Entrepreneur is making the most out of spare time

Zhang Mu, a 24-year-old marketing graduate, discovered a huge customer base on Taobao.com, one of the leading online shopping websites in China.

He opened his own shop, Rainbow Spare Time, on Taobao.com in November 2009 with no major investment. In the next four months he became the leader of a 60-member team.

Basically, his employees can be hired for such tasks as picking up laundry to picking up friends at the airport. What they sell is their spare time.

Why did you open the business?

Zhang: I was inspired by the Hunan girl Chen Xiao's idea - to let netizens decide how she will spend the rest of her life. To be honest, before I opened this shop, I was just like Chen. I couldn't see the meaning of my life. So I decided to open a shop and helped more people in my spare time. It's made my life meaningful.

What was your first job?

Zhang: My first job was to buy some medicine and post it to a customer, because the medicine can only be bought here and he was in another city. It took me about two hours to do it. I felt achievement after that because a small thing I did can save other people a lot of time and effort.

What makes your shop special?

Zhang: I believe my shop is the only one on Taobao.com which has chain stores in almost 40 cities in China. I have about 60 members in my shop and they are from different places.

So when people need help in their city, we can find someone to handle it locally instead of flying over a whole country to offer a service.

How can a person become one of your members?

Zhang: I don't have a set standard, but most of my members are university students or college graduates and they do it as a part-time job.

I charge about 10 yuan for membership at the beginning and I raised it to 30 yuan recently because the population of our members has grown quickly. I charge them more so that they will think twice before joining.

How do you ensure the safety of your members?

Zhang: We always communicate with our customers online before receiving cases. Through chatting, we can find the personality of a customer. And we make sure our members do not need to go to remote areas or private residences to offer the service. In addition, we refuse requests such as watching movies together or singing in a KTV.

What's the most important thing about running a business?

Zhang: Trust from our customers is essential in this business. Once one of our customers asked us to send cash to her relatives. It was a red envelope for the lunar new year. We charged about 20 yuan an hour, but the money she asked us to deliver was much more than that. If she didn't trust us in the first place, we couldn't offer the service at all.

Zhang: We hardly earn money from it. Most of us see it as a volunteer job and don't expect any profit. Our members charge 11 to 20 yuan an hour. As much as 9 percent of profit will go to our online salespeople and 1 percent will be donated to a charity fund directly through Taobao.com.

What are your plans?

Zhang: I don't have a clear goal, but I do hope more people will become our members so that our service can cover all cities in China. And I want to make Rainbow a famous brand. When people need help, I want the first thing to come to their minds is Rainbow Spare Time.

What's your definition of time?

Zhang: I think time is the other name of life. Everyone's life is made of time. Your life cannot be longer than your time. So I suggest that everyone seize the time and live every moment of their life.

What is the best way to spend spare time?

Zhang: Do something meaningful, something you will remember maybe not for the rest of your life but at least for a relatively long time. I believe most white-collar workers in big cities have a lot of spare time after finishing their daily work.

Take me as an example: I work 9 am to 5 pm. After I return home I have nothing to do except hang out with my friends. It's a way to kill time, but it's not the way to treat your life.