Ask HN: How to enter the Chinese web market?

I'm consulting for a small bootstrapped startup right now that is trying to build a web-based business that serves customers in mainland China. The business model itself is a non-mobile, niche market, but requires access to a few U.S. based web resources which we don't control (none are Facebook or Google related). Has anyone in the community had experience building a product for Chinese consumers like this? Our biggest hurdle appears to be constructing something that can access these U.S. based partner sites with any speed - how do you get around this beyond requiring every consumer have their own VPN?

Any other suggestions for a small company trying to make a model like this work?

Serve the assets from your own server(s). Proxy or cache the third party stuff. If you can't do this (e.g. if you're relying on third parties for OAuth) then consider removing those dependencies, or at least have graceful fall-back if clients fail to load any third party stuff. (You can test this with uMatrix, by blocking all third party connections.)

How niche is it? Can they pay with credit cards (which most people in china and can't)? You'll need a local entity if you want to do payments through Alipay etc. Which can be done with a WFOE if you have aprox. 100k in registered capital.

If you're confident that it'll be successful AND your strategy is fairly stable and you just want you product in China then go for it. But if you ever want to go mainstream there, want to take Chinese investment or anything of that sort that requires you to abide by their regulations just forget about it.

As far as the technical side goes, yea, just proxy their connections if you cannot cache it locally. And you want to use shadowsocks or something else that doesn't get hit by the GFW rate limiting super fast. But you'll still want to have 5 or so exit nodes that you can rotate (or bind togather) in case the throughput goes radically down. And yes if you're a popular product it probably can get you banned in China.