4 ms·

Used to use a co-working space for my own stuff. Mostly to get out of the house. In the two years I was there, in the same building, the co-working company chan

• wongarsu 3y ago
  In our town we have at least four different coworking spaces. All apparently profitable, none of them operated by big companies. It's a simple business model: commit to a long-term lease, add furniture and sublet the space in lots of small flexible short term leases. The setup also seems to be similar everywhere, with some mix of flexible desks, fixed desks and closed offices available. You mostly differentiate on location, how hip it looks, and what kind of community you can build. WeWork had efficiencies of scale on the looking hip part, but on the community building a local group can easily outcompete a multinational company.
  • BobaFloutist 3y ago
    It's like a hotel for offices. Or maybe more like a hostel.
• danielvaughn 3y ago
  I often work from home, but I've long been part of a coworking space down where I live. They've got a great model because they're a non-profit, and partake in all sorts of things to help local businesses, like accelerators, talks, etc. I feel like that's the right model for this type of thing, because it does seem like the unit economics don't work for profit-driven business. https://www.weare1909.org/ https://www.weare1909.org/
  • abfan1127 3y ago
    how much of this coworking space is supported by taxes (via West Palm Beach Downtown Development Authority)?
    • danielvaughn 3y ago
      That's a good question, I don't have an answer unfortunately. I can say that I pay about $100/month for an open-seating membership. It's something like $300 for a dedicated desk. Pretty cheap, especially for the area, so I imagine there's quite a bit of support (though idk where it comes from).
  • zeruch 3y ago
    Same (and bonus, it operates from the perspective of an Arts non-profit, so I have an art studio for myself that doubles as an office, but I can still use the co-working space at will, 24-7): https://www.localcolorsj.org/ https://www.localcolorsj.org/
  • derefr 3y ago
    Interesting; makes me see the potential of a coworking space from a very different perspective — not as "a bunch of businesses renting space" but rather as a generalization of a maker-space, for people who aren't necessarily making physical goods. Though admittedly it'd be really cool if there was a co-working space that included maker-space facilities, both for the constant use of the people who are makers, and for the less-frequent use by the people who aren't. (And so that the people who are makers would end up seated next to the people who aren't. This starts to get into "arts college" territory — where someone doing an illustration project can wander over to a friend in the woodworking department to get their illustration turned into a carving...) Heck, while we're at it, let's throw in other facilities that would lure in people with complementary skillsets to most businesses. A teeny-tiny colo in the basement for your dev servers! Podcast recording rooms! A screening room for videos!
    • danielvaughn 3y ago
      Funny enough, this has been kind of a dream of mine. I didn't go to a normal university, I went to art school (memphis college of art). The college shut down back in 2020, and though I'm not sure what became of the building, I really wanted to see it turned into a kind of co-working space with all the same facilities that a college offers. It was small enough that it would have been doable. You could turn the cafeteria into a coffee-shop, the auditorium into a concert hall, and everything else into individual membership shops. It would've been amazing.