XIHA Life.com, founded by Jani Penttinen from Finland and his Chinese wife, is a multilingual social network for expatriates, exchange and language students and people with multi-cultural families. While founder Jani lived in China, he found it hard to use local websites and discovered that for locals it was just as hard to use foreign websites, so for him it became obvious that there is a need for XIHA’s worldwide service. XIHA – meaning happiness in Chinese - detects automatically the languages you speak and offers tools to create content in any of these languages. If you study a new language, there is also a translation feature.
Jani is proud to point out: „XIHA has a healthy pace of growth with a monthly rate of 20% , 1 mio. unique visitors per month and a couple of thousand new registrations per day. Traffic is coming from everywhere from Turkey to Brazil to China.“ The company received funding by a Chinese investor and has now reached profitability: „We will create a really nice business and expect to have around 10 mio. users by the end of 2009“, says Jani.
Jani, who used to develop games, finds it important when starting a business „to do something you really care about. At the beginning it’s not easy and you need to be willing to go the extra mile in order to do a better service than everyone else.“ According to Jani it is best „to target the European market first.“ His advice is „to cover the basis of the countries that can generate cash flow early on and use that money to build the basis, then expand around the world.“
27.11.2009 at 13:11
[...] or other incubator-type of places with a high of concentration of startups.“ Click here for Jani’s interview from Slush Conference Helsinki. More Web 2.0 Expo New York interviews can be [...]