IHMCFF

Today was a day for a committee meeting of the Shanghai chapter of IHMCFF.

IHMCFF was a major club back in Hanoi back when I was starting my first media project, and it has now been reborn here in the capital of full-contact commuting. The full name of the club is, I Help Michael Cole For Free, but we like to call it the IHMCFF for convenience sake.

If you have millions of dollars you typically are not starting your own business. Folks who have all that cash already are investing in other people’s businesses and either raking in the profits or bashing them on the head while they do all the work. That’s the way the world operates.

So if you are starting your own business, you typically don’t have a lot of funds. Nerve? Plenty! Misguided confidence? Also a surplus. But excess cash? Not likely.

So us entrepreneurs beg and wheedle for free help from friends with useful skills and experience. (Btw, if you have useful skills or experience, you also probably aren’t starting your own business, because some other poor soul is forced to pay you lots of money to work for them).

Today’s meeting of the IHMCFF was held to discuss whether the new website should include editorial content, or be a pure b2b exchange. As someone who originally came from an editorial background, I tend to think that editorial is important, but looking around the b2b universe, hard hitting journalism on the benefits of integrated circuits over old-fashioned wiring has clearly been pushed to the sideline. Having spotted this trend, I have been considering dropping editorial altogether from the plans for my new project. A fairly major concept to bat around.

So I called a meeting of the IHCMFF to seek the council of people with actual industry knowledge. I mean industries other than the media industry. Since the new project will focus on the real estate market, I wanted to get the input of real estate professionals. I could seek funding from some venture capitalists and then pay the real estate consultants US$500/hour for consulting, but I decided to spring for some RMB 40 Tiger drafts instead.

After approximately RMB 160 worth of Tiger (5% alcohol by volume) the editorial content was saved! We were able to locate several online sources that supply quality real estate information for free, and these will be incorporated into the project.

We expect at least one more meeting of the IHMCFF club between now and the Spring Festival holiday, so give me a buzz if you would like to come along.