Start a business in the garage cafe 200 teams huddled in the garage

"the APP earns an average of $40 a day, and the artist is borrowed from the next table." Wangwang is a post-80s generation who came to Beijing to start a business. his team consists of two people who are engaged in mobile game development projects. Unlike ordinary entrepreneurs, Wangwang does not work in an office building, but in a cafe.

The name of this cafe is Garage Coffee. It is one of the earliest start-up coffee in Zhongguancun and is very famous among entrepreneurs. Liu Chuanzhi once called it an entrepreneurial "incubator", saying that garage coffee "connects capital and technology" and "has become an entrepreneurial ecosystem that exists in China today." Since its establishment in April 2011, more than 210 Internet entrepreneurial teams have been certified here, and four or five have earned more than 100 million a year from here. Garage coffee has witnessed the growth of a group of grassroots entrepreneurs in Zhongguancun.

Four or five teams with achievements have earned hundreds of millions of dollars.

At about 01:30 last Wednesday afternoon, the reporter Mu Ming came to the garage for coffee. Despite driving Baidu navigation, the location of the coffee shop is not easy to find. Not on the roadside with convenient transportation, there are no exaggerated and conspicuous signs, only the words "garage coffee" are simply pasted on the second floor window of an ordinary gray building, bypassing an obstacle downstairs, and then to the second floor of Xinding Hotel. Xu Tianhai of garage coffee told reporters that the reason for choosing such a position is to naturally screen customers. The target customers of the garage are not people who want a simple cup of coffee, but customers who really need to start a business. As for the name, garage coffee is not a real garage, but a tribute to the world-famous innovative high-tech companies born in garages, such as Google and Apple.

Go up the stairs, push open the turnstile of the garage coffee, and you will find that this is a different world.

It was lunchtime, but I didn't see the imaginary dining scene. On the small podium opposite the door, someone is showing his project through the oversized LED screen, and the people under the stage are either listening carefully or still busily tapping the keyboard. Looking at it, they are all young faces, more than 90% of them are men. The cafe is almost full, with six or seven people sitting around each table, with a notebook in front of one person, giving people the impression that they have entered the office of an Internet company.

Xu Tianhai of garage coffee told reporters that from 2011 to now, there are more than 100 entrepreneurial teams coming out of garage coffee, and now there are more than 210 certified teams serving in the garage, and four or five teams, such as the warm-blooded Sea Thief King, have earned hundreds of millions of dollars.

Advantage the monthly office cost is only 2,000 yuan.

"there's nothing better than that. I'm a grass-roots entrepreneur and, more generally, a loser. I just have an idea and don't have much backup. There are only two people on the team, and the other one is part-time." Born in 1987, Wang Chengshu graduated from Guangxi University. He came to start a business in the garage from Guangxi, thousands of miles away, and took a fancy to the environment of Zhongguancun. "fortunately, the garage took me in, otherwise I wouldn't have a place to start a business," he said. For most cash-strapped grassroots start-up teams, the most practical significance of garage coffee may be to provide an affordable office space.

In a metropolis like Beijing, renting an office space outside generally costs 5 yuan per square meter per day, and the rent for a team of five people may be tens of thousands per month. In the early stages of most grassroots entrepreneurial teams, the first bucket of gold is often not abundant. Here in the garage, the office cost is only about two thousand yuan a month. In addition, 24-hour garage coffee, free utilities, 1G Internet speed bandwidth, coffee catering at any time, with conference rooms, study rooms, and the front desk of the coffee shop also collect express delivery. all these conveniences are enough to appeal to grass-roots entrepreneurs. Garage Coffee is to create such a place where entrepreneurs can invest their money in technology research and business development to minimize start-up costs.

In addition to office hardware services, garage coffee also provides an unparalleled shared environment. At present, there are more than 30 joint ventures in garages, involving the Internet, finance, law and other industries. These enterprises will provide a number of preferential policies for all certification teams stationed in garage coffee. For example, Aliyun provides 3000 yuan vouchers for each startup team, Microsoft provides a complete set of legitimate software, Lanxun provides servers, and law firms provide legal aid. Garage Coffee and Bank of Beijing's micro-loans and entrepreneurs' credit cards will also give entrepreneurs protection in their pockets. Every Friday, the entrepreneurial team goes to the Agricultural Bank to open an account for capital verification free of charge.

Here comes the "Magic camera".

"my idea is different in the eyes of parents. I want to make my life a little more exciting. Here are all the same people who work hard with a dream and expect good returns with no regrets." Wang Chengshu's idea is not popular among his classmates. He found a sense of belonging in the garage coffee. "although someone will approve your project, it will be someone who will approve you."

Around 7 o'clock in the evening, people left the cafe and began to go home. The vacant tables were quickly occupied by people who worked at night, and the cafe was still busy after 08:30 in the evening, with the two boys at the next table each asking for a bowl of rice for midnight snacks, while talking about what a new APP module should do.

Professor Li Yining, a famous economist, mentioned at a seminar that Americans do not pay attention to China's GDP, but coffee shops in Zhongguancun, and predict that in another 20 to 30 years, a large number of innovative talents will come out of this group of people.

Indeed, in the more than two years since its opening, many successful entrepreneurial teams have gone out of the garage coffee, and more entrepreneurs have come here with dreams. The Magic Man camera, which suddenly became popular some time ago, is the representative of a successful startup that went out of the garage coffee, and has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Tencent. As the blood city of China's rise in science and technology, Zhongguancun has so far nurtured its descendants and inherited innovative genes, attracting more young people to come here to work.

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You only need to look back to find technical support.

Garage Coffee brings together countless entrepreneurs with dreams, where they exchange ideas, find partners, and work together on the road to entrepreneurship.

Wangwang, from Hengshui, Hebei Province, was born in 1983. He is small but energetic. After graduating from junior college, he loved game development and design and spent three months self-taught programming in a few square meters of bed in Beijing. He moved to the garage coffee and started his business in July this year, where he met his partner and former Baidu technology architect Kai GE. So far, their Storm Studio has developed more than 20 games in more than 3 months. One of the cookie games was downloaded by 20,000 users on its first day of launch, earning hundreds of dollars a day. But because the team lacked artists and used the pictures downloaded online, the game was forced to go offline due to copyright issues. Wangwang later discovered that the other team next to their desk was PC-end game design, ranging from programmers to artists, planners and producers. Now, when Wangwang has a problem, he can turn around and consult, and he can also borrow the artist at the next table.

There is an electronic check-in wall on the back wall of the cafe, which marks the table number of each table, the names of entrepreneurial teams and members, along with their respective needs and strengths. At nearly 9 o'clock in the evening, a bald man with glasses came to Table 15 to look for a technician surnamed Peng to express his desire to cooperate in the development of the game APP. After knowing that Wangwang also developed mobile games, the two quickly found another place to sit down and talk about cooperation, which led to a cooperation in just a few minutes.

Traditional entrepreneurial teams also come to the garage to look for opportunities for cooperation. Yang Hui, 28, started her career as a retail researcher and went to the garage to find her own technical partner. "I wish I had registered a few years later, and now they all start their own businesses at zero cost." At that time, Yang Hui asked her mother for 40,000 yuan for a registered company. Yang Hui lamented that she had registered early, and now the entrepreneurial environment is better. In the future, Yang Hui will make an O2O shopping experience platform that integrates online and offline, so that consumers can not only experience the same products offline, but also buy online at a low price. The project will be based on big data to investigate consumer market data and provide businesses with more accurate analysis reports. In order to find a technical partner, she went to the garage coffee. When she embarked on her entrepreneurial journey, she traveled to seven cities a month at her busiest time, with 30 air tickets in her pocket. Yang Hui said that it is not hard to start a business, and the important thing is that what you do is valuable.