Coworking goes micro, extending into the homes of sharing-economy enthusiasts
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- bounce ideas for your company/product/project off other people
- get real-world testers
- find co-founders/partners/new friends
- have animated discussions on technology and such
Coffee shops are great, but loud background music and a lack of knowledge about who might be there makes it less than ideal. "Regular" co-working spaces are often more focused on work qua work. Something like this seems like a good middle ground with a looser vibe. Work is the default, but with (hopefully) the expectation that people are OK with being interrupted/talked to. A quality coffee machine seems like a good idea, too.
In this scenario I imagine, you'd rent out your space to more than one person at a time, and hopefully the host would always be present. Renting out to a single person definitely would make it less compelling.
Exciting idea.
So when is anyone supposed to do any work?
I'm very curious how this works out.
That being said, I've thought more than once about getting a slightly bigger house than I need so I can share some space with other remote folks.
If two people end up married because they first met on your workplace-sharing site, is it really a net loss if they stopped cutting you in on a hookup fee? Or if they go on to form the next Google? Or even if they just become friends? Sure, you don't get any more money from them. But you just made two people's lives a little more interesting. That's worth something if your balance sheet includes more than just money.
I mean, don't advertise that as one of the main features if the focus is "finding interesting places to work outside your home". But something this intimate definitely has a "meet interesting new people" aspect to it.
They asked how to make it so they don't get pulled out of the loop and kevin suggested adding valuable services/features that make it worth while for both parties to keep using the service.
While it's possible that enough trust can build up over time to where people would go around SpareChair, I doubt it will be a problem for them. Even if friends of friends were to co-work at my place, I'd feel a lot more comfortable if they were insured.
How much actually useful work did you get done this week? If you didn't have to put on a performance of being at your desk for 40 hours, but were able to do 3 hours of really high-quality work, would you end up more or less productive?
In any case, yes, absolutely less productive. The time you need to communicate with other people in your team probably already amounts to at least 3 hours in your week.
Not counting the time you need to build back your mental context of the task you are working on. Why you were stuck last time ...etc.
I understand the feeling that people have that there should be a more relaxed schedule and restrictions on the location you are working from but in the end I'm unconvinced that it improves productivity. No saying that you should work 80 hour weeks and be be stressed out of your mind but the reverse is not true either.
I suspect this idea will only work as a “life-style” business. I can’t see how you can sustain the profits to support investors. The positives are the costs are low enough that it should be possible to bootstrap and the market small enough that the VCs will stay away.
I do know what happened being close on the outside, but not behind the closed doors. It seemed to be a strong urge to advocate for co-working vs. creating valid VC business model. So, yes, I agree it may be a better fit for a lifestyle business.
You could have an added feature that let startups match up with other startups when renting a location. It can be pretty hard to find exactly the amount of space you need - two or three startups could list how much space they needed and the app could try and pair them up to match the space available.
Also: many large office blocks in the centre of Birmingham have a large atrium space near the front door with the reception/security staff on a desk. Some seats for visitors but often empty space. I'd love to see some desks/power points in those spaces. Loos available, secure, possibly convivial. Could help people get started on businesses.
I recollect something called coffeeandpower.com but it appears to have gone now.
Loosecubes tried to fulfill this niche and never made it profitable.
If I had to independently conclude why, I might say that the relationship-building aspect of this kind of microcoworking is the most compelling for hosts but that kind of value is difficult to quantify and therefore difficult to monetize.
Loosecubes was the first VC-backed started I ever worked at. And it taught me a lesson (Lots of lessons, actually! Fantastic experience with amazing people.) that I would then be taught at a few other startups as well: When you take that money, you need to be prepared to return it 100 times over. That's why they are investing in you. Not to get it back with a 10% return but to get it back 10x or 100x.
Edit. Adding to this idea I would sign up for service that let me move around just so I would get exposed to different people and ideas. If you worked in a different location with different people each week you would build an amazing network pretty quickly. Something like an email on Sunday letting you know that you will be working in location x for the next 5 days.
So good messaging on that one needed I think.
Zoning law and insurance are the major roadblocks compared to modifying facilities to accommodate both work and rest. A lot of businesses are moving to ABW arrangements, retrofitting their office spaces to be more like a home or lounge. Work is done on laptops and mobile phones which are taken home. Files/work IP is stored on remote servers. Bicycle storage, lockers, showers and car spaces are integrated into office buildings already.
I see how this will fail though. This is why we can't have nice things. can be roughly translated as Because humans.
The destruction of the middle class is so extended that "entrepreneurs" now have to share "company offices" with people's homes
Talk about making a virtue out of necessity...
Hasn't this concern more or less gone away in the wake of AirBnb's overwhelmingly positive testimonials. (I realize there have been some highly-publicized negative outlier events.)
The optimist in me hopes that the "sharing economy" will remind us that the vast majority of people are well-meaning and just trying to get by.
The really frustrating thing is that I knew potential supply was huge.
I don't know how you balance the users who use this every day (now you're just commercial real estate), and those who only need it a couple days a year, which I think would be a really good thing to expand your market.
It's great to see more people taking this approach to creating coworking communities. This is how many of the world's best coworking spaces started. If you can get 10 people to work with you regularly at your home you can probably work together to lease a dedicated space.
One word of warning: While it's great for the hosts to make a few extra dollars from their spare space it rarely works well as a long term workplace for the coworkers. One of the things that makes great coworking spaces so successful is that all the coworkers feel a sense of ownership to the space. They're not somebody's guests or customers, they're equals with everyone else in the space.
Check out this FRED graph comparing income and new house prices: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?g=... [1]
We see that the median income has dropped by $4,000 over the past decade while the price of a new house has jumped up by approximately $70,000.
As a recent grad with a decent job, there is still no way in hell I'm going to be able to afford a mortgage on any decent, middle-class house in a semi-urban area for a very, very long time, unless I want to move to Detroit or a similarly bankrupt/developing part of the US. I'm also speaking from a debt-free perspective: if I had come out of school with $100k+ in student loans, forget about it.
The only kind of jobs that are going to pay for good houses in the future are banking/tech/fortune 500, which have median salaries of ~60k right out of school and a well-compensated track to climb. These jobs are becoming increasingly scarce and hard to obtain, especially with competition from out of country talent.
I wouldn't be surprised at all to see my generation (I'm 22) having an extremely low & delayed demand for purchasing housing, and to eventually see what is happening in Detroit (houses abandoned, rotting away [2]) happen on a smaller scale across the country where there is too much housing supply for too little demand.
And no, prices will not equalize to accommodate lower salaries because real estate always appreciates in the long run...right? The Chinese, Canadians, Mexicans, Indians, and British seem to think so: foreign investments in US real estate totaled $108bn over the past year, or 8% of total existing home-sales dollar volume. Unsurprisingly, they are "spending more money on fewer homes," aka they are driving real estate bubbles in major cities such as NYC and SF. [3]
So we'll see a bunch of late 20, early 30 something's living together, splitting the rent in what would have once been a 4-6 person family house in order to make ends meet/be close to work. Maybe they'll even drive for Uber on the weekends. Welcome to the sharing economy.
[1] Note that I placed the data on separate axes so the scale might not be what you expected.
[2] http://www.motherjones.com/photoessays/2010/10/detroit-house...
[3] http://realtormag.realtor.org/daily-news/2015/06/18/foreign-...
In regards your more general complaint even us x-ers are not is such a good position in regards real estate. I have a very good job, two incomes, yet I live in an apartment (admittedly a very nice one). I would love to own a house, but the prices are far out of my reach in my area.
People move out to the burbs once they find a mate, settle down, and have kids. Then they don't need to get liquored up with their buddies on the weekend and look for drunken revelry and romance.
Moving out to the boonies in your early 20's would probably stunt your social development, even if you could get paid decent money to maintain a couple of servers in SF out of Ironton, Ohio.
Also, 2 incomes - how do you manage that? One active and one passive I'm assuming.
In regards the two incomes I was referring to my wife’s income and mine :)
Ah, so you have two sets of costs then as well, and possibly a third on the horizon. Best of luck to you in securing a nice house in a nice neighborhood. Maybe wait until the current real estate bubble pops. Then you can rent it out to random people and have them work there with you :)
Online socialising is really important. I lived in a small city in Australia for 7 years and the only way I could mentally survive it was via access to the internet - 10 years earlier and there is no way I could have lived there. I do share you lack of interest in social media though.
I have more than two sets of costs - I have three boys! I have been waiting for real estate to crash for years and every time I think it can’t get any higher something comes along to kick it even higher. I know at some point it will stop rising, but when it does it won’t be pleasant.