Editorial Team Note: AnyHelper has been collaborating with City News Service since our inception in 2022. Their talent recruitment business unit AnyJob lists jobs specifically for foreign talent which you can find here. They also specialize in higher-end apartment rentals for expats which they list here. However, they are best known for their Visa Agency, Business Registration, and Accounting services.

Movers & Shakers is a column where we profile the people making things happen in Shanghai – entrepeneurs, creatives, artists, and whomever else that are influencing industries/spaces and are making things move and shake in this city.

When negotiating life in China, it never hurts to have a guy.

Trouble with your visa? Better have a guy. Looking for a new apartment? Call your guy. Looking to register Shanghai's next business start-up mega-success story? You gotta have a guy.

For the past five years – and for over 60,000 inquiries – Shanghai's guy is Kelvin, founder and director of AnyHelper, an AI hybrid platform that offers any and every kind of assistance possible for things like locating private and commercial rental property, visa regulation and business registration, job hunting, and even just how to use WeChat. Since starting as a university-based project in 2016, AnyHelper now has branches all over Southeast Asia and has worked with over 1000 companies, getting sorted for business in Shanghai and China.

We caught up with Kelvin to talk about how AnyHelper developed over the years and to find out what Shanghai's like these days for career-minded folks.

What is AnyHelper?

AnyHelper actually started in 2016 as a campus-based support platform. My background is in AI, so it started as an AI chatbot written by myself and a classmate. The AI technology at the time was quite efficient at fielding inquiries – sort of like Chat GPT now.

I will say from the brand side that we're a platform that is oriented toward helping individuals who want to come to China and companies who want to come to China. 95 percent of the service is free. People have questions, and we have answers.

For the 5 percent of clients who need more in-depth support, we provide that. If they need an expert for whatever reason concerning getting set up in China, that's the service we provide.

So that's the main business model. But I would say that, as it is today, we provide an interconnected ecosystem of services. We help with finding residential and commercial space; we help with visas; we help with company registration; legal matters; notarization; employment; everything.

AnyHelper's origin story

My name is Kelvin. I'm from Liaoning, Dongbei (northeast). I came to Shanghai in 2010 for my PhD at Jiao Tong University, after being in the US from 2013 to 2016 in Austin, Texas,

Although I'm Chinese, after staying overseas for a while, I found I wasn't familiar with China's new technology ecosystem. At the time, China was growing super fast in online payments, and I remember coming back and just struggling with QR code payments and stuff like that. And of course, the other thing is that all these apps are in Chinese, so how are foreigners supposed to manage them? At the time, Didi didn't even have an English version.

It can be a real struggle. You don't know how to call a taxi. You don't know how to use a map. You don't know how to buy things online.

So, in the beginning, it was just recognizing the potential to help people who were like us – students – and we found a use for our AI technology. So, for our initial whole system, it was AI with a few volunteers together to provide free help to foreigners, finding apartments.

It took about six months, but it really caught on and spread to all the different universities in Shanghai.

From there, we found that professional expats could make use of our services as well. So step by step, we just sort of built up, reaching out to different groups with shared problems, and then out of Shanghai proper.

AnyHelper houses students

It all grew mainly from our housing services for students. In the beginning, we were cooperating with housing agencies and individual landlords to refer our clients directly to them. Just received a commission fee.

We ended up evolving beyond that, renovating spaces and working with landlords directly because we wanted to ensure quality for our clients. Working with agencies, you are sometimes not able to control how they're doing business, so we basically assumed that role ourselves.

From the apartment locating services, the ecosystem really comes from that because that ties into visa services, company registration services, and everything else. Daily life stuff as well. It's really about supporting clients in all these interrelated areas.

Getting your company registered

These days, it's not really hard to get your company set up and registered, but you have to do it the right way. There is a process, and there are laws to make sure you follow the process. It really depends on the type of business you want to start. For a lot of our foreign clientele, they are running consulting agencies, which are straightforward with what is required.

Another frequently requested one we get is F&B and importing and exporting; these are both harder because they're more closely monitored and you need a lot of certificates. For all of it, you've got to be really aware of how you are being taxed, which can be complex in certain industries when you are dealing with different sorts of assets.

Again, support for that is one of our key services, and we have a mostly long-term relationship with our clients.

Visa regulations and COVID

The laws have changed a lot – even since 2016, maybe five times. But we've done a lot of business working with visa-related questions, so we're able to adapt. Since 2018, we've cooperated with the Exit-Entry Administration Bureau of Shanghai, working directly with the government. We helped promote the Entrepreneur Visa at that time, 2018-2019. We cooperated with the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Science Park, and it was really booming because Shanghai was really encouraging people to come.

And then 2020 comes along...

So, I still remember – it's 2020, March 28. China closed the border. And we go to the Shanghai Exit and Entry Bureau to find out what the exact situation was. They had a live-streaming Q&A, and we ended up supporting them, helping to explain to private Chinese HR staff what they were supposed to do with their foreign teams.

Of course, the pandemic was a crazy time for everyone – especially for people who have apartments in China or businesses in China and were unable to get back into the country. A lot of people's visa situations were in flux, and there were changing rules about how one gets out and back in. People were applying for personal invitation letters, and it was just a really long process and not easy to do unless you had some support based in China. It was tough to get all the documents and navigate the system properly.

In terms of housing, we went from working with 90 to 95 percent foreign students to almost entirely Chinese nationals who were returning to China from overseas because it was safer here.

But even at that point, 2020-2022, there was still high demand for people to come to China, which was a relatively more stable place than a lot of other places in the world. At the time, we were getting a lot of tech experts as well. A lot of factories and manufacturing industries were using the time to invite foreign tech expertise.

Changes in the Shanghai jobs market

The Shanghai job market has radically changed over the years. It's gone through lots of different phases. I would say when we started formally with employment services in 2018, we were helping foreign professionals find jobs in marketing and English teaching. Those were huge areas that were hosting lots of opportunities. So, mainly worked with younger generation expats who came to Shanghai, and loved it, and wanted to stay longer.

Along with the border closing in 2020, the Chinese education industry totally changed its regulations, so a lot of those positions went away. In response to that, and, in general, the post-COVID climate, we've diversified into other areas and moved up to working with people looking for senior-level positions and technology expert positions. There is still a lot of need in those areas, even today.

We also work on international levels, headhunting local professionals to work overseas as well as helping people based here find placement with companies overseas.

And the industries in which we're seeing a lot of opportunity are manufacturing, automation, technology companies, and new energy companies. It's a lot of big tech companies – Temu, the e-commerce company, is one. People in these fields can look to Shanghai as a really viable place to start or build on their careers.

AnyHelper helping everyone

My favorite part of the business is the cross-cultural, cross-border aspect of it. It's really interesting because when I check my WeChat, I see thousands of people from like 100 or 200 different countries.

You can always talk with different people, and they will share new ideas, new information, and different cultures. We survived eight years through some challenging times, so we pride ourselves on knowing all the solutions for a given situation for an international clientele.

Some of the solutions may change every day, so we're always one step ahead…

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