MPD

Last time I posted about Beijing Coworking, I’d had 10 responses to the survey and was starting to evaluate locations in Beijing.  In the meantime, a lot has happened.First, Judy and I did look at a lot of offices in Beijing.  We looked at the SOHO office in Sanlitun, Art 8 near Guomao, a friend’s place near Gulou, and some smaller offices all around this area.  What we found is that office space generally costs around 4.5RMB/sq. meter/day, and at that rate, we’d need about 14-15 people to cover the costs of a 250 sq. m. office over a period of one year.  That’s a lot.  Moreover, we would have to pay six months rent up front, minimum.

Those numbers seem like they could be doable, especially since we’ve had 14 interested people so far.  However, it’s not so inexpensive that it wasn’t going to be a big risk, and a large expense initially.  Therefore, we decided to hold off for a little while and think about our plan.

At the same time, I also signed up for the Coworking Google group, so I’ve been getting daily emails from other space owners around the world.  I learned about what concerns they had, what challenges they’d overcome, etc.  I even had a chance to talk to a lot of coworking people in the US when I traveled through in July.

In the end, we decided to change our course and instead of trying to just push forward by ourselves, to try to find a few partners here in Beijing who’d like to do this with us.  There are a few advantages to this:

1. Coworking is all about the community, not the fact that you have spare desks to use.  Starting with partners ensures that from the very first day, there will be a community.  New people who come in to check it out will see at least the three to four partners working and will have people to welcome them.
2. On our side, we’ll know that the place we decide on is one where entrepreneurs in Beijing want to work, and not just one that’s convenient for me.  Even with only three to four of us, we’ll have had to negotiate a location, and it will probably be better than just me and Judy picking one.
3. It splits the financial risk so that no single person has so much money on the line.  Even if we get no customers during the time that we rent the office, we can all just treat it as us paying a little bit extra for something we all wanted (shared office space).

So, last week, Olof Nordenstam posted a message on the Web Wednesday Beijing group message board on Linked In asking about shared office space for entrepreneurs.  There was some interest, so we decided to talk in person at last week’s Web Wednesday meeting.  Turns out he and Carl (the other person who was interested) are really nice guys and we decided to try working together informally at Mucha Coffee (technically 木茶咖啡, since they don’t have Pinyin on their sign) on Friday.

I also sent out an invitation to the people who had responded to my coworking survey, and two of them, Steven and Sarah, showed up as well.  We decided to keep getting together semi-regularly, so I started a new email list on Mailchimp to keep track of where we’ll be working.

If you’d like to join us next time, please sign up for the email list on our Beijing Coworking website.  Hope to see you soon!

This entry was posted on August 24, 2010 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Beijing, coworking.