By necessity, most startups run on the cheap. We forgo expensive systems and big teams in favour of lightweight, low-cost solutions that keep our fixed costs down and keep our companies “agile,” “lean,” or one of the many other euphemisms for flimsy. If you have been working at this game long enough, however, you will learn that running things lean may save you costs, but it can also end up wasting your time, unless you can find some low-cost ways to build in redundancy.

Today at RightSite we were deprived of one of our major systems when the file-sharing service Dropbox was suddenly blocked by the infamous Great Firewall of China (GFW).  We regularly use Dropbox as a combination of online backup and file sharing.  The service allows us to collaborate on files, such as editing the stories for our website, without having a physical file-server in our office or relying on emailing files back and forth.

Of course, we could rely on other services such as Google Docs, but the immense popularity of Docs means that it has always been too tempting of a target for potential blocking, so we have steered away from it for this reason.  Dropbox was innocuous and, I would have hoped, obscure enough to avoid the wrath of the authorities.  However, it seems we were wrong.  I don’t know what exactly the issue is, and no statement has been issued about the blocking (there never is) but I suspect that some naughty individuals were using the service to share anti-government materials.

Does the government have a legitimate beef with Dropbox?  Probably not.  But you have to remember that decisions on what gets blocked are not made at the politburo level. Nope.  It’s some little guy in a room someplace who probably has never heard of online backup, or even offline.  He just knows that somebody somewhere did something bad using Dropbox, so he hits the big BLOCK! button and you wake up with one of your favorite resources unavailable.

For the guys who work at big companies, this is just another thing to moan about in the bar, but if you are running your own company then this kind of down-time can mean a loss that you can’t afford. So we have to look for cheap ways to build redundancy into our systems. By planning for alternate backup and filesharing systems in advance, at RightSite we already have Jungledisk installed on all of our workstations to replace Dropbox.  Now we are busy looking at Opera Unite as a new alternate system.

So while the finance guys and bloggers will keep telling you to keep your company running on the cheap to make it financially viable, you will also have to look for ways to ensure that your company just keeps running when things go wrong. By the way, today is the day that we produce our weekly newsletter at RightSite.  Because we have alternate systems at the ready, our newsletter will get distributed tomorrow morning on schedule. Our customers are counting on it, so we are glad to have systems (and planning) that we can count on.

Related posts:

1. Problems Accessing Google Docs in China

All part of life at a start up.

When starting up a company we operate on the lowest possible budget that we can until we start generating a profit. That means that we often overwork our teams, our equipment, and even our offices.

So the office decided to fight back a bit this week.  On Tuesday the power suddenly went out at lunchtime, and after several adventures with circuit breakers, UPS, and shutting down the mail server, the phone server and the router, and some consultation with our neighborhood electrician, we figured out that one of the air conditioners had gone evil. (Air conditioners routinely double as heaters in China). At least by isolating the problem we were able to get electricity restored, although some of the team had a chilly afternoon.

So after the electrician was sent away, the air conditioner repairman was summoned. When he finally arrived the next day, and after blowing out the circuit breakers a few more times, we were able to find out that the air conditioner had lost a capacitor (or at least it kind of looked like a capacitor, but I’m not sure of the Chinese for capacitor)

Just imagine what we could have done under reasonable working conditions.

Our other victory of the week was resucitating my old desktop PC to put it to work as another server.  With the advent of our RightSite Pro products we will also be putting into place a training server that we will use to train our new staff and do testing on new features.  So the team from our IT vendor, Fusion were kind enough to help us fit out the machine with some new hard drives so that it could be set up for its new duties. Total cost of hardware — RMB 386

Once the new hardware was in place, we set up a server installation of Ubuntu Linux, Apache webserver software, MySQL and PHP. So now this old PC is running a LAMP stack and is ready for its new role as an in-house web server.  Total cost of software — RMB 0!  (Take that Bill Gates!)

There are things that RightSite willingly spends on — the development of our website, professional hosting of RightSite and the training and development of our staff. But in non-core areas, we don’t spend money that we don’t have.

Of course, working with equipment like this puts us in danger of more equipment adventures like we had earlier in the week, but that is part of the deal with start up. When we start bringing in more money, we start spending on more expensive systems.

In any case, this gave us an idea for another story on our website.  In the coming weeks, watch RightSite for a feature on crisis management planning in China!

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1. Monday Management Madness

China Turns on the Sun

One of the benefits of building RightSite has been getting the opportunity to find out more about some of the intense industrial development going on in China.  During the last two years China has made a dramatic shift towards developing new energy and is starting to make progress towards establishing energy independence. I recently added a forum post on our RightSite forum that tells more about what is developing in China’s solar power industry, and I hope you will check it out if you have time.

After a short break I will be back with more updates on what’s been going on at RightSite.

See you soon…

No related posts.

These ladies are using the same technology that drives your PABX

I hate switchboards.  This ubiquitous piece of office hardware has always seemed to be the biggest equipment rip-off that any business owner has to suffer.  Paying lots of cash for a primitive switching system that comes with built in limitations tends to set me off a bit.  Beyond that are some of the associated costs that come with moving from no phone system to a PABX system for your growing business.

In my previous company, one of the major limitations that drove us out of our home office and into a “real” office was the need to get more phone lines and have phone switchboard functionality, such as transferring calls or sharing one phone line between several people.  Real offices can be great, but they also add a lot of expense, and since we would like to keep running RightSite out of our home/office even while adding more staff and making more phone calls, we are looking into installing a software PABX called trixbox.

Trixbox is supposed to provide us with advanced switchboard functionality including voicemail, call forwarding and other functions, and lets us hook our phone system directly into a VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) system so that there will be no more long distance charges. This free software is installed on a server and connected both to the phone lines and your computer network.  Phone calls can be taken through workstations, on special IP phones, or on regular telephones, depending on how you want to set up your system.  Pretty groovy (especially the “free” part).

But now Mike has to figure out how to integrate the trixbox system into his network.  The system itself appears easy to set up, but figuring out how it works with the rest of our network is challenging for a techno-dunce like me.  Here’s how I think it would work:

Phone/ASDL line
Phone line comes into modem from somewhere outside my apartment

Modem
Modem connects data line to router
Modem connects voice line to Trixbox server

PSTN Interface card
Connects PSTN (phone) line to trixbox server

pfSense Router/Firewall
router distributes data to network workstations and servers via data network

trixbox Server
trixbox server distributes voice traffic to workstations or IP phones via data network

Data network
Carries data and voice traffic to workstations and IP phones

An ugly diagram of how I think this system might work is available here, courtesy of the nice folks at scribd.com

The problem that I have with this network concept is that right now the trixbox server sits outside of the firewall, which makes the network vulnerable to hackers.  So I expect that before we can implement this network, I will need to figure out how to set up the trixbox server within the network, but still make it accessible to the PSTN (regular old phone) lines.

If any of you more technically astute people out there have suggestions, please feel free to comment!

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1. Learning Some New Trix
2. Setting Up an Intranet with Open Atrium
3. Crisis Management Planning

• Built the beta version of the RightSite.Asia’s first stage
• Assembled a database of 1500 industrial zones and more than 4000 service companies for use in the site
• Established our offshore company and onshore WFOE company
• Didn’t go broke on a lot of unnecessary staff or hardware
• Mike lost 8 kg and lowered his resting pulse by 25 beats per minute (still trying to achieve that work/leisure balance)

Now we have to develop some new goals for 2009.  Having already built our site, our aim for the new year will be to make RightSite famous and start creating revenue.  In an even shorter frame of reference, our company will focus on marketing to make our site famous and build up traffic during the first half of the year.  By building this traffic we can assure ourselves of easier revenue generation in the second half of the year.  Here are a few of our goals for the next six months (in no particular order):

• Build a directory of 1000 available properties
• Increase our directory of service companies to more than 6000 companies
• Attract at least 250 unique visitors to the site every day by June 30th
• Enhance RightSite’s directory of industrial zones by guaranteeing that all entries contain full contact information, transportation information, and detailed descriptions in Chinese and English.
• Ensure that RightSite appears on the first page of the Baidu and Google search results for “China industrial real estate, China industrial property, China industrial zone,” and other relevant key words
• Keep staff turnover at 0%
• Not spend all of our cash on equipment and other silly things
• Create Phase II of RightSite, including premium listings, client sites and purchasable keyword priorities
• Lose another 1.5″ from Mike’s waistline (I’m still trying to get rid of the effects of all that wine I drank in my previous job)

Although making money is goal #1, there are still a number of steps for us to take before we can start taking in any of that cash.  So, it’s easy to say, “let’s get down to business” and try to start selling listings today, and we could probably sell some. However, this approach would not be likely to create a satisfied customer base if the site doesn’t have the traffic levels to guarantee that people who list on the site will receive the inquiries that they need to drive their business.

So RightSite will be focussing on marketing for the first half of 2009, and on sales for the second half of 2009. I promise to keep you posted as we work toward meeting our goals.

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1. The OverTime Express
2. In the Home Stretch
3. RightSite Launches in Private Beta

Glamcham event that we organised at my last company

Last week we had RightSite’s first official event, the Private Beta Private launch party, and we are happy to announce that it was a success.  Out of the thirty-three people we invited, about 14 showed up, but many of them brought guests, so we ended up with a full-house in our private room at the Big Bamboo.

This event was intended as a contributor appreciation party to say thanks to the many friends who helped us get our site launched.  However, the party was also a great way to let people know that the first stage of our project has been completed and to show people that we have made some progress.

While we intended this event as a one-off, the enthusiasm that it generated among our friends and staff have got me thinking about making this a regular monthly or quarterly event.  At my last company, we had monthly events that we called the GlamCham parties, and they were very helpful in bringing together our staff with our clients and helping everyone to understand each other better by drinking lots of free wine.  Easy marketing and all done through barter deals, so there were no cash expenditures.

For RightSite, we are planning some events that will bring together foreign manufacturers and local industrial zone owners to have a few drinks and trade name cards.  While this may sound simple, and most people will acknowledge that these two groups need each other, actually getting them to socialise can be tricky. Besides the language barrier, there are also some real party-style barriers.  Local events tend to centre on traditional banquets, whereas foreigners are more accustomed to the Chamber of Commerce cocktail party.  The venues also tend to be quite different.

So our challenge is to find a format and venue style that will make both groups comfortable (and at price that we can afford).  Once we have accomplished this, we should have a very effective marketing tool.

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1. Event Marketing in Suzhou
2. RightSite Launches in Private Beta
3. Marketing Machinery

Chinese proofreading: we are still revising and proofreading the Chinese version of the site

Value lists: we have fixed the problem of arranging the values in our field menus in a natural order for each language (hooray).  But there are still a few English values lurking illicitly in the Chinese site

Style sheet: there are a few changes to be made in font colors and link colors in the site to make it more appealing to users

Property Requirements Location Preferences:  Our team had set up the fields for preferred location in the properties wanted section in the same way that they had set up the location fields in the properties available section.  Oops! We didn’t think that the actual locations wanted would be much more a general than the locations available, so now we need to re-structure these fields.

Linking Industrial Zones to their Subzones: Many large industrial zones include specialised subzones, such as Export Processing Zones, so we need to show the relationships between these zones.  Unfortunately, the existing structure only allowed for free text entry of subzone names. Now we are improving this to allow users to select a parent zone for any subzone from an auto-complete list of existing zones.

Browser Compatibility: There are many different software platforms out there to view RightSite on.  We are trying to make sure our site displays and functions properly on Windows, Mac and Linux, not to mention using Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari browsers.  This will take some time.

Loading the Site onto our Permanent Host:  Once we have finished the site, it needs to get set up on our permanent host.

Importing the Data: We have built listings of nearly 1,500 industrial zones, and we will need to import this information into RightSite.

With some luck, I believe that we can be installing RIghtSite onto its permanent webhost on the weekend of 22-23 November.  (Now that’s something to be thankful for). After the site is set up, we will import the data, and do some additional testing.

Look for a live, public beta version of RightSite on December 1st. We hope you will enjoy!

Related posts:

1. RightSite Launches in Private Beta
2. In the Home Stretch
3. Pre-Flight Checklist

Office rents are falling

Exports have stalled

Foreign direct investment has dropped off a cliff

Not since SARS has it been so easy to get a table at your favorite restaurant

Yup, business is headed into a recession in China, and if you came here to make money (as opposed to enjoying the nice weather and the wide-open spaces) then there are very good reasons to be concerned. And if you are involved in a start-up company then you might consider becoming terrified.

But what you really should be doing is following the most logical strategy for anyone operating in China.

Go where the money is

Sell to the biggest customer

Concentrate on the opportunities with the biggest potential

And in China, the guys with the big money are the government. Read the newspapers — China has trillions in foreign currency reserves, the country has a current account surplus of record proportions and the government is being very aggressive about propping up the economy. Already this month, the government has taken steps to stimulate the rural economy, prop up the property sector and just yesterday cut interest rates.  These are guys who don’t want things to stop growing and have cash to spend — so sell to the government.

At RightSite, government companies have always been a major part of our strategy. The biggest players in China’s industrial property market are the government companies that own and operate the industrial zones. As a foreigner, its easy to overlook the importance of these companies.  Many of their managers don’t speak great English, they don’t attend AmCham meetings very often, and they almost never hang out at Malone’s or Element Fresh.  So they’re nobodies, right?

Not!

Anyone who has the kind of resources at their diposal that major Chinese government companies possess are the primary players.  All too often, the well-dressed consultants and foreign company managers that you meet at the pub are the nobodies.  They too often are only in the country for a very limited rotation, and in the case of any consulting company, their advertising and promotion budget is not even worth the time it takes to make a sales call.

While selling to a government company may mean putting up with a longer sales cycle, drinking a lot of tea that still has the leaves floating in the top of the cup, and maybe even learning to speak Chinese, this is exactly the type of investment that we need to make to sell in China. If you are not here to deal with the Chinese government, then the pool of people that you are dealing with, and the potential for earnings that you are hoping for, is very limited.  In which case, you might as well stay home in Minnesota. China is serious about building its infrastructure in a way that the US was in the 1950s, and is determined to follow a very Keynesian approach to overcoming the current economic crisis.

For RightSite, we are ready for hard times in the next 12 months, but we are also ready to sell to the government and are focussing our marketing on the economic zones. Now if only I could figure out what we are supposed to do with the tea leaves that keep getting stuck in our teeth during meetings.

Hope that you will do well through the current downturn and see you next time here on Mingtiandi.com.

Related posts:

1. Chop Me, Mick!
2. Back in Town and Back to Building Companies
3. That Was 2008, Now Let’s Do This 2009 Thing

We are now nearly finished with the website and have only some minor elements left to add before we create the Chinese version. The feedback from people that we have shown the alpha version of the site to has been very positive, and we hope that folks will appreciate the beta version even more. We expect to launch the beta version in approximately 3 weeks time. Yup, just in time for all of you to head off for October holiday — so it will be a very soft opening indeed.

Once the site is operational, we will concentrate on building up the number of listings on the website. People coming to the website will be looking for property listings, properties wanted postings, consultants and industrial zones. We have already built a list of more than 1300 industrial zones, so those we can easily import into the website. However, for the property listings, our team will need to start calling real estate agents and industrial zones to help everyone list their properties on our site.  This should take a few months.

And now we will start our marketing campaign by attending conferences and seminars on industrial zones and development across China.  On the 19th of this month, we will be attending a session in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, and on the 20th to the 22nd we will be attending a similar investment promotion conference in Wendeng, Shandong province.  I will try to take it easy on the Baijiu.

So I guess that you can say that while we are soon to cross the finish line on the site building segment of our adventure, we are still just beginning on the business building part of our journey. I hope that developing the company will be as challenging and informative as putting together the site was.

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1. Flight Times
2. That Was 2008, Now Let’s Do This 2009 Thing
3. Fun in the Sandbox

The big news on this Monday is the debut of the RightSite.Asia sandbox site. (Apologies for the tech-talk – I will do my best to explain, and it’s not nearly as much fun as it sounds).

The key to success for any site is usually its search ranking on search engines such as Google and Baidu. Unfortunately, when new sites are launched, Google likes to put sites into the sandbox before they are allowed to rise and fall in the rankings as they may otherwise deserve.

We are now about 45 days away from the launch of RightSite’s public beta version and to help make sure that the full-on, official, world-beating RightSite.Asia gets to climb out of the sandbox as soon as possible, we have put together this sandbox site as a place-holder until we can get the real site ready. At present the site only contains a brief description of the company and a few other details, no property listings or anything else that will make up the primary content of the real site.

As for the development of RightSite, for you geekier folks who are familiar with the usual software release cycle, we are wandering around the alpha stage somewhere right now. We have completed the basic structure including the ability to post property listings, create company IDs, and conduct basic searches. We expect to complete the advanced search by the end of this week.

Our next steps will be to create the Community section of the site, along with the About Us section. Since most of this is static pages (these are simpler than dynamic pages), we should be able to complete this in the next two weeks or so.

Finally, we will insert all of the Chinese content, including static content and field labels, and our little bilingual site will be ready for full-scale testing. We expect that to happen on about Sept 23rd.

Once we have done our internal (UAT) testing, we will be ready for a public beta. That’s when you folks out there will be able to use all functions of RightSite and let us know what you think. After about six months of working out the bugs, we should be able to take the training wheels off and have a fully operational site. In that six month period we will also be hard at work creating new and more powerful features that will make it easier for people to buy and sell industrial property through out site.

So that’s what I’ve been up to since you saw me last here on Mingtiandi.com. In the meantime, we also were cruelly dinged from the Smith School of Business contest. I guess they didn’t see how sexy industrial property could be. Also, mom stopped by for a brief visit. (Yes, even entrepreneurs have moms).

But the real reason for the blog hiatus has been the exercise program. For the last three weeks I’ve been in the gym each morning at 6:00 am. It was painful at first, but it was about time to do something about that middle-aged spread that comes with the all-in-one house/office lifestyle. You don’t work off much beer walking from the bed to the desk.

Have already lowered my resting pulse from 84 beats/minute to 76 beats/minute and lost a few pounds. Just about six more months of this and I should be back in the shape I was in before I launched my first company in Shanghai. Sigh….

Related posts:

1. It’s Beta, Baby!
2. Hurdling Through China
3. In the Home Stretch