No Fools Here

By Michael Cole On April 2, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Yeah, we took a day off from Mingtiandi yesterday, but that’s only because there’s no room for fools here at Rightsite.Asia. Now it’s time to survey another week.

Big items for the week:

Web development contract. After nearly two months of searching for web developers and asking for proposals it looks like we have finalised an agreement for building the site. If things go well the contract will be signed this week.
Places Database. Winni the WonderAssistant has finished our list of places in China. What places? All of them. Every province, city, district, village and autonomous region. May not sound exciting, but it will be integral to the site.
Focus Groups. Once we start building the site it means reviewing concepts and designs from the developers. So we are putting together focus groups to review and provide feedback on each stage of design.
Office Search. We are looking all over Shanghai for a site cool enough (and cheap enough) to be the Rightsite.Asia office.

Since Wednesday is nearly over, and we have to be off work to sweep tombs on Friday, we have to move fast this week, and we already have.

WFOE Application. Yesterday we met with the consultant handling our WFOE application, and we expect our application to be approved by the Commercial and Administrative Bureau by the end of April. Then there are a few other random agencies to pass before we reach the last hurdle, the Tax Department. Ultimately, the final objective for your new company and your real reason for being is to be able to legally bill for services. And the tax department gives you that right as the last step in your WFOE process when they hand you that first book of fapiaos (tax invoices). We expect to receive the first fapiaos for Rightsite sometime in the middle of June.

Office Search. Here’s what we’re looking for:

150-200 square meters
Located convenient to the metro system
Easy access to the highways (most of our customers will be in Zhejiang and Jiangsu so we need to be able to get out of town)
Budget of around RMB 10,000/month

We just started looking last weekend, and we’ve already seen a few reasonable candidates in our price range. Hooray! Office rents have reached staggering levels in Shanghai, so it’s nice to see that there are still some cheap, lousy spaces available for us startups.

Web Development. Strangely enough, although software development is supposed to be a growth industry in China, and we are working in Shanghai, we seem most likely to use an Indian web development vendor. Faster, cheaper, and with a good track record of B2B projects. Hard to say if we have made the right choice at this point. Will give you more details in about four months when stage one of Rightsite is complete.

Thursday. Is the last day of the week (even though we will be working through the weekend), so tomorrow we will be updating the project budget and the project schedule. The web development is taking more time than we expected, and we are starting about two weeks later than expected, so this means a one month delay in our overall schedule. This will run up the budget some, but nothing we can’t deal with.

Now its time to get back to work on Shanghai’s China’s Asia’s most exciting online industrial property exchange. Have fun and see you again soon.