Building up to a Business Training Center in Shenzhen!

Startup Tuesdays, Ecommerce Saturdays, Shenzhen Coworking space, internet marketing consulting in South China….all roads are leading to:

• an idea lab – incubator – startup breeding grounds.
• But more immediately (and more monetizable) a business training center!

A majority of the speakers have been open to getting paid (duh!) for a longer, more detailed and comprehensive training class in their expertise and topic….and we have the space now in the SZteam coworking center (as well as the whole facility which is the Nanjing University Research center of Shenzhen!)……

We have the demand from the people coming, and we have the experts / speakers over the months of events and gatherings….and we have the place. Its just gotta get organized and tested a bit.

Classes / courses I am thinking of offering (which you can look back to in previous meetings in mikesblog.com , startupscn.com , szteam.com )

• Ecommerce – building a shopping cart
• Payment settlement, foreign exchange
• IP, trademark law
• Manufacturing law, contract law, making proper documentation for factories
• SEO, web marketing
• HTML, website design, construction
• South American market, USA market, Russian market
• Chinese ecommerce, taobao
• Logistics, warehousing, chargebacks, returns
• Email marketing
• Incubators, hackerspaces, creativity

Now, again, I don’t want to stop the “Free” classes and the networking….I hope people don’t get the fear that will disappear, those are rather quick, introductory, to get common people and minds together to discuss a topic. So don’t worry, those will continue. We will just extend and offer more detailed, intimate courses for those who really want to get down to business. And seems Shenzhen needs this too!

Below is a quick summary of today’s Startups Tuesday #3 by Bruce Levin.

Thanks again to Bruce Levin for coming tonight and speaking on business model generation. We had a solid 35 to 40 people showing up, again a good mix, actually a better quality mix, of Chinese and foreigner, technical and business, entrepreneur and investor. It keeps getting better and better.

He is willing to share his slides, you can download them – Introduction to Business Model Generation

I took some notes, and as usual past them below.

Business model generation

NOT a business plan.

What is a business model? Describes rationale how a business creates, delivers, and captures value.
think things through first!

there are 9 points, but there are 4 main points:

Customers
Offer (product / service)
Infrastructure
Financial viability

What is value? the thing (product or service) that people will pay money for.

We got a bit off topic talking about Gilette razors loss leader model, printers making money selling ink not the machines, and affiliate marketing tricks and ways they make big money. Also a big topic was skype, being bought out by ebay, then bought back by the founder of skype for a fraction of the price, then sold to microsoft for 8 times that (approx)