The Spot Cafe

The Spot Café had sort of a spontaneous jam session last night and our photo guy in Tianjin, Matthew Stinson, caught it on film. While we don't have a sound recording of what happened, we do have some cool pictures.

Here's a list of links to each of the photos taken last night:

http://twitpic.com/45c7c

http://twitpic.com/45cce

http://twitpic.com/45cbd

http://twitpic.com/45car

http://twitpic.com/45ca1

http://twitpic.com/45c98

http://twitpic.com/45c8k

After having been open for nine months now, The Spot Café has truly come a long way. We have had a number of very exciting events, such as art shows, cultural sharing events, and special guest musician, and we are constantly being discovered by more and more customers who tell us how much they love our unique and rich atmosphere. However, being brand new in Tianjin, our first 6 months in business were not as lucrative as we would have desired, and as we approach our rent payment date of March 12, we are finding that our financial situation is slightly less than desirable. Despite this discouraging fact, WE REFUSE TO JUST PACK UP AND GO HOME. We will hold on and continue to provide Tianjin with a unique and enriching coffee house experience.

From now until May 12^th, we will be holding the “Keep The Spot Café Alive” event, including a number of events that will be announced very soon. Do you Love The Spot Café too? Help us keep going! Invite your friends to come and enjoy our great coffee, tea, and atmosphere! You can also help us by purchasing our very own in-house roasted coffee grounds available during this special period. 1/2 Pound bags are 150 Yuan, and 1pound bags are 200 Yuan. All proceeds will go to Keeping The Spot Café Alive!

We are now selling Tianjin Focus Discount Cards at our store! This discount card can be used at at least 20 different stores throughout Tianjin for special discounts, so it's definitely worth your 20 Yuan to come over to The Spot and buy one! If you haven't visited The Spot yet and aren't sure how to get here, you can find directions right here.

 

on another note, I would like to appologize greatly to everyone interested in The Spot Cafe's news and progress for not having updated our blog in such a long time. I have been super busy lately with managing and organizing everything regarding the cafe, and have not been able get to the online updates.

The Spot Café will be hosting an African drums performance Sunday night, Dec. 14th at 8:00 P.M. The performance will last about an hour. Be sure to be there for this great cultural event!

For information about how to find The Spot Cafe, please see our location section on our website.

The Spot Cafe has been open for just over two months now. We've had increasingly good business, and have gotten a huge amount of good feed-back from our customers. While business is going well, we still need to increase our business a bit in order to start making some good profits, so we're working hard to work with a few local groups and organizations to develop regular events and other partnership deals to increase customer patronage and the reach of our promotional efforts. The truth is that the more people know about us, and the more people experience the atmosphere of The Spot Cafe, the more regular customers we will be able to attract, because really, we're the best coffee house / cafe in Tianjin!

Tianjinexpats.com has chosen to make us their regular weekly location for their coffee house meeting, and this past Saturday evening we hosted a large group of English students for their regular English corner event. There was also a local English teaching company who had a pre-Halloween event on Sunday, and will be back again this weekend for another event! I'm also very excited that TianjinDirectory.net will be holding a number of Tianjin Directory meetings at The Spot Cafe. This year is truly looking to be highly promising in terms of networking and mutually benefitial relationships with a number of local organizations.

 We're finally starting to sell food items as well. This week and last week have been our trial period, and based on the success of this, we will make a decision about what kinds of foods we need to sell and how much we should prepare each day.

All in all, things are going very well. The next big thing is to plan our special feature nights, such as nights when we have live musicians, dancing, poetry reading, or open mike nights. That will be right around the corner!

We've been officially open to the public for over a month now, and boy have I been busy! Our opening day was Saturday, July 16th, and since that date we have had very good business for the first month of operation. The first few weeks consisted of a lot of correction and refinement in terms of our processes, as well as making efforts to increase our product choices. We now have a number of pastries, pies, and cookies, in addition to our coffees, teas, and other beverages. I'm very pleased with our development so far.

 Last night was a first for The Spot Cafe - an Art Exhibition featuring works by Telly Kongolo!It was a really great night - tons and tons of people showed up to enjoy the evening. We were packed nearly beyond capacity, but somehow managed to make it through. Anyway, it was a really great night.

This next month should also prove to be very productive. We will be working on adding more food items to our menu, and will also be trying to develop some regular events to spice things up a little.

Woops. I got four very beautiful paintings from Telly Kongolo today, and this afternoon, I went to buy a very cool small drill to drill holes in the wall and hang his stuff. I was just drilling the first hole through the concrete when suddenly the drill starting going through the wall like it was butter, and then before I realized it, water was spurting out of the hole that I had just made - I had hit a water pipe!!

 Anyway, it took about an hour for the repair man to fix it up, but after a little while, it was fixed, and things were back to normal - and I even got all four of Telly's paintings hung before I left tonight! That should teach me to make sure I have a very detailed map of water pipe and electric wire locations before I go drilling into walls again!

 

This week, I must say, has been a really great week. This week we started our pre-opening exclusive one-month free visits project, and it's really been very exciting. We now have a total of 91 members officially registered, and the rest of the spots are already reserved by other friends who just haven't had the time to come by yet. We've had a very good amount of improvement over these last five days as far as product goes, and we're slowly perfecting everything about the coffee house. Everyone seems to be pleased overall with the coffee house, and the advice and suggestions being offered are all very helpful. In the coming weeks we'll be adding a lot of great things, such as paintings from local artists, more drinks and food, and possibly a book case and some other things as finances allow.

Below are some pictures for everyone to check out： 

 

 

 

 

This past week we got a tremendous amount of things completed. We started painting on Thursday, and all of our other renovation was finally completed on Sunday. The major part of our painting was finished this Monday, and all of our furniture was also moved in on the same day. This week we'll be completing some of the final steps of preparation, and we will plan to begin our one month "Friends of the Coffee House" period next week, during which 100 exclusive guests will be able to visit our coffee house for free before our official opening. 

 Here are a few pictures of the coffee house now:

 

a few of the painters

-----------------------------------

 

the back corner of the coffee house

---------------------------------------- 

 another corner

 

 

It's another week, and we have more progress to report. All of the walls for rooms including the bathroom and dish-washing room have been completely built, and now the workers are putting on the finishing touches - finishing up the counter, and the floor of the bathroom and sink. It looks like we will be done by the end of this week, or at least very, very close to done.

we are now well into another chapter of the coffee house progress. Last week and this week have mostly involved renovation, along with buying a few final things that we need for the coffee house. This week, we are finishing the bathroom, adding a window in the front of the store, and then building our counter area.

 

 

our future bathroom! 

 

It's another week, and we've got new news!

 Last week we spent buying things that we need for the coffee house (glasses, cups, etc.) and on Friday we moved things into the coffee house. The landlord then spent the next several days moving his things out of the coffee house, and by the end of today (Monday) most everything should be gone.

This week we'll be able to start doing some renovation which is a very exciting thing. Here are some pictures of what's happening at our place:

 

 

- wall siding being torn down -

This past week we ran into some small bumps, but we're still moving forward. On Wednesday, we intended to sign the contract with the landlord for the building space, but found out that it might be a good idea to take care of design blue prints for the safety checks before signed the contract.

So we started getting in touch with designers and renovation companies to to take care of those necessary items, and today, By Monday of this week, we had mostly nailed down the necessary blueprints and process involved in obtaining those blue prints that we do not yet have.

 On Thursday of this week, we signed the contract with the landlord.

Last week we also found some of the things we will need for the store, such as refrigerators and other machines.

Now, we are working through the process of getting the sanitation permits for the building. On Monday of next week, we'll be meeting with an inspector who will come by and look at our building and let us know if it can be approved for what we want to use it for. 

We're getting closer!

Well, this past week we had our very first investors' meeting, and we were able to talk briefly about the plans for the coffee house, see the building location, and sign contracts.

Also, I met with the landlord yesterday, and while I was not able to convince him to lower the rent at all for our location, we are still going to go forward as planned. Tomorrow we will be signing the rental contract with him, and then begin renovation! Provided everything goes as planned, by the end of this week, at the latest, we should have begun moving into our future coffee house location!

This week, we had a couple things on our plates. On Tuesday, I and my friend went to Xiang He Furniture City (way way north of the city) and looked at different furniture options and prices. Got some good ideas.

 Then on Wednesday, we went and registered a name for the coffee house - a Chinese name, which, when translated, means - "the meeting spot cafe"  (ju dian kafei guan, 聚点咖啡馆, for those of you who know a little Chinese).  I am planning on going with a name similar to "The Spot" in English, though haven't entirely settled.  Today (Friday), the results of the regestration process will be available - we'll know whether our name is permitted or not.

Well - I was so busy last week updating my personal blog and my Chinese blogs, I didn't even realize that I had forgotten to update the Coffee House information! No, this isn't an April Fool's joke, as of last week, all the investment money is completely spoken for by a total of 13 investors, and now we are moving into the next stages of the coffee house project. I'm pretty excited about it all, actually. The first order of business is to get the contract written up and let each of our investors make sure it works for them, and I am also now immediately moving into the permit-obtaining process for the coffee house. Anyway, over these next couple weeks, there will be a large amount of new things happening and new information to talk about, so keep coming back and reading more about what's going on!

Well, lots of good stuff happening with the coffee house project lately. Right now, investment promises have reached over half of what we need - we currently have 138,000 RMB promised, leaving us with only 112,000 to go. This week there are several interested investors that i still have to talk to, and if they are in agreement with the terms of the investment process, we could very well have everything that we need by the end of this week! All in all, i'm really excited about how this week is going to turn out, and look forward to reporting back when it's all over. I'm sure I'll have some very interesting news for everyone!

 Once all our investment is raised, of course the next step will be to begin solidifying the details of the contract, getting the necessary permits, renovating the location, etc. etc. It could very well be that the coffee house is open to the publc for business by the end of next month! Anyway, I'm very excited about current events and hopeful about the future. Keep coming back for more info - i'll certainly post again next week for all those out there who want to know what's going on!

These last few weeks, mostly what I've been up to has amounted to surveys and meeting with potential investors. At the moment, I have a number of people whom, together, would be able to cover the entire cost of investment for the coffee house. This makes me considerably excited. I still have to discuss details with a few of these potential investors, but things are on their way to a good beginning, 　I believe.

 The other thing that I've been doing lately, surveys of the students in surrounding campuses, has also been going quite well. Both last week and this week I went to Tianjin University and the Medical University and did some really short surveys. The students' response to the possibility of there being a good, affordable coffee house in their area was very good, and after reviewing the data and analyzing it in an Excel spreadsheet, the results are even better than I had thought. Of course, at this point, the results that I'm seeing need a little refinement in order to be a little bit more accurate, and my surveying isn't completed yet either - I still need about 200 more surveys to have a total of 500 before I'm satisfied that I have a good well rounded look at the attitudes of the local students.

 As long as everything goes well, I believe that this next month I could begin the next phase of the coffee house project, which will involve getting permits, machinery, and doing other preparatory things, and hopefully by the end of January or beginning of February we could be opening to the public! Keep your hopes up!

 

Today I met with another guy who's really interested in helping out with getting the coffee house started. Seems really promising. I find that the people that are most unhesitantly interested are those who truly love the idea of there being an actual good comfortable coffee house here in Tianjin. They're not in it for the money, they're in it because they know what they can get out of it. That's the kind of investor I like the most.

 Yesterday I met somone who seemed really interested as well, and I will have to wait for his reply in the next few days before I know for certain.

 In all, I have a total of 5 people (including myself) who have committed with certainty to invest in the coffee house. Adding those that I have spoken with in the last several days, who seem fairly certain, but from whom I am waiting for definite answers, I think it may be very very possible to have all of the finances that we need fairly soon and start working on the details of renting and other things. I'm a little excited!

Yesterday (Saturday, Nov. 24th) I met with a couple people that expressed interest in investing. I think it went pretty well. I met with the first guy at Alibaba's, and we talked and discussed the investment possibility, and he told me that he'd talk to his friend about things and get back with me. The second person basically told me he really didn't even care about making money from the investment, what he cared about was being part of the project and helping this to get off the ground. He, like I do, believes that this is something that Tianjin needs, and there really isn't anything else in Tianjin that really succeeds in being a good, relaxing, enjoyable coffee house.

 Anyway, I felt like yesterday was pretty successful. It was a good day for the coffee house.

The Coffee Spot blog is a log of Daygan Sobotka's journey towards opening a new, trendier, more cultural, and more affordable coffee house in Tianjin. Updates will be posted regularly, so we encourage you to bookmark this page and come back often. The website address for the Coffee House is: http://thecoffeespot.googlepages.com.