How to start a great coworking space | Hacker News Reader

How to start a great coworking space

gregoiregilbert.com

26 pointspmzy13 comments

People in Los Angeles interested in an extremely low cost and creative coworking space should check out https://www.droplabs.net. We're located next to the Brewery, near downtown. Highly creative environment with lots of web, 3D animation, acting, recording studio, AR/VR, set construction, wardrobe & makeup, prop construction and more taking place in and all around Droplabs. Seriously, fuck Santa Monica and it's expensive everything and check out Droplabs.

Good public transport options? From my experience, this is very important to a hackerspace ..

I opened a co-working space in Seattle [1] last year and closed it down in the same year. I had spent time in several other coworking spaces and was enthusiastic enough to try my hand at it. To bits of caution here:

1) As the owner of a coworking space, your primary function is to be a landlord. You will spend much more time than you like thinking about deposits, pricing, payments, turnover, etc.

2) Building a community is incredibly hard. Harder than most people realize.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140406200827/http://devlocal.i...?

As someone who has (often) thought about heading down this road - would you mind sharing why you closed? Was it a purely financial decision or just too much effort? Feel free to ignore if too personal, obviously.

edit: spelling

I am interested in this too. I would be very interested in a more detailed write up of the issues you encountered or things you learned.

Perhaps a decent analogy is the difference between dining out and running a restaurant. Once the honeymoon is over you realize that you're running a business that has large capex and terrible margins. You also might be in a city (Seattle, SF, DC, etc) where you are competing with well-capitalized juggernauts like WeWork.

And despite your desire to create a community and engender loyalty, most coworking customers care about price, proximity, amenities and community in that order. I realized within 6 months that a small, boutique coworking space in Seattle wasn't creating sufficient added value to the community and was a poor use of real estate, money and my time.

Gotcha. Really appreciate the follow-up. Thanks.

The author is right that community is everything, but it's not something that you can import. I strongly disagree that you should build your co-working space around an outside team of entrepreneurs.

You have to build your co-working space around the people in the space. Don't nickel and dime your members with add-ons of limited value. Have generous event and friend policies that encourage organic community. Foster connections between members not between members and outside "advisors". People come and stay because their friends are there.

In that vein, you should also probably have a mission that's bigger than the space. A way for people to identify that it's the right place for them, instead of being another generic space in a sea of generic spaces (at least in SF).

Offices are real-estate. Co-working is people.

EDIT: I founded a 3000 sq. co-working space in SF.

A great resource for those thinking about starting a coworking space - a community of people who run them: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/coworking

Thank you for sharing it! :)

Another great resource, the coworking wiki : http://wiki.coworking.org/w/page/16583831/FrontPage

Nice! Thanks for sharing

I have been working out if Surf Incubator in Seattle for a little over two years and have found the community to be amazing and highlight many of your points about being more than desk space. The founder Seaton Gras, cares more about building a startup community in Seattle than anyone I know.

http://www.surfincubator.com/

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