you reach a certain amount, it doesn't generate much effect. During our overseas crowdfunding, we found that some KOLs drove sales that didn't even cover what we paid them. But when large numbers of KOLs are discussing your product simultaneously, it creates considerable brand momentum.
The point where a brand truly generates value is when your product has established a certain market influence and users are willing to pay more for it — that's brand value.
Li Haoqian (Oladance): In the first stage, you need to own the category, so I tell consumers "I'm the first person in the world to discover and solve this pain point", turning that into digital assets that accumulate over time.
Startups may not have much capacity for paid acquisition at the beginning, but one thing is absolutely doable: provide consumers with the best service you can possibly manage. In our earliest days, our backend was wide open — consumers could chat with us directly, and we could resolve their issues or hear their product complaints immediately. I never argued back. Consumers sense your dedication to the brand and become your hardcore fans, spreading the word for you.
Peng Yiheng (Kickstarter): For startups building brands — from early user selection to organizational structure to KOL selection — you must have your own values and find the right people to amplify them. If your own thinking isn't clear yet, I'd suggest spending more time reflecting: what values do you want to transmit to the world through your product? You must exchange time for brand assets. Early teams may not have much money or resources, but you need to use time wisely.
Yan Shixing (Lazada): The first step in going global: choice matters more than effort. Every market has distinctly different characteristics; it's difficult to classify them by fixed standards like population size, middle-class proportion, language, or political system. Once you've selected a market, several questions follow: Do you need to establish a local entity? Which functions should have local teams? What customer segment are you targeting?
When facing local markets in different countries, we encounter two challenges: culture and people. As a foreign company setting up branches or offices locally, Chinese companies going global aren't viewed by local employees as MNCs (multinational corporations) — our Chinese imprint is still quite strong. We must respect local markets and cultures, respect local consumers and employees.
For different markets, you need to calculate different cost structures. In a place like Jakarta, for example, local engineers might cost one-twentieth of what a Chinese engineer costs, and the products they build only need to charge very little to recover costs. So you need to ask yourself: do you want to use Chinese engineer costs to build a product for Southeast Asia?
Another critical judgment: does globalization require localized products? Some problems we simply cannot solve, such as policies related to local regulation. If you make business decisions based on local policy, and then policy changes make the local operation unviable while other markets have different standards, you've been led astray.
Han Qing (Kyligence): We currently offer a standardized, subscription-based product. Through continuous customer usage, we refine and improve it, which becomes our advantage in going global. Meanwhile, US customers have extremely high requirements for security and user experience; by the time we replicate to other markets, this creates a "dimensionality reduction" effect.
Business environments differ by location — be mentally prepared before going global. For example, large US enterprise customers are extraordinarily demanding, always giving us the hardest parts or unsolvable problems and evaluating us throughout. If they decide we're not a fit, they leave without hesitation. This is something we're still learning.
The US is a marketing-centric market. Enterprise procurement is a lengthy process, so you must have sustained brand building. We build brand through conferences, meetups, social media, and PR agents — but don't spend blindly, especially on things that don't work. I suggest founders personally get their hands dirty in this, otherwise it's hard to truly understand how these things work.
One misconception is thinking that doing open source and technology well automatically converts to commercial value — that's impossible. You need to think about what value you're actually providing customers. In fierce competition, everyone talks about business, technology, and open source, but how to build differentiation is what people should be thinking about.
Zhou Xiaosi (QingCloud Technology): One lesson from running our open source community is to find young, outgoing, energetic people to operate it — even if they don't understand it at first, they can learn quickly. Second, doing open source isn't just about a single product; you must build an ecosystem, making partners technically interdependent from a technology standpoint. It's worth noting that the core metric for measuring an open source community is actually number of users, not contributors as commonly understood, because this represents the software's value.
When choosing whether to open source a software product, first you need to identify the right track. If you pick a track with very fragmented players, success may be difficult — look for opportunities that can scale. Second, think clearly about why you're choosing open source. Many domestic companies do heavy customization, which is highly inefficient. My preliminary thinking is that we need to improve overall societal efficiency, and to build global open source products — open source inherently has global attributes.
In reality, open source is a double-edged sword for commercial companies. It is indeed a low-cost marketing tool, especially for brand building and competing against tech giants. But balance is required — make the open source product too good initially, and customers may be reluctant to pay; but if the product isn't good enough, the open source community won't attract many users. You need to find the equilibrium yourself.
Currently, China's open source market still has issues, such as insufficient respect for intellectual property and severe involution. We need to move beyond blind open source bandwagoning and return to competitive fundamentals.
Gao Ning: Simply put, PLG means in the early go-to-market stage, choosing relatively free models like network effects and community to acquire your first batch of seed users and drive growth. Product and marketing work in tandem, spreading word-of-mouth at scale through community and social channels, saving considerable early sales expenses. Facing customers more directly also strengthens bonds and relationships with users, which is very helpful for finding PMF.
On business models, the biggest shift in recent years is that people have started using usage-based pricing — pay for what you use — lowering both the psychological and actual barriers to adoption. Many products are experimenting in this direction. When initially exploring PLG, there are several important stages: first, acquisition, finding your first seed users; second, signup conversion, where the page can include some guidance to drive user registration; third, retention, which involves whether users are actually using the product. Quantifiable retention metrics could include user dwell time, number of blocks created, number of APIs created, etc.; fourth, monetization, where you can set different payment touchpoints to see if users are willing to pay for premium features or specific thresholds. At each of these four stages, we can try monitoring quantifiable metrics and forming closed loops for iteration at each stage.
I've noticed people starting user screening relatively early through research or community communication, but I think the underlying logic should be identifying your ideal customers or power users sooner. Only by finding core users can you validate monetization faster. There are some misconceptions about PLG in the market currently. First, when domestic companies first start PLG, they may lack mature acquisition methods and channels. What you think is good, power users may not actually agree with. We need to use different tools and operational methods to truly iterate on what users find valuable.
Second, I don't think PLG products should necessarily be free from the start. But constrained by domestic market environment, payment willingness, and other factors, free is a relatively long-term tactic here to attract more users. The overseas situation is completely different — you start charging when usage reaches even a small threshold.
Third, utilization of data tools is another area where domestic and overseas differ. Overseas, all kinds of tools are used to monitor data at each stage, but domestically, using tools to better execute PLG isn't yet widespread, or they're deployed at later stages, resulting in wasted time.
Originating in Silicon Valley, BlueRun Ventures was established in 2005 as a venture capital firm focused on early-stage startups.
Currently, BlueRun Ventures manages multiple USD and RMB dual-currency funds in China, with assets under management exceeding RMB 15 billion, making it one of the largest early-stage funds domestically. Its investment stage focuses on Pre-A and Series A, covering hard tech and innovative interaction, enterprise technology, new consumer, and healthcare. It has cumulatively invested in over 150 startups, including Li Auto, Waterdrop, QingCloud, Guazi.com, Qudian, Songguo Chuxing, Ganji.com, Monster Charging, Yuntu Semiconductor, Machenike, Yunsheng Zhineng, Anxin Wangdun, and BioMap.
BlueRun Ventures has been ranked #1 on Zero2IPO's "China Top 30 Early-Stage Investment Institutions," #1 on ChinaVenture's "China Best Early-Stage Venture Capital Institutions TOP30," and named among Preqin's Top 10 VC Fund Managers Globally for Sustained High Returns.
Additionally, BlueRun Ventures has received consecutive recognition from Forbes China, 36Kr, Cyzone, Caixin Media, CBNweekly, Jiemian, and other media organizations for honors including "China Early-Stage Firm of the Year," "China Top Venture Capital Firm," "Most Founder-Friendly Early-Stage Firm," and "Most Influential Early-Stage Firm."