Living the lonely solopreneur life? Why not try co-working?

Do's: forget about it. Don't: actually go through with it.

Running a co-working office is not just leasing an apartment, giving 5 people a key to it and ping them once a month to deposit 200$ in your account or the cookie jar on the kitchen table. I've watched this happen from fairly close twice now, and here is a selection of what is involved:

- Internet/telephony. One residential internet point with a wireless router isn't that big a deal, granted, especially when the people working there are tech-savvy. But you very quickly get to the point where somebody needs a fax (government contracts yay!), a reliable line to Skype while that other guy is pulling in a new Redhat iso ('DD-WRT can do that!' sure, if your time is free), needs a way to have phone calls go to an answering machine, or if you need to decide on a system who will answer whose phone when people have varying work schedules. Everybody cell phone only, no-guarantee internet - it probably works in some circumstances, sure, but you hit the limit sooner than you think.

- Rent is not the only cost - you need to divide electricity, water, municipal taxes, garbage costs. Can easily add a double-digit percentage to the base rent.

- Who's going to do the cleaning? Put out the garbage? Call the land lord when the toilet is clogged? Answer the door for that client that you thought was coming at 9h30 but came at 9h (happened to me this morning)? You can pay somebody for all of this, but it'll add to the cost. Some people will want to do it themselves, others will want to pay somebody - now what? Resentment creeps in easily.

- One person decides to get a regular job, or to go on holidays for 3 months, or doesn't make enough to pay rent. Now you have to scramble to fill that spot, or jack up the price of the rest. If you're connected enough that sending out one email will provide you with enough reliable candidates, great - otherwise enjoy spending an afternoon posting ads online, showing people around, interviewing them to at least have the impression that they won't rob you or leave you high and dry with the bill after 3 months.

- Or somebody wants to hire a secretary or other staff. Now what? Labor law rules, higher and more insurance, parking issues, and no more 'I can just leave my wallet and 2000$ laptop here cause I know and trust everybody', that's what.

All in all, what you can save over a commercial co-working arrangement (which, yes, are expensive) is in using hobby-level equipment (no Cisco switches and IP phones, only the cheapest from Newegg, and Ikea over Aeron); and the profit they make. That profit isn't all that huge, although in a small team you do have the advantage of being at full capacity as long as you have tight arrangements. Co-working spaces go bust all the time, not because they're so expensive, but because doing enough business for economies of scale to kick in is hard in a space that doesn't require much except capital to get into. So in my experience, you can bring the cost down from 500-700/month to 300-400/month plus depreciation of the chair and desk.

If there isn't already, it might be an idea to setup a sub-reddit or such for this.

I was a member of one once, and volunteered with the management, but haven't set one up from scratch yet. The biggest issues are mostly people-related: making sure everyone knows what is expected of them and being good neighbors to each other. When I started, the membership was around 20 people, though only about 5 of them were active. By the time I moved to a different city 2 years later, it was closer to 40 members, with about 10 in the space "full-time".

There is an issue with injury liability that I'd estimate at least 50% if not 75% of such member-ran, community workshops just completely ignore. The theory is, because it's supposed to all be friends, then when someone gets hurt they won't sue.

The worst injury we had was the fault of the building from which we were renting. A faulty window with a crack in the middle ended up shaving off the skin of one of our members' knuckles. It was unavoidable on his part. Other than that, I think we did a good job of specifically avoiding accepting memberships from people we didn't trust to run the tools safely.

In practice, when we got bigger, while everyone there was friends of someone, we got to the point where there were quite a few people who had never even met each other. Somewhere around 40 members, we grew a noticeable delineation between the 9-to-5-ers (who seemed to strictly use the space from 6pm to 9 or 10pm) and the everyone-elsers (who had no discernible pattern, being seemingly random even in their own schedule, which paradoxically seemed to make them run into each other more).

So does and don'ts: DO start small: you need to be able to trust the people you start with. It takes time to build the membership base and you need to know the people with you aren't going to flake.

DON'T call it a hackerspace: People don't understand what it means. You'll waste a lot of time and effort explaining it to the few people who are curious enough to at least ask. You'll lose attention from people you'd wish would come around. You'll gain attention from people you'd rather avoid.

DO advertise: members are the lifeblood of the place. You owe it to the place to make it independent of the core, in case any of them do finally move on.

DON'T get in it for the money: there's no money in it and the best people you could have will smell the money lust on you and get turned away.

DO get in it for the people.

DON'T take just anyone: a bad apple can ruin the bunch. Be circumspect about who you accept as a member. We got really liberal at one point, and while we had an initial spurt of membership, it nearly killed us because nobody wanted to be around the 2 assholes who were using the space as their personal livingroom. We lost a lot of potential members from that.

DO emphasize respect for all people: okay, this one is going to go a bit off the rails, and probably spark the ire of a few people, but please note that I am speaking of my experiences and of what I found to work in our situation.

We were (well, they still are, I'm just not there anymore) a very male-centric group. I think it's the nature of technology right now and, while we should all work to correct it, it's not going to happen overnight, so no use in getting your stomach tied into knots over the current state (but still work on it, just don't let it affect your mood). We had people try to increase our female membership many times, but I think it only served to alienate potential members for feeling patronized and current members for feeling left out in the cold. I think the turn around (and it's still very male, but there are some female members now) was when we just started to put our foot down about how people treated each other.

I learned a lot about sexism, things I don't think any corporate "sexual harassment sensitivity training seminar, SIX SIGMA PLUS BLACK BELT ENHANCED EDITION 3" could ever hope to teach, things about how patriarchal systems hurt everyone, men included, and how commonly it is that "gender inclusion" efforts are still a patriarchal effort (it emphasizes the "otherness" of feminism, assumes the "defaultness" of maleness). It's not just about men and women, it's about sexual orientation, too. For example: gay men are still men, and in my experience, most of them are not effeminate and still want to be seen as men--as tough, as strong. And some straight men want to be effeminate and do not want to be expected to be tough and strong, but they don't want to people to expect them to be gay just because they are effeminate. Patriarchy hurts all of these people.

And I think, even in the nearly caricature-like portrayal of man-on-woman sexual harassment in the workplace, those types of men are assholes in real life, too. I think that is the reason why so many people deny sexism still exists, because they just can't imagine anyone acting like that. While there are more subtle ways for sexism to occur, even in well-meaning people, the belligerent asshole is still a problem and not at all a myth.

But the subtle ways seems especially bad with really geeky guys, and our particular shop was very electronics-centric, so we had a lot of really geeky guys interested in the place. I get an image in my head of such people becoming vindictive over getting scorned by cheerleaders in highschool--it's most probably not the actual scenario, but substitute whatever minor details you wish (they may even identify themselves in this same image, it's a very popular one in our culture), the end result is the same. It's getting popular to call out the Nice Guy Syndrome (not that they finish last, but that they aren't actually nice guys). The sort of personality that ends on that sort of behavior is an unbearable person in many other ways. I've found they usually have a chip on their shoulder about everything.

So while we hadn't accepted any members who were bad, we weren't able to get any new women into the group because they were experiencing our membership drives with all of the idiots we were rejecting and associating those people who would never become members with us. While dealing with those sorts of people during the open hours was a necessary evil, that was only 4 hours of one night a week.

It came down to defining bad behavior, be it from male or female, directed at male or female, and not tolerating it. You don't tease a person you don't know (besides, you can't tease a person well until you get to know their hangups). You don't talk overly familiarly with people you don't know. You don't assume a person you're talking to doesn't know what you're talking about (as if you're talking down at them[1]). You also don't assume a person you're talking to DOES know what you're talking about (as if they would be an idiot for not knowing). You basically just don't assume anything about anyone. You treat them politely and hope they come back to hang out again. If, once you have hung out enough to become friends, then you can start teasing and joking around and flirting, because then you have the basis to do such things.[2]

We almost lost one of the more active, imaginative members before we figured this out. She and this one other guy started coming to open hours around the same time: they were completely unrelated and it was completely incidental. He was a complete creeper and we did our usual thing of just ignoring him, hoping he'd get the hint and stop coming back. He didn't get the hint[3] and he seemed to think he could impress this incredibly attractive woman who was there with her boyfriend with his mediocre computer skills just because she was an artist. She could code circles around him because her art was game programming (remember, don't ever assume anything about anyone, even if you know a few details about them). And he was really transparent and making her really uncomfortable.

I saw her getting ready to turn around and leave one night after seeing he had gotten in before her, but was able to convince her to stay by talking about her project. She stayed, we finished our conversation, I started working on something else, and the creeper started in on her again. One of our other members interrupted him and told him to leave, that his behavior was completely unacceptable. She signed up that night.

My point with this long-winded story is that bad apples really do ruin the bunch. You have to be firm with people and establish the culture of the place early. You have to make it clear, state it out loud (don't assume!) that bad behavior will not be tolerated. That's, of course, extremely difficult to do without chilling the friendliness of the environment, because a lot of people don't understand the issue and it makes them uncomfortable. The way to do it is to seek confrontation when bad behavior occurs.

So one more DO. DO confront disrespectful people and DO tell them, politely, that their behavior is bad. We lost a few people with this method, but we kept a lot more because most of them had no idea of what they were doing.

[1] If a person asks you a question about something you're working on, explain what it is, not how you did it. If they ask you how you did it, then you first ask them what they already know. It's that simple.

[2] I think hiring in the corporate world is a very similar issue. We get a person to come in once and then try to decide if we're going to marry them, essentially. Why not think of it in those terms? If you're particularly bad at your job, you're going to be spending more time with your coworkers than your wife. Yet you're going to start a long term relationship with them off of a sheet of paper that tells you far less than a Match.com profile and one to three meetings in person. No, for me, if I need a new employee, it will be from my friends. And if I don't have anyone suitable in my group of friends, I need to make more friends.

[3] I don't think he was an Aspberger's case, I think he was just stupid