I grew up in Beijing, China, and in 2010 when I was 16, I joined the throngs of Chinese students who study abroad. Indeed, every year more than 700,000 new students from China study abroad, joining the ranks of nearly 1.6 million Chinese currently enrolled in overseas education institutions. 

I moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, to study at the all-male Mount Michael Benedictine School. It was quite a culture shock in many ways, as the American school experience is so different from what I was familiar with in China. It was especially evident at events like the homecoming dance. Oblivious to convention, I overdressed with a formal black tie outfit and brought a friend; everyone else had brought a date and dressed more casually. I certainly stood out! I still have a chuckle about this when I think back. 

It was a great opportunity to improve my English and make new friends, but one consistently nerve-wrecking point of my experience was the difficulty in paying my school fees. 

I vividly remember the stress that my parents and I faced at the start of each semester. My mom would spend an entire day at the bank to pay my school fees through an international transfer. She would have to arrive early in the morning to secure a queue number before waiting for several hours, forgoing a day's worth of errands and sometimes even lunch. Another hurdle for my mom was not speaking English. She struggled to fill in the transfer information on the bank forms. The staff did their best to help, but often they weren't sure either. 

I knew from my mom's experiences that there was an opportunity to close this gap, and so I started EasyTransfer. My cofounder Michael Shang and I visited nearly 300 schools and universities across the U.S. to conduct market research with local student groups and organizations to see if there was a real need and pain point among Chinese students. 

After our year-long trip, we discovered the problem, and opportunity, was even bigger than we imagined: international students across education struggle with paying school fees. 

We have now become the only international education payments service integrated with mobile banking apps and financial platforms in China, and the exclusive international education payment service integrated officially within Tencent's WeChat platform, processing about $3 billion in transactions every year. 

I learned a lot through co-founding EasyTransfer, including some universal takeaways that every entrepreneur should consider:

Understand your market on a deep level

Perform thorough preparation and market research for whatever industry you plan to go into with your startup. Understanding your market is the key to attracting early investors if you can demonstrate that you are filling a unique need. For us, we understood that students and parents are willing to go through often challenging levels of preparation to study abroad - from the admission process through visa applications and transferring funds for paying tuition fees and other expenses overseas. While some of these are an unavoidable part of living and studying abroad, we knew that simplifying cross-border tuition fee payments resonated with our key audience. Take your time to conduct surveys and get quality feedback. My co-founder and I spent nearly a year collecting the necessary data, but it paid off in multitudes. Sometimes there is no replacement for taking the time to survey people in person or over the phone. 

The right time to partner up

When you're in the "zero to one" stage of your startup, I would not advise trying to partner with a major tech company just yet. We didn't have all the top-tier partners from the very beginning. First, we launched the online platform-as-a-service with local community banks on their mobile banking apps and internet banking interfaces. This allowed us to test our product in a lower-stakes environment and get feedback from real users. We took our growth and data to UnionPay and Tencent -- China's interbank network and one of its largest tech companies, respectively -- to show them that students like the platform and that we were filling a critical gap in the market. It became apparent to Tencent that most other third parties were too expensive, lacked the dedicated services that students and parents really needed or failed in both criteria. Tencent was also looking to provide a solution for this pain point, and decided to partner with us. 

The power of networking

At the beginning, we visited hundreds of universities to poll more than 100,000 Chinese students about their needs. We found compelling data that showed 90% of students required a service platform that was cheaper and easier to use, which gave us a huge boost in confidence. It sounds easier than it was, though. We surveyed between 300 and 500 students at each university. I drove to each campus and asked the university's Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) president for a meeting. Sometimes, if they were busy or were a little wary of an acquaintance asking for a favor, I would have to wait two to three days before I could get a chance to meet up with them. I had to do this over and over again to meet each CSSA president in person to build my network and connections. But once I put in the time to build those connections, I found that all the CSSA presidents were willing to support us. They would even recommend friends and underclassman from their university who they thought would be willing to connect and learn about EasyTransfer as well. The takeaway from this experience is that in addition to making new connections, remember to manage your relationships and update your connections on each milestone that you achieve -- that way, they will be willing to help you out in the long term.