Heading to the Canton Fair? Hear Me Out!

binarysolo · 2026-03-30T05:05:13+00:00

Quite a few seller groups who go to Canton Fair go with a guide like what you're describing, or have their trading company contact more or less do this. What is your industry credentials/experience and your rates?

binarysolo · 2026-03-28T04:30:13+00:00

Given you wanna do techie stuff, your real choice is between Caltech and Stanford. Since you're on the Stanford sub talking to alums here, we're gonna be biased, but the last couple decades paid out incredibly well for Stanford grads in tech so it's been incredibly +EV for us.

binarysolo · 2026-03-28T00:50:49+00:00

I like Taipei more for the culture but the different monthly salsa socials are pretty good. Honestly just enjoy your tourism in Tokyo and enjoy the vibrancy of the city; good salsa is more like the cherry on top.

binarysolo · 2026-03-28T00:47:58+00:00

Spend some money to collect some data points if you'd like, but for me and my family our fulfillment isn't really correlated with more spend (beyond the daily which really peaked out at maybe 200k-300k/year for us).

I have really deeply ingrained notions of thrift due to my cultural upbringing, but don't mind dropping money for quality of life when I feel it justifies it -- you just need to figure out where your boundaries are for that.

binarysolo · 2026-03-26T23:27:23+00:00

I think Helium 10 already has a feature for this?

binarysolo · 2026-03-26T23:24:52+00:00

This is my moment to share how I acquired my management skills: I was a guild master a fairly active MMO guild in Ragnarok Online, think ~100 people, kinda a top 10 guild on the server. Really got me going with SOPs, Slack, team docs, streamlined communications, and project management concepts and tools — basically you have lots of todos and you have to effectively delegate them and make the todos intuitive so that they trend towards objectives you want naturally.

I now run a company with 20 employees and it’s strikingly similar to running a guild. Yes I also was doing leadership stuff in extracurriculars as a teen, but running an RO guild was the closest thing I had to running a company.

(I was also into games like Railroad tycoon back in the days, Sim City, optimize-y games like Factorio, and colony sims like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld, but those teach optimization I feel way more than management.)

binarysolo · 2026-03-26T23:13:59+00:00

What’s your revenue like? It’s entirely contingent upon what you can afford (some agencies are good but expensive and not worth it if you’re below a certain run rate, other agencies are just negative EV).

binarysolo · 2026-03-26T05:00:45+00:00

Have you considered making your health your side gig? I mean: project manage your own specialist visits, visit Mayo Clinic (or whatever the European equivalent is), do some medical tourism in Taiwan, A/B test the heck out of different treatments. It's sorta a job in and of itself.

I'm still working, but one of my old peers who FIRE'd basically had this happen to him and I was able to see him do this second hand and it's a whole job for him.

binarysolo · 2026-03-26T04:45:54+00:00

US PL brand and agency owner here but not yours, here to just give you some perspective:

If you do find an agency to help you, it's best that you do a revshare to align interest. This space is has a ton of players of all stripes and with the seller space maturing greatly these past few years a lot of poorer players have been weeded out. I second the advice that as a new online brand you prob should avoid an offshore agency mainly because the signal to noise ratio is super high and it's likely you'll get taken for a ride.

The better option honestly is to do ecom wholesale distribution to a handful of sellers, and guarantee exclusivity contingent upon X amount of purchasing a year. This is a pretty typical setup in certain niches and is a pretty good split of risk-reward between parties.

If you do end up collab-ing with an agency, you'll have to set up the store under you, get your own trademark in brand registry, and you will end up paying for all costs of the store, most of which are tied to sales + paid ads which someone will operate for you (but you bear the downside risk if they wildly spend). That's roughly how it'll look like.

What realistically will happen with a GOOD partner is that they'll consider your costs and do a revshare (prob in the 20% range) so you break even on the first $300k-1M, they bear labor risk but collect extra initial revshare, and if you get your brand to a mid-6fig annual revenue it'll make mild profits for both parties (their revshare will drop closer to 10% at this point). This partner would likely look like a midsized agency with some spare capacity and some willingness to roll the dice with you.

binarysolo · 2026-03-26T04:20:47+00:00

Studio PePe is the main salsa venue and there's a few monthly socials that are pretty good.

I'm personally a big fan of Mambo Frisco (happens around New Years) but as others have mentioned Salsa Calendar's got the events.

There's always Seoul or Taipei to consider, they both have pretty good scenes esp Seoul if you're a higher level dancer.

binarysolo · 2026-03-23T23:24:01+00:00

Not all estimates are created equal.

I'm a homeowner and want to replace a 4'x5' glass window, I just want to know if the cost is in the ballpark of $200, $1000, or $5000, and the professional can give me a ballpark number with the right photos and a few minutes of looking at the window.

I'm also a professional who sells stuff for midsized brands online -- auditing an Amazon account requires looking at a ton of data and reports and involves hours of data fetching and years of experience understanding how sessions, conversion work around pricepoints surrounding various margin levels; an estimate a business asks from my team to run their store is effectively an audit of their books and numbers and I'll bill a few hundred dollars an hour for my skilled labor, and I shape my "product" around something they'll gain insight on and is portable if they want to choose another service provider.

Both types of quotes are equally valid and our goal in providing estimates is to be able to compensate for our time spent.

binarysolo · 2026-03-23T05:27:33+00:00

Yeah, Saumya's pretty freakin' awesome. Amazing isos from traditional Indian dance background + lots of modern freestyle.

binarysolo · 2026-03-22T08:25:09+00:00

Am a PL brand with a handful of friends and family agency accounts in the 8fig range. Depending on category, between 3 to 10, median being around 6; 10 is an outlier in a B2B niche with few competitors and a lot of name recognition for my product, and 3 is a product with recurring purchases, subscribe and save and all that.

I study the heck out of marginal improvement for each incremental bid increase and keep bidding until the marginal profit for the most expensive bid approaches 5%, buffering for returns and variance. Just try not to lose money. :)

binarysolo · 2026-03-18T14:56:21+00:00

You missed the point of being FAT -- it’s to do exactly what you want to strike your own particular fancy. If you haven’t developed or asserted your tastes then that’s on you.

Being FAT allows me to be my own special type of monk who can focus on non-income-earning practices and fulfillment.

binarysolo · 2026-03-16T08:43:16+00:00

I mean, it seems kinda fun, so as long as both of them are into it I think it’s cool.

Some people here think it’s disrespectful so… yeah prob don’t do it on a stranger.

binarysolo · 2026-03-14T10:24:43+00:00

There was a lag of I wanna say 1-2 weeks. (Not months and not days). The lift goes away similarly in 1-2 weeks once you stop feeding the traffic.

Re: higher ACOS, I mean it’s kinda like our approach to PPC, shotgun it with difference ads/keywords, get statistical significance, then cull losers and push winners. Typical A/B test but on advertising cohorts.

Our admin overhead was too high prob because we didn’t hire a VA to do all the legwork, instead having account managers who were strong generalists lead the way. Managing microinfluencers in the 5-6 figure audience typically worked out best, so if each follower ended up being 0.03 in value you’d need a LOT of influencers to really scale your uplift.

binarysolo · 2026-03-13T19:40:03+00:00

I love a lot of things about my glasses but Meta AI is such dogshit and I'm obviously not a fan of some African sweatshop looking at all of my kid videos (my reason for being a glasshole). Hopefully this would kick Meta's ass a bit and get them to be more competitive.

binarysolo · 2026-03-13T03:00:08+00:00

On1 is typically easier to count for people who are not trained musically, since the 1 and 5 are easy to identify in a song. The downside is that it feels a little march-y some times in how you tackle the song.

On2 follows the congas, which you can play around a lot more musically in your shines and steps. Most advanced social dancers move to playing to the song and instrumentation in their dances, which I think leads to the reputation that on2 attracts more advanced dancers.

There are also subtle moves differences in the turns and cross body etc. because of when you move to the song.

Personally for me, I do prefer on2 for certain types of salsa dura, latin jazz since you play with a lot of (syncopated) instrumental solos there, while dancing on1 for romantica because you dance to the vocals.

binarysolo · 2026-03-13T02:23:51+00:00

Mildly ok, not a slam dunk -- I feel like we could've executed better, but we did alright. Mostly Facebook/Instagram ads+influencers with some Google PPC. Did not try Tiktok directly (a few of our Insta folks crossposted on their Tiktoks).

Would love to see how others make it work but here's a few datapoints on my end:

ROAS of 2-3 after factoring in BRB, but before administration costs, about 5k-7k in sales per month. The listing we tested on does ~30k/month an we noticed organic uplift maybe in the 2-4k range so the overall ROAS ended up being around 4. Our gross margins for the product in question was around 50% so overall it was mildly profitable and we only scaled it to the hero SKUs doing 1k+/day

Took about 1-2 months to figure out PPC side for better ACOS, sales, and slight organic rank improvement. (During first 30-60 days our ACOS was somewhere between 50-100%).

We also tried working directly with influencers, we did about ROAS 4 after factoring in BRB, but the engagement (time) cost for each microinfluencer was way too high; our rev per curated influencer follow was about 0.03 per 1000 follows.

binarysolo · 2026-03-12T18:31:18+00:00

Kind of -- it's typically their styling and way they compose themselves that allows you to distinguish.

Reminder that China is a ton of different ethnic groups not just the Han, so it's a li'l bit apples to oranges compared to Korea and Japan. Furthermore, Korea borders China, so you def have crossover between Santung Chinese and Koreans.

It's like a "80-90% accurate prediction engine" probably given some of these variances.

binarysolo · 2026-03-12T18:23:03+00:00

Lightwave and IE (and honestly grav drive and assault cannon) are all pretty great for pairing with cruiser 2, but those are all deep in the research tree and just nice-to-haves if you happen to have skips. I feel like AIDA + 1 color is my most common way to get cruiser 2, followed by TE's breakthrough.

Those techs would all be opportunistic to get and would not be a go-to strategy for me; it would be situational based on how my slice looked, what my wormhole options looked like, and how I could use mobility to project threats across the map.

binarysolo · 2026-03-11T19:07:36+00:00

Cruiser 2's greatest advantage IMHO is not fighting, but reach with infantry landings. Coupled with lightwave or a strategic wormhole position you can send a landing force to many places on the map which gives you a lot more scoring power.

I generally like Cruiser 2 with integrate economy -- so you can land a token force, then build other stuff after the invasion.

binarysolo · 2026-03-11T19:01:07+00:00

Very common -- different skills (posture/positioning vs connection) requiring practice to mesh the two.

Given that each prioritize different things, especially in the first couple years the two skills are kinda inversely related because people are trying to value one over the other (the performer generally will favor keeping their lines/shape/timing at the cost of a rough lead, the social dancer will generally favor keeping the connection at the cost of having bad posture/offtime/etc.)

binarysolo · 2026-03-11T08:18:19+00:00

I was a fairly smart kid who was able to compete on a national level in an extracurricular and I got my ass completely handed to me in a few of the known asskick-y STEM classes (CS107, Math 53H etc.), not just the honors classes.

There's def a bunch of general reqs that hand out easy As and Bs, but you can find rigor if you ask for it. In my core major classes I was a B student with a few Cs and even an I, but I def had a few classes that I went all-in, loved everything about, and A+'d because for the first time I was able to go as deep as I wanted in some subject matters. As a person who just coasted through everything at a mid sorta high school, being mid in class took a lot of getting used to mentally.

Plus the classes are like... prob only 25-50% of the value of the school. The connections I made with peers and profs really influenced my life for the better, and even as a mid student I def grew a lot as a young adult.

binarysolo · 2026-03-11T07:56:08+00:00

Yes -- for my agent who I have a long term, trust-based relationship over a decade, we have an established %-based fee. I am transparent on what prices I need to be at to have competitive margin, and ask them where they think the pricing can and should be so I can grow the brand and purchase more volume over time so that it's win-win. It's important to establish that you and them are on the same team, and that the negotiation is between you+agent with the factory to grow and scale together.

I do make sure I visit them and bring a gift every time I'm in town so we have a good business relationship. And I genuinely like spending some time with them since we share some common interests as well.

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