I’m currently running a small business (not education or fitness-related) in Canada, and long story short it’s not a greater market for business / economy, and I’ve recently had thoughts to explore investing and doing business in Taiwan – yes, considering a gradual relocation if things are on track.
Two ideas that I have personal interest in and feel strongly about:
An experience-based English language / education business, and
A fitness studio that’s like F45, offers Hyrox classes, and other group-based classes.
My wife is Taiwanese (I’m Canadian-Chinese, born in Canada) and we’re making a trip back to Taipei mid-February to mid-March. Interested to see if there’s anybody else on this forum that might be interested in similar ideas, and keen to connect either virtually or in person when I’m there – even if it’s just to share experiences, spitball ideas, discuss feasibility, or whatever really.
Start a business called ‘Street Chinese’ where language’moms’ ditch the classrooms and take language learners out on the streets of Taipei to learn to speak Chinese by negotiating real life situations. Tourists and newcomers could sign up for combination tour guide/street language learning sessions to get them up to real life speed faster than they could manage on their own
I was just giving you a direction I would go with.
Most people I know who made a lot in business in Taiwan are exporting. But I think you can now also make good money catering to the needs of a growing class of rich Taiwanese.
Both of these ideas could be feasible. There’s thousands of fitness studios and gyms, but it doesn’t mean you couldn’t succeed , but you may need to be an affluent area for that.
For English education ‘experience’ yeah maybe it can work but would have to figure out if that was for kids or adults. A lot of money is spent on kids education . I think for adults I wouldn’t bet on it being successful. Adults are very busy and also they like having fun going on trips to Japan more than anything now. They go there skiing, touring, looking for property , even learning Japanese baking I don’t see a great hunger or interest amongst them for English learning. Yep I can only really see it for kids myself.
Yes I was thinking kids, max teenagers and would see how things go from there. I only noticed a lot of cramschools and buxiban on my trips there, are there a lot of experiential learning businesses there right now?
AI and automation. I don’t think it’s going to be as profound a change as the tech bros will have us believe, but a lot of people aren’t going to be working. They’ll have to be taken care of by the State, so they’ll have some kind of disposable income.
That second universal cash dispersement that just happened might even be a test of universal basic income the government is doing. They’re trying to see what the cost will be and what effect it will have on the economy.
