Yuhai Lin

Most of my career has been spent on the operator side of cross-border commerce, not the consulting side. From 2015 I ran Lunette's China D2C business through Finnexion Oy, building up a Taobao store, opening Tmall in 2017, and eventually closing it in 2022 after the numbers stopped making sense post-COVID. That decision was data-driven, not reactive. At peak, the Shanghai operation was doing around 10 million RMB a year across all brands, with a ten-person team on the ground.

I've also helped Flow Cosmetics and Lumene build their China market presence, handling everything from product selection through KOL livestreaming and Tmall operations. Before all of that, I ran e-commerce for LUMI Accessories, a Finnish brand with its primary markets in Finland, the Nordics, and Europe, managing channels across Europe, the US, China, and Japan. Earlier still, I negotiated publishing deals with Rovio, Tencent, and Huawei at a mobile games company. Across these roles, a consistent part of the work has been designing the customer journey from scratch, mapping each touchpoint and building CRM and lifecycle systems around what we found.

A common thread through these roles has been starting without a playbook. The brands I've worked with were my own choices. I spotted them, reached out directly, and negotiated the commercial terms before building anything. That pattern has extended into software. I've built and shipped several consumer apps to the App Store using AI as the primary tool, no developer on the team. I'm most useful in environments where building the structure is part of the job.

MBA from Hanken School of Economics. PMP certified. Finnish B2-level, committed to developing. Chinese native, including Shanghainese and Suzhounese Wu dialect.

Cross-border operations from Northern Europe to Southeast Asia, with Finland as base and China as the decade-long primary market.

Also: Taiwan  ·  Hong Kong  ·  Singapore  ·  Malaysia

I'm completing a Master's degree in Sustainable Digital Life at Tampere University. My research focuses on a question that sits at the intersection of product and growth: what makes users keep using a digital service over time?

The thesis looks specifically at the role gamification and user experience play in building sustained engagement. Not retention as a metric, but the user experience behind it. What keeps people engaged, what becomes less effective over time, and what digital product teams can learn from these patterns.

It connects directly to my broader work in customer lifecycle marketing, CRM, and commercial growth, and to ten years of watching what actually makes customers come back.

I use Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Codex every day as actual workflow tools, not experiments. ParkScan, Pad Frame, and MingClarity all went from idea to App Store without a developer on the team. I'm comfortable scoping a project, building the first version myself, and knowing when to bring others in.

The question I find most interesting about AI isn't which tool to use. It's whether the existing way of working still makes sense. Most of what AI handles well, things like research, production, and repetition, used to occupy most of a marketer's time. What's left is judgment: what's worth building, what's worth saying, what a data point actually means in a real market.

On the marketing and commerce side: HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics Customer Insights, Meta Ads Manager, Google Ads, GA4.

Open to senior commercial and marketing leadership roles in Finland or remote, particularly first-marketing-hire and early-stage growth environments. Also available for cross-border GTM consultancy for brands entering Asian markets.

Also happy to talk if you're curious about Finland-Asia market dynamics, building products with AI, or what cross-border commerce looks like in practice.