through

SOCIAL INNOVATION & COMMERCE

Social platforms are among the most powerful and profitable digital business models globally. Dangdi combines agentic commerce, community and gamification in a way never seen before. Now conducting a $1M bridge round investment in partnership with Deloitte Ventures.

Demo

Market

Chinese consumers living, traveling or purchasing outside China constitute the three largest verticals in the World:

• 60M Chinese diaspora (residents outside China)

• 120M Chinese outbound tourists (the big spenders of the coming decade)

• 180M Chinese cross border shoppers inside China (virtual tourists)

Problem

This aggregated user base share common interests and have a unique behavior online – in communication, organizing and in buying and selling products and services. They are not well served by Western social and ecommerce sites. Nor by internationalized Chinese sites such as WeChat and Red Note (Xiaohongshu). Content in these are either China-centric, not locally organized, or subject to government censorship - limiting trust and relevance. There is a lack of a dedicated social & commerce platform tailored around local (outside China) information, services, and products.

Solution

Dangdi means local in Chinese and refers to anything exclusively belonging to a city or country - outside China. Dangdi is a combined community, commerce and travel platform business model, that is globally scalable. Idea is to connect Chinese diaspora users with Chinese tourists (physical + virtual) and with local sellers, services and people, offering a differentiated UX including features such as new retail (OMO), gamification, experiences, team purchase, AI-enhanced content and more.

People

Team: We are a cross-cultural founding team with backgrounds in Tencent (WeChat) Bytedance (TikTok), PwC, EY and Deutsche Bank. We combine expertise within digital product development, e-commerce, and social media.

Advisors: World leading tech consultants, Jeffrey Towson, runs our advisory board. Jeff is a former professor at three leading Universities including Peking University. Jeff has more than 3M followers in LinkedIn and is referred to as a global influencer by Alibaba and Huawei. Lars Tvede is a serial entrepreneur, hedge fund manager, author and futurist. Lars advices governments and corporates on long-term disruption. He recently won the AGI Development Award in Beijing and has sold more than 1M books.  

Board: Christer Tønder Bell, Vice-president at LEGO and Kristian Nordahl, former CEO of Kiloo Games (developed Subway Surfer - the most downloaded game in the World). Ziya Sang was with McKinsey for 3 years, now head of strategy at Cisco.

Business model

Dangdi is a multisided platform business model that empowers different user groups: consumers, influencers, merchants and advertisers. Revenue streams include e-commerce commission, marketing- and tourist services.

Dangdi is targeting local businesses pursuing Chinese consumers - an underserved and growing segment - expected to lead global consumption by 2027. Sellers of both products and services as well as International and non-Chinese users will be able to access Dangdi (available in both Chinese and English).

Traction

• We have already demonstrated how we can achieve rapid market penetration with “a near-zero” CAC: The Dangdi local lifestyle magazine: dangdi.life has reached 420,000 Chinese readers in Europe in a 18 month period.  

• In Denmark, we organically reached 86% of local Chinese in under 2 months by distributing PGC and hqUGC content, mainly contrasting Nordic and Chinese lifestyle. -> This marketing strategy can be replicated when launching in other regions.

• We performed a detailed survey of 500 Chinese target-group users in Denmark: 91% want to use Dangdi in their daily life. Main reasons: enhanced local information, deeper local communities and network + open/non-censored communication.  

Investment

The Dangdi investment is structured with convertible loan notes (CLNs). Process is managed by Deloitte Ventures in Copenhagen.

The short term objective is to reach the first 1000 DAUs within a 7-9 month timeframe. At this milestone 7 VCs have expressed strong interest investing up to €2M.