Three steps to Chinese end user research

Kassey Lee explains how he finds end users in China.

A reader asked me recently to do an end user search for one of his domains. Instead, I decided to share my method in this article so that other investors can also try. For this exercise, I’ll use the domain DDKT.com, which was mentioned in one of the articles I have written.

The method involves three steps.

Step 1: Check .cn

Enter “www.ddkt.cn” into the browser. Be sure to include the “www” prefix. This is because many Chinese companies fail to set up their domains properly so that without the “www” the domain may not resolve. In this example, ddkt.cn actually goes to a parking page.

www.ddkt.cn shows a website which appears to belong to a company. Since it is a potential buyer, I want to assess its financial capability. Look for pictures first because they don’t require translation. Luckily, the site provides many pictures that show the company deals with expensive industrial equipment. This tells me that the company can pay 4 or even 5 figures to acquire the domain.

Step 2: Check .com.cn

While .com.cn domains are much smaller than .cn domains in numbers, many companies still use .com.cn only so it is worth checking.

In this example, DDKT.com.cn shows a site consisting mainly of a menu. If you don’t read Chinese, just copy the whole text to Google Translate or use your browser’s translate function. The translation result indicates that the site is about betting. It has little content but sends you to other sites. This suggests to me that the domain owner is probably not our target.

Step 3: Perform Baidu search

Enter “ddkt” into Baidu search and check the URLs in the search result. Look for domains similar to DDKT. If you find one, visit its site and assess the financial capability of the company.

Also, while visiting a site, look for email addresses. In this example, we find one at the bottom of the home page. If necessary, look for the Chinese characters 联系 (meaning “contact”) in the menus and then open the page to find email addresses so that you can contact the company. Of course, you can also try browser extensions such as Hunter.io to locate email addresses.

This is a simple method I use to look for end users. If you have other tips, please include them in the comment section.