The B2B Cold Start: A War Fought with Free Listings and Cross-Time-Zone Calls

It was 11:30 PM. The curtains in the Hupan Garden apartment weren't drawn, and the light from a few fluorescent bulbs spilled out into the night. The living room looked less like an office and more like a makeshift "war room." On the table were three landline phones, two whirring laptops, and a stack of printed English email templates. On the wall, four cheap quartz clocks ticked away, their hands pointing to the time in four different cities: San Francisco, London, Istanbul, São Paulo.

Imagine you have hundreds of webpages for Chinese factories on your platform, but they're like islands in a deserted sea, with no footsteps from buyers. If your only weapons are a dull knife called "Free" and a few old-fashioned telephones, what do you do?

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What you'll learn from Jack Ma's story:

• Use 'Free' to Cleanse Friction: First, let the supply side get on board with zero psychological burden. Use the accumulation of quantity to create the possibility of a qualitative leap.
• Engineer Your Acquisition: Turn "luck" into "probability" with a linked approach of scripts, rhythm, and a "three-touch" process.
• Define Your North Star Metric: Fight only for the conversion rates between these three steps: from "having a page" to "getting an inquiry" to "receiving a reply."
• Reshape Value in the Buyer's Language: Translate the "jargon" of Chinese factories into credible value that global buyers can understand.

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The First Bullet: Free, to Get Everyone on Board

"First Fill the Pond, Then the Fish Will Come"

On the war room's whiteboard, a cruel equation was written in black marker, like a three-level gauntlet that had to be run:

• Having a Page ≠ Getting an Inquiry
• Getting an Inquiry ≠ Receiving a Reply
• Receiving a Reply is the first sign of a possible "handshake."

To connect these three steps, the first hurdle was to "max out the supply side." "First, you fill the pond with water," Jack Ma said. "Only then is it possible for the fish to swim in."

"Free to list." He wrote these three words heavily in the center of the whiteboard. After a thought, he added another: "Unlimited."

Finding the Factories That "Didn't Think They Deserved to be Online"

During the day, the team members would ride their bicycles to industrial parks on the outskirts of the city. The entrances to the factories were often dusty concrete, the air a mix of oil and metal. They would explain a plan that sounded too good to be true to factory owners who had just wiped their hands clean from a machine: We will help you take three product photos, write a simple English description, fill in your fax and email, and then click "publish," letting businesspeople all over the world see you.

"No money?" was the most common question they heard.

"No money."

This wasn't a posture; it was a clear-eyed tactic: Before the value is recognized by the market, first eliminate all psychological and decision-making costs for the supply side. Only when the density of supply was high enough would the platform have the atmosphere of a "bustling marketplace," making it possible to attract the first batch of overseas buyers willing to stop and even place an order.

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The Second Bullet: A Cross-Time-Zone Telephone War

Three Scripts Under Four Clocks

As night fell in Hangzhou, the other side of the planet was waking up. The four clocks on the wall were the metronome for this battle. 9:00 PM was afternoon in London; 1:00 AM was morning in San Francisco. Taped to the wall beneath the clocks were three printed cards with English opening lines:

1. "Hello, this is Alibaba, a platform that helps you find reliable Chinese suppliers. May I take one minute to show you a supplier's online showcase?"
2. "You will receive 3 quotes from different factories within 48 hours. This service is completely free."
3. "If you are not interested, simply reply 'STOP,' and we guarantee we will never bother you again."

The young people around the table took turns picking up the phone, taking a deep breath, and then dialing a distant long-distance number. Each call was strictly controlled to be under three minutes. After hanging up, they would immediately type the key terms of the buyer's needs—dimensions, materials, MOQ, destination port—into a simple backend system. A few minutes later, an email with links to several matching factory homepages would fly across the ocean into the buyer's inbox.

The "Dumb" Effort of the Three-Touch Process

They turned the act of "outreach" from a random sales activity into a repeatable, if somewhat clumsy, engineering process:

• T+0: Phone call to understand core needs.
• T+1: Send a summary email with links to the three best-matched factory pages on Alibaba.
• T+3: If no reply, send a second email with a different subject line, asking only one simple question.
• T+7: If still no reply, send one final email, suggesting a "sample first" approach with logistics options.

The rules were rigid, but they were effective. The huge chasm of "Inquiry ≠ Reply" on the whiteboard began to be filled, bit by bit, by this clumsy but determined effort.

The Wall of Three-Colored Sticky Notes

One wall of the living room was slowly covered with three colors of sticky notes, like a constantly shifting battle map:

• Green: Reply received from the buyer, moving to the next follow-up stage.
• Yellow: Requires a second or third touch.
• Red: Explicitly declined or requested to be blocked.

Every midnight, after a day of telephone bombardment, the team members would silently walk to the wall and rearrange the notes, like chess players moving their pieces, painstakingly pushing each lead forward one square at a time.

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The Language Scalpel: Translating "Factory-Speak" into "Buyer-Speak"

From "Our Company Has Great Strength" to "Part Tolerance ±0.02mm"

They discovered that many factory homepages began with empty phrases like "Our company possesses great strength and world-class equipment." Ma had the team cross out all such sentences with a red pen and replace them with "metric-based language" that overseas buyers could understand and that reduced their sense of risk:

• Material: Must specify if it's 304 or 316 stainless steel.
• Tolerance: Must state if it's ±0.05mm or ±0.02mm.
• Packaging: Inner bag + outer carton, and specify if custom logo is supported.
• Lead Time: 7 days for samples, 21 days for mass production.
• Certifications: ISO 9001, CE, RoHS.

"Our homepages are not corporate PR essays," he said, holding up a heavily edited printout. "We are preparing a 'risk assessment report' for the buyer."

Photos That Speak

They persuaded factories to replace the generic "group photo at the factory gate" with "detailed shots of key production processes." They also required that a coin or a ruler be placed next to all main product images for scale. Within days, the click-through rates on these pages rose significantly, and the inquiries they received became much more specific.

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The North Star: From Page, to Inquiry, to Reply

"The Three Hurdles of the Funnel"

Every Friday review meeting was noisy and brief. They only looked at three trend lines:

• The percentage of suppliers with product pages but zero inquiries.
• The percentage of suppliers with inquiries but zero replies.
• The conversion rate from receiving a valid reply to shipping a sample.

These three declining curves were known as "the three hurdles of the funnel." All the team's efforts had a single purpose: to make the drop-off at each hurdle a little less steep.

An Email from Brazil

At 1:00 AM, a buyer from São Paulo, Brazil, finally replied after the fourth follow-up email. The message was short, just one sentence:

"If the sample is okay, we will place a small order."

The apartment was quiet for a moment, then erupted in a suppressed cheer. Everyone knew this wasn't a "big order," but this email was the signal that their clumsy, cross-time-zone, handcrafted system had worked for the first time, end to end. It was proof that "the three hurdles of the funnel" could be overcome.

The next day, they immediately contacted the factory and had two samples sent out. In the email to the buyer, they included detailed logistics advice: DHL is faster but more expensive, EMS is more economical but a bit slower. These small, thoughtful suggestions reduced the "uncertainty" just a little bit more.

In that moment, Alibaba was no longer just an "information display platform." It had begun to acquire the warmth of "service."

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Free Isn't the End, It's the Beginning of Trust

After the free strategy attracted a massive number of suppliers, "crowding" and "chaos" on the pages became the new problem. So, they drew the prototype of value stratification on the whiteboard:

• Basic Tier: All suppliers, free to list, searchable.
• Priority Tier: Through payment or by providing more verifiable information, gain better display positions and more inquiry referrals.

"This isn't a question of charging or not," Ma explained. "It's a question of display efficiency and matching efficiency."

At the same time, they began to encourage factories to upload verifiable documents like their "business license copy, a photo of the legal representative holding their ID, and sample shipping receipts." They added a "Verified Supplier" badge to the pages. Many overseas buyers said on the phone: seeing that badge made them more confident to take the next step.

The seeds of trust were thus quietly planted amidst the seeming chaos of the free model.

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Bringing it Back to You: From Cold Start to the First Echo

This story is about how to use the most primitive tools and the most resolute discipline to bootstrap a two-sided market from nothing. If you are facing a similar cold-start dilemma:

1. Use "free" to eliminate the psychological cost for the supply side. Get enough "products" on board first.
2. "Engineer" your acquisition process. Design your own "script, rhythm, three-touch" flow. Use discipline to fight against luck.
3. Obsess over your "North Star." In the early days, care only about the conversion rate from "display" to "inquiry" to "valid reply." Ignore all vanity metrics.

When you receive your first email that says, "If the sample is okay, we will place a small order," it means your flywheel has started to turn.

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Key Takeaways

1. Use 'Free' to Cleanse Friction: In the cold-start phase, use a free strategy to completely remove the "barrier to entry" for the supply side. Gather quantity first, then improve efficiency through value stratification.
2. Engineer Your Outreach: Cross-time-zone calls and a standardized three-touch email process—this "clumsy" chain is the most effective way to bridge the "inquiry-no-reply" chasm.
3. Speak Like a Buyer: Using metric-based descriptions, photos that tell a story, and clear trade terms instead of empty "factory-speak" is fundamentally about reducing risk for the buyer.
4. Keep Your North Star Simple: Focus only on the "Page → Inquiry → Reply" three-step conversion, and use continuous, small, but rapid experiments to constantly smooth out the friction at each step.