They say you learn more from failure than you do from success. And that appears to be the theory behind a new blog post from Sinobeat Capital managing partner and Fortune China columnist Ding Chenling. In his very long post in Chinese, Ding lays out the stories of 17 Chinese startups that ultimately failed, and breaks down the lessons learned. The whole thing is a bit too long for our purposes, but here are a few of the most interesting startups (and lessons) Ding picked. Company: Fanfou Lesson: Startups shouldn’t work in areas that could be politically sensitive. Fanfou is actually still around, but these days it pales in comparison to its competitors Sina and Tencent Weibo, even though it was around long before either of those services. Fanfou was China’s first Twitter clone, and back in 2009 it seemed to have the world at its fingertips. 300,000 users and growing, the company had netted a big investment from HP. And although the company was doing its best to block “sensitive” words and keep political speech to a minimum, it was blocked (along with a host of other sites) following the Urumqi riots in July, 2009. This gave big companies, which already had established relationships with the government and were better equipped to implement censorship, time to develop their own microblog products, and by the time Fanfou was allowed to re-open, Sina and Tencent had already left it in the dust.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Lessons to learn from 5 promising (and failed) Chinese startups | ventureburn
