16-year-old British girl earns £48,000 helping Chinese people name their babies
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
- It's just a wordpress website. You don't need nothing fancy to be successful.
- Unknown niche market instead of 'going with the flow'.
- A 16 year old is capable of making a 'good enough' algorithm for a new market.
- Her (amateur?) pricing strategy/conversion funnel seems more balanced than some made by professionals.
Most 16 year olds are just using their phones to send silly snaps to their friends and watch porn.
Because most 16 year olds dont come from a family with such a wealthy (both in money and opportunities) background.
And most people waste their lives away in 9-5 jobs. It's not an age thing.
If a kid grows up understanding finance, business development, how to pitch an idea to investors etc. they're going to be lightyears ahead of some kid who grew up being taught to 'do well in school so you can earn a good hourly wage'.
I've observed similar products myself, often ones that are more successful versions of my own creations. I've seen stuff built with spaghetti PHP code, yet it was marketed well and more people were paying money to use it than my own. Yet when I looked at it, the first thing I saw was an SQL injection vulnerability that would allow me to drop the entire database.
It makes me wonder though, if instead of looking at entrepreneurship from the software development side of things, maybe instead I should be trying to build a marketing and advertising agency that builds software. These types of companies seem to make more money than I do.
Yet at the same time, in the marketing companies that come to my mind, the weaknesses in their products tend to be sustainability. I think overtime customers are going to become frustrated with their lack of good support and ability to maintain code and add new features.
Just my thoughts when reflecting on all of this. :)
Thus, bugs and quality are secondary. Why spend $ on engineering and fixing bugs when you can spend that on marketing for much better ROI.
That said, as someone who highly values a well built product, this may be wishful thinking.
But the reality is that companies are getting pwned over and over and nothing bad happens to them. Actually looking at cost-benefit it still makes sense to get to market quickly.
What is the argument? If you start thinking about it, I think you'll find it's actually quite hard to create a coherent counter-argument.
Of course, as we all know, it never happens. BigCorp continues to churn out buggy, leaky, unoptimized code, and customers keep giving them money for it. I suppose you can handle this in a number of ways: 1. You can accept this and re-adjust what you consider to be "good enough to ship", 2. You can get jaded and dismiss all software customers as morons, or 3. You can start your own company that TAKES SERIOUSLY the proper use of namespaces, and see if that lets you outcompete the competition.
They just don't care.
I think one way to do both of these is market your product well, yet at the same time develop it in a sustainable way so that this piece of crap is becoming something that eventually looks great on the engineering side of things.
To use the ever-present car analogy, shoddy engineering didn't harm British Leyland - until it did. And now there's no native British car industry to speak of.
But people don't care about engineering - they care about how your product will affect their lives today. If you can prove to them that it will solve that problem they have, they don't care that it's made out of biscuits.
Often, that requires the technical skills to reliably solve their problems.
Always, that requires the communication skills to pursuade someone you can solve their problems.
The trade off skills apply outside the engineering domain as well.
I don't think a blanket put-down of all marketing as negative value is really true.
Of course there are instances where marketing is dishonest or harmful, but by and large, how do you expect people to discover goods and services if there isn't someone who's willing to pay for the cost of dissemination of information, whether it's a marketer, or Google's search algorithm, or the consumer?
Marketing is by and large about gaming the way people select goods and services, so that you can sell more regardless of the quality of your offerings, or of whether the client actually needs it.
That may be the objective function of the marketer or salesperson, but it doesn't follow that marketing itself is a simple net transfer of wealth from consumers to producers.
> I think bringing up marketing-as-information-dissemination is a red herring, because it's only a small fraction of the whole thing.
The marketer is not paying to move bits to a consumer, the marketer is paying for the consumer's attention, which is much more limited than our ability to move bits around.
Do you have an alternative fair and equitable way of allocating that scarce resource? For example, if we went with your suggestion and restricted marketing to only classifieds and other forms of print advertising, then we would expect the cost of placing ads there to skyrocket as everyone competes for scarce space. Also, the same risks of manipulation and dishonesty apply just as well there:
https://www.google.com/search?q=snake+oil+ad&espv=2&biw=1440...
Yes. Not allocating it. What you call trying to "allocate" consumer's attention is, from the point of view of a consumer, people purposefully attempting to distract you from living your life in order to extract money from you. In all other contexts of life we would call such people "assholes". Classifieds have the benefit of consumers paying attention only when they want to pay attention.
Time is the most precious thing we have in life. Attempts to take it away from other people should be treated more seriously, IMO. It's never just one marketer - they're competing for attention just as they would compete for classified space.
I'm not sure what you mean by not allocating it.
Even if we restricted all advertising to classifieds, we still need to decide whose ads get shown, how many pages they get, etc.. That's what I mean by allocation.
And that would still be subject to the problems you identified: the advertiser might be dishonest, they might not have the consumer's best interests at heart, etc.
As for how to achieve this objective--have the government rigorously define advertising and ban it in all forms? That just shifts power from advertisers to bureaucrats then, with all the risks of regulatory capture that implies.
Let me pose the question in a different way: let's say there are a hundred different kinds of toothpaste. There is a cost to figuring out which kind is the best kind(s), and then letting everyone know the ordering. Who does the work of figuring that out, and then how do they get compensated for that work?
Advertising and marketing is one possible answer by creating a signalling equilibrium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#Introdu...): all else being equal, the better toothpaste should have access to a larger marketing budget. If consumers know this, then seeing someone's ad is actually a (perhaps weak) signal of quality.
There are also other models, like Amazon reviews; but there are plenty of ways to game that system, and you're really depending on Amazon to police it effectively.
Or you can actually pay someone to review products, like the Consumer Reports model, where you only get access if you pay up.
But each of these models has a tradeoff; Consumer Reports works best when everyone subscribes, but then as it becomes more popular, producers will be tempted to buy them off; Amazon reviews are subject to bandwagoning and cheating; classic marketing is expensive (in time and cost) and unreliable.
Now obviously, humans being humans, there's no way to prevent companies from trying to influence that word of mouth mechanism. But there seems to be a benefit from keeping it a shady (or perhaps illegal) practice - the society in general will shun corporate shills and attempts at influencing people's opinions. Which seems to be a better option than what we have now, where marketing is actually a respectable occupation, and people get assaulted with advertisements.
> all else being equal, the better toothpaste should have access to a larger marketing budget
This doesn't work because the definition of "better" for the market is different than "better" for the consumer. A market!better product is the one that sells more than alternatives, while the consumer!better product is the one of greater quality/usefulness. Market!better gives you profits which increases your marketing budget which increases market!better - you have a positive feedback loop here that bypasses the consumer!better variable entirely - hence the observation that investing in marketing has better ROI today than making something that's actually useful for the consumer.
> This doesn't work because the definition of "better" for the market is different than "better" for the consumer.
I think these two points of view are incompatible.
The first quote implies that consumers can distinguish between two toothpastes, and moreover, they prefer the better one by being willing to pay more for it.
If that's the case, then given two initially otherwise identical companies, the one making the better toothpaste will have more sales, and then a larger marketing budget, etc. -- basically, the initial condition of producing a better toothpaste, combined with the positive marketing-sales feedback loop that you identify, leads to the better product winning.
Of course, this only works if consumers can tell which product is better, and there might be other factors that prevent product quality from being a strong enough initial condition (e.g. it's really hard to displace incumbents even with a better product).
> the society in general will shun corporate shills and attempts at influencing people's opinions. Which seems to be a better option than what we have now, where marketing is actually a respectable occupation, and people get assaulted with advertisements.
People who use aggressive tactics like cold-calling usually get paid minimum wage precisely because the signal-to-noise ratio is so low. In a sense, the market already strongly discourages blindly blasting people with noise.
Compare to the success of Adwords--advertisers only want to show ads to people who will be interested. The tradeoff here, of course, is reduced privacy for the consumer.
Engineering tradeoffs are very much about costs. I could (well once upon a time I could :-) design a bridge that's stable up to a (not very) nearby atomic blast; more stable than the bedrock it's built on. But that would require an unnecessary level of resources (unless atomic resistance is in fact a design requirement). I could design the most super-awesome web site that scales to 40 billion unique visitors...but it's unlikely to be needed (though if some of the uniques are robotic, perhaps it is). Simply choosing an alloy that's simpler to work with the tools on hand is a rescue tradeoff, and those resources are time and money.
Likewise, the plane (I assume you mean airplane) has only one valuable purpose (transport people or goods that someone wants transported) and that is denominated in money. Make it cheaper and more people can fly, or pay less for their gadgets or fresh shellfish.
It's incredibly naive to to say that marketing is some zero-sum game. If you have an amazing bandage that is cheap and saves lives you still have to get the word out.
The core topic in this subthread is focusing work on marketing the bandage instead of making it cheaper/save more lives, because marketing has much better ROI than actually providing value to people.
And the word can get out fine by itself, actually. The word of mouth is a pretty effective thing - and a lot of marketing is trying to game it, getting increased profits by destroying its usefulness.
1) Person A makes a crappy bandage (Y units of quality) with X units of budget and markets with 9X units of budget
2) Person B makes a decent bandage (5Y units of quality) with 5X units of budget.
If person B were to also market the bandage with 5X units of budget, they will take a larger fraction of person A's market share than if they don't, thus providing more value to people. Yes you can argue that if person A didn't exist, then they wouldn't need to spend this money and the bandage could be cheaper, but this is clearly an example where adding marginal marketing can be a net benefit to society.
> And the word can get out fine by itself, actually.
Umm, good luck with that. There are only a few, small, specialized businesses for which that is true.
In some situations, it is about 1 or 0, because the output of that continuous function at a certain time t is put through a thresholding function: either buy or don't.
I'm simply pointing out that it's more accurate to look at the world in terms of degrees.
"never" and "always" have, I believe, a high degree of built-in denial.
Companies that don't sell software, see it as a by-product and have zero worries about its quality, what matters is that at the end of the it delivers the outputs the actual business requires.
So beware of presenting prototypes in such industries, their are always the final product and code refactoring is not something that usually makes them sell more stuff from their actual products.
Also the code tends to be pretty horrible, because a lot is developed by external companies that usually tend to implement a just single set of features. It is almost impossible to write properly safe code, because no external is able to grasp the whole codebase in the required timeframes for delivering the new feature and leave to another customer.
And increasingly, because of the 'go fast a break things' attitude, this is extending to companies that _do_ sell software.
Engineering quality really doesn't mean much to people, so stop worrying so much about it once the core works without killing the user.
think of the extremes; you could develop a technical masterpiece and keep it under covers, making $0, having spent every single bit of available time/money/resources on it.
that's a hobby, not a business.
Engineering or rather sometimes over-engineering things might make it super easy but not intuitive to use.
Many people do this already and it's a highly competitive space. Stories like this are neat because it seems like a lot of money (and it is for a 16 year old), but many of these things are too small to fit into a marketing agency model to make them worthwhile.
http://41j.com/blog/2016/09/ugly-solutions/
If the engineering solution is good enough (for the customer) there are other things that matter more, mostly marketing, sales and customer support.
Ironically, unless they're doing a side business in Microsoft product keys, specialname.cn was hacked until at least a couple of hours ago (according to Google's cache).
It's not just a problem of limited access to information, but also limited knowledge of what qualifies as a good English name. All of the people we've encountered were from Hong Kong, which has no Great Firewall to contend with. We've also seen many people using names that haven't been popular in the West in a long time, like Eugene or Doris.
And plenty of Americans choose odd names for their children--out of TV shows, movies, comic strips.
Those are both proper names and awesome though, it's a far cry from using random english/engrish nouns (or the reverse, getting random — and miswritten — hanzi inked on).
Also, naming in another language is difficult. Microsoft knows that, as "Bing" means disease in mandarin.
- B- in Chinese is unvoiced, whereas it's voiced in English
- the -ing in Chinese and English are pronounced slightly differently
- Bing in English is usually inflected somewhere between 1st and 4th tone -- 病, properly pronounced, has a much more noticeable downward pitch slide
It's fair to say though that if you say 'Bing' when you mean 病, a Mandarin speaker will probably understand you.
Source: am native English and Chinese speaker
Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be as strong a correlation as you'd expect between a person's use of an English name and their command of the English language.
I used to work for a startup in Shanghai where no one spoke a word of English, except for the English names of the other employees. Office chatter was entirely Chinese, with a sprinkling of "Tony", "Leon", and "Francis." At the other extreme, I had a friend who was from Chongqing, but grew up and went to school in the west, who refused to take an English name at all because she didn't see the value in going by a fake name to all her friends.*
However, by her own description, this was somewhat unusual, as it meant that people called her by her full given name all the time. And according to her (this could be wrong, I'm just repeating it, and its hard for me to verify as I'm not Chinese), Chinese people generally address each other by some kind of nickname. So bringing it full circle, an English name is not only kind of cool, but doubles as a nickname, which was already a part of the culture anyway.
*I can see the merit in this. If you're going to befriend someone, especially someone of a different cultural background, telling him/her your name is basically the first chance you get to introduce them to your culture and language. But I digress.
Interestingly enough, an old friend of mine was the opposite.
She's from China, came to the US when she was in sixth grade (she's still here), and I met her in high school. At the time, she mostly used her Chinese name. She only used her English name a little bit and never in class. She graduated a year before I did, we lost contact (this was before social media was a thing), and then a few years later, when Facebook became a thing, we found out we were going to the same college, so we reconnected. The first time I talked to her after that, I called her by her Chinese name, just because that was what I knew her by. She laughed and said she hasn't heard that name since high school. Turns out she dropped her Chinese name like a hot potato as soon as she graduated and has been using her English name exclusively since. I haven't called her by her Chinese name since.
As an aside: much later, she got married, and she took her husband's last name, which is a western practice that isn't done in China, which really sums up how much she considers herself American. I never asked, but I get the impression that she felt that all parts of her birth name just othered her and she couldn't wait to get rid of it.
It may sound stupid or funny to the native speakers, but there is nothing wrong with the names per se, after all. With so many languages that are not English, there are bound to be many weird English names. I personally like the "ridiculous" names because they are adding something interesting to long list of boring "proper names".
Also, Eugene is a pretty common name here in Singapore, where English is the official instructional language for schools.
It may sound stupid or funny
So, ridiculous then?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_st...
It is declining fast in American English:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_st...
However, not the case in British English:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Eugene&year_st...
Office for national statistics, Baby Names for Girls in England and Wales, 2015; https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
(The last sheet has a list of all names). So, it's an unusual name.
Other information about most common names. (Some Game of Throne names make it into the list.)
Office for national statistics, baby names, 2015 registrations, England and Wales:
http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdea...
* Less than five girls called Cinderella.
* Less than five boys called Cinderella.
So rare and unusual, but not unique.
(I find it interesting that there are a non-zero number of women called "Steve", because obviously the first thing you do is search for your own forename/surname!)
These names exist in a linguistic spectrum that is different than Indo-European languages, which our brains are tuned for. It's just a lot more practical for Chinese people to get a Western name.
The canonical example is "cellar door", which is frequently considered one of the most beautiful strings of syllables in the English language. Tolkien was one of its most famous proponents, but a good many writers have said the same thing. And another has said the same about "salad or" (as in "would you like salad or roast vegetables with that?"), which is almost the same thing.
Just forget about the meaning and respell it as "Selador" (it's better if you pronounce "cellar door" with a non-rhotic accent), and you've got a quite pleasant fantasy name.
Another place an English nickname crops up is in online identifiers like e-mail usernames, since for a long time Unicode support was lacking.
Status-symbol names aside, I wonder how many of these names get chosen based on the pleasant sound aspect?
http://www.cotswoldlife.co.uk/people/celebrity-interviews/li...
who owns the Great British Teddy Bear Company and Big Red Bus English, offering language tuition to children in China.
so not quite a rags to riches story, but she's still got a website that fills a need and is able to monetise. A lot more successful than many silicon valley start-ups :)
> A young man asked an old rich man how he made his money. The old man fingered his worsted wool vest and said, "Well, son, it was 1932. The depth of the Great Depression. I was down to my last nickel. I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the apple for ten cents. The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5 pm for 20 cents. I continued this system for a month, by the end of which I'd accumulated a fortune of $1.37. Then my wife's father died and left us two million dollars."
Judging by the amount of well written Chinese text on the page this girl is either a native speaker or she had help.
Nowhere does the page indicate the names are paid. However clicking though the flow takes us several seconds and requires us to agonise over five different qualities. By this time we are now sufficiently invested in this site. We are now so invested and curious we consider paying the 68 RMB price anchor. Luckily there is an ongoing "promotion" that allows you to buy your name for only 9 RMB, what a deal!
This is the work of a genius.
Normally, I'd say there's nothing wrong with that and also absolutely no need to mention it, but in this case she's specifically misleading people who visit the site.
Scroll down to the bottom (or view the about-us page - http://www.specialname.cn/about-us/) and compare the picture there to picture in the bbc article. One of those pictures is not like the other.
The blurb is then even more misleading - saying she's been visiting China regularly for the last 12 years and is often asked by colleagues to give English names for Chinese babies.
Now, given her father's business, I'm sure it's quite likely that she's been visiting China for 12 years, but I'm pretty sure she didn't have many colleagues when she was 4 years old.
Mad props to her for setting up a site like this, and I can see the reasons for wanting to bend the truth with her background, but it just rankles a little to see this being done.
Plus the text says "I'm Beau Rose Jessup the CEO and Founder of Special Name", which is clearly not the case if you look at the BBC article.
It's in a whole other league to say this is me and this is my team, and this is my history, when it's not. I'm not sure if you read Chinese, and maybe that's why it's harder to tell the difference between "we" and this. It's not just the picture, the blurb provided is misleading at best and false at worse.
Yes, people are biased, but this is a situation in which there was no need to be misleading in the first place. She could just have easily written some respectable copy without needing to resort to deception, and so it rankles me she chose to be misleading when there was no need to be.
It says stuff like 'under the supervision and guidance of our CEO and Founder Beau Rose Jessup, our team of experts will analyze the characteristics you're looking for in a name and blah blah blah'.
Then there's a single shot of the same woman with text that begins "I am Beau Rose Jessup the founder and CEO of Simple Name" and then goes on to detail her 12 year history of visiting China.
It's very heavily implied that these are the people behind the site.
The thing is, for this sort of website there's no need for this to even come up. I'm sure they could have written copy and/or used pictures that gave an air of respectability without needing to actively mislead.
No insecurities on my behalf, and I'm happy for her success, but success does not automatically give someone a free pass on criticism.
The criticisms I have made also all stand on their own regardless of my or her respective successes.
There's plenty of alternative copy she could have used to give an air of respectability but didn't.
But something else doesn't add up. The 60p fee includes printing two certificates on paper, and shipping them to China? Or contracting with a print shop in China and arranging for mailing? Perhaps when the article mentions "made £48,000", that's gross revenue?
> But something else doesn't add up. The 60p fee includes printing two certificates on paper
The 60p fee appears to be a mistake in the article. If you put in an order, you're taken to a checkout and the cost is 68 RMB, (about £7-8 or USD$10).
It literally says that she's been visiting China for the last twelve years and every time she goes to China her coworkers would asking her for English baby names.
It is quite clearly suppose to let the reader think that Beau is the middle aged woman in the stock photo.
This could go hilariously wrong. Her algorithm attempts to match names with personality traits. Some personality traits will be more popular than others, therefore some names will be more popular. Depending on exactly how it's all weighted, some names may be heavily biased towards or against. Without feedback and adjustment to maintain a sensible distribution she could well end up naming every third baby the same thing. Without anyone ever noticing until the next census.
Which gives me an idea for a website! "namemybabyaliceorbob.com"
See http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2009/04/the_na...
The image is just a stock image: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-160492445/stock-photo-portra...
Yes, the text is also misleading, but again it seems more to hide the fact that she's 16. Her father has businesses in China so it's likely that she has been visiting China for 12 years. I doubt she's been giving English names to Chinese babies for that long though.
1. You can find good translators on UpWork
2. Use Alibaba Cloud (www.aliyun.com) to setup a server anywhere in China.
The reason her site is more popular among Chinese is likely to be a function of targeting Chinese people, rather than the other sites which are geared towards native English speakers.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/quickly-check-site-visible-grea...
You can check any site here: http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org
However, I could not find the website for "Special Name" to check; does it exist?
Edit: Address is http://www.specialname.cn/; it was very hard to find on Google.
That comment made me hungry http://globaltableadventure.com/recipe/ugandan-rolex-breakfa...
1. does the money legally go to the girl or her parents/guardians (I guess a 16 y/o is still a minor), and how much of this is taxable?
2. how exactly is the tonality established for the English names?
At 16 you pay PAYE - i.e. income tax.
The minimum age for part-time work in the UK is 13, with exceptions for modelling and acting. Age 13-14, the most common job is delivering newspapers, since at this age there are big restrictions on working hours. At 15, it's more common to work in a small supermarket, but I think it's become a lot less common than 10 years ago. (Of course, there are unofficial jobs, like gardening and cleaning cars.)
If this girl pays herself the whole £48,000 as a salary, the tax would be £12,693.20 leaving £35,306.80. Under 16s don't pay National Insurance (healthcare + unemployment etc tax), they would take home £39,600.00 from the same salary. The first £11,000 of salary is tax free, regardless of age.
https://listentotaxman.com/ will calculate this.
https://www.gov.uk/child-employment/minimum-ages-children-ca...
At that point, one can move out from their parents, no longer attend school, have sex, marry, join the army, consent to your own medical treatment, and apply for a passport without your parents' consent.
Though it's generally not considered good life choices to be doing most of these this young.
But since her family has business links in China, it probably isn’t a big deal if she gets paid in ￥ - there’s probably something they can spend it on over there & the family can compensate her here in £.
(Try going through to the payment page and you see the conversion to GBP happening.)
What kind of marketing went into this girl's business to do so well in a country that she doesn't even live in?
Elegant, Motion, Sensitive, Insistent, Confident, Honest, Clever, Creative, Optimistic, Reliable, Keen, Have empa
And how many names there are in the DB? between 1320=PERMUT(12;3) and 95040=PERMUT(12;5)
ty
Edit: Finally made it on.
Clicked a few icons (for which I believe represented personality traits) and then I was asked to pay money. Who would actually purchase this unintuitive random name generator? Chinese are absolutely delusional for using this, then again they'll eat anything up that comes from the Western World.
Imagine if your son or daughter asked you how you came up with their name. Your response, "bought it for $11.99 on the internet".
"please wait until our experts choose a special name for your baby ..."
Where goes the line of white lies?
Reminds me of "Catch Me If You Can" and "The Wolf of Wall Street" movies.
what payment system would be available globally?
1 in 1,589 boys (http://www.babynamescience.com/baby-name/Beau-boy)
1 in 235,542 girls (http://www.babynamescience.com/baby-name/Beau-girl)
No, it is from French: literally, "handsome," or the masculine form of "beautiful." Still an odd choice for a girl. The definition you quote is what it has come to mean in English, but it is really a shorthand.
1 in 220,489 girls (http://www.babynamescience.com/baby-name/Adam-girl)
Source: http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdea...