A few minutes ago, I sent out an email update on Judy and my coworking idea that I talked about recently in A New Place To Work. Then, I realized people who aren’t actually going to be able to participate in Beijing might be interested in our status as well, so I decided to post it on my blog, too. Here you go:
All together, 10 people have responded to the survey so far. I was really excited by the fact that they all came in during the first two days, but after that, the responses basically stopped, so that didn’t exactly translate into the 40 interested people in a week that I hoped it might. It’s still enough interest, though, that Judy and I decided we’re going to go ahead and open it up. We can start small, and it will take a little while to get everything ready to go, so we still have time to get the word out.
In case you’re interested, here are some answers to the survey questions:
- 8/10 people said they’d prefer to work a few days a week, rather than every day or only a few times a month.
- People are actually from lots of different industries – IT/online work, journalism, PR, etc. It sounds like the community will be pretty diverse.
- The most popular extra idea is to have coffee/tea available. I should have thought of that myself. By extension, we’ll probably also have water and maybe some fruit as well.
- Almost everyone wants to use both English and Chinese.
- Three people wanted the office in the CBD, which was the largest set of answers that were exactly the same. However, we had a number of people who all suggested areas around Dongzhimen and Sanlitun as well, so we’re looking mostly in those three areas. Gulou is still not out the picture, though, since we saw a space that might be nice there as well.
- The most requested options by number of “essential” answers were wireless, printer, whiteboards, VPN, and private spaces. I also took a weighted score that included the “I’d try it” and “it’d be nice”, which yielded a slightly different list: wireless, printer, private space, community events, and whiteboards. So, we’re looking into all of them.
The next step for us is to evaluate locations. To make the cost work out, we’re looking for an office around 2-3.5元 per day per square meter, which is pretty cheap and a little hard to find. If you know of any good spaces that are available, please let us know! Before we make our decision, we’ll send out an email to the people who answered the survey with the final few choices and see which one people like the best.
Update: We’re making progress
January 11, 2011 at 7:41 pm
[...] Coworking – Making Progress August 24, 2010 Last time I posted about Beijing Coworking, I’d had 10 responses to the survey and was starting to evaluate [...]