One of the stranger tasks in our Dodo Pizza China launch came from compliance instead of code. We had to print a blue poster roughly two metres by two metres, take it to the person named on the web license, and photograph them standing in front of it. It looks like somebody lost a bet. The photo was a required filing step. Our first pass through the process took four months. During those same months, the product team was building the WeChat ordering flow for Dodo’s cashless Hangzhou store: QR code, menu, coupons, WeChat Pay, kitchen status. The customer saw a mini-app. Behind it sat paperwork moving between our team, Beijing, and Shanghai.
Related case studyShipping Dodo Pizza’s WeChat Mini-App in HangzhouThe customer-facing half of the launch: five interface iterations, QR ordering, wallet coupons, and opening-night work on the store floor.Read the Dodo case →
What follows is the engineering and launch side of one real project — not a universal checklist. Filing paths differ by company and service. Get current legal guidance before treating these steps as a playbook.
The license was on the launch path
A WeChat Mini-Program still sits beside the rest of your web presence. We needed a licensed domain and a page that stayed online. API hosting, marketing pages, and data-location decisions all touched the same launch plan.
The “compliance work” label hid a direct software dependency. Every paperwork delay moved the product date.
Our ICP process
ICP stands for Internet Content Provider. For our project, the approval came through China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).
This is the sequence our team went through:
Prepare the document packet in Chinese.
Send it to Beijing.
Receive corrections and prepare the documents again.
Travel to Shanghai with the person named on the license.
Have a designated organization print the 2×2-metre blue poster, then take the required photo.
Wait for the review and receive the ICP approval.
Put a landing page on the licensed domain and keep it online.
The poster is the detail people remember, but the four months mattered more. A normal product estimate counts design, development, QA, and release. Our China estimate also needed Chinese paperwork, government review, travel, corrections, and idle time between each step.
We learned to prepare license work in parallel where the process allowed it.
Public Security filing came next
After ICP came another deadline.
In our project notes we called the next step PLF, or Public License Filing. Within a month of receiving ICP, we had to file with the Ministry of Public Security. Its registration number then went on the same landing page beside the ICP number.
The page became permanent launch infrastructure. It stayed available and showed both records.
This dependency often sits outside the screen list in an agency proposal. Six weeks before launch, it lands with engineering under the label “unblock China.”
Government review queues ignore engineering velocity.
The MVP has to include a route to launch
“We’ll handle compliance after the MVP” sounds like sensible sequencing. It splits the product into a build phase and a launch phase, then calls the first phase complete.
In China, the filing path belongs inside the MVP scope. The interface can be finished. WeChat Pay can pass every test. The kitchen status can update in real time. The licensed domain and the next Public Security filing complete the route from prototype to permitted launch.
The useful definition is simple: an MVP includes the smallest product customers can legally reach and use. That definition puts the filings on the product timeline from the first estimate. It also gives founders and investors an honest date instead of a software-complete date followed by months of regulatory waiting.
Our China market entry page shows the WeChat and launch work we cover. Ask whoever owns the timeline one question first: where are ICP and the Public Security filing?