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Comment by ePierre | Hacker News Reader

My goodness. Their website is made exactly after this article:

https://medium.com/slackjaw/template-for-tech-product-announ...

As for their story... Well, it's great that they wrote up a summary of their adventures, but I'm appalled at the fact that these three 25-something year old Americans are amazed that in China, people speak Chinese and nothing is written in English... Welcome to the World, I guess!

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>three 25-something year old Americans

It says that they departed from St. Louis, but I don't think that they're American. For one, their English isn't at a native level. Also, at one point in the article they referred to what the vast majority of Americans would call a "soccer ball" a "football." There are many other terms and phrases that I wouldn't expect an American to use, like "China border." Assuming you are American, think about it, do you hear anyone calling it the "Canada border?" No, we say "Canadian border." Maybe Western or Northern European.

There is a caption on one image that mentions that at least one of them is from the UK: "There are lots of things in Hong Kong that Jon remembers from the UK, like Lucazade!"

Which is another mistake, since it's "Lucozade", as you can see in the photo right above. Plus, at one point they say "it costed us X".

From http://needwant.com/about/ :

> Marshall Haas, CEO & Co-Founder: A Texas native…

> David Myers, Design & Co-Founder: From New York…

> Jason Cox, Head of Operations: Jason was a fashion model in NYC…

The only one who's not from the US is

> Jon Wheatley, Product & Co-Founder: Born and raised on the south coast of the UK…

Are you telling me in addition of not knowing that people in China speak Chinese, they don't know how to write in their own language?

Oh my.

>Are you telling me in addition of not knowing that people in China speak Chinese, they don't know how to write in their own language?

Apparently so.

To be fair, we don't actually have any evidence that the four co-founders wrote this article themselves. Maybe the bedding manufacturing isn't the only thing they outsourced. /s

They're native speakers, but the style is weird, agreed. I think it's the generally extremely simple sentence structure and vocabulary -- this blogpost is probably at a third-grade reading level. There's also no deep commentary on any of the things they encountered or things they thought about. I couldn't help but feel as if I was reading some kind of picturebook intended for children.

There are also things like "you wouldn’t be able to breath" that make you wonder if they are typos or actual spelling mistakes.

These are smart guys who are catering to the wannapreneur/internet marketer crowd, not tech geeks and seasoned entrepreneurs.

>wannapreneur/internet marketer crowd

I have to agree with this, based on the 'products' they 'make' at their company.

Seriously, these guys should have spent the plane ride over learning Chinese phrases. Might have made their adventures more adventurous.

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