Unlike AirBnb and Uber, a co-working location is usually used for weeks, months, or even longer. There's little stopping the participants from cutting SpareChair/Desktime/whoever out of the loop, once they've built up some trust.
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.
In the last office hours, someone asked about something similar, they were building a ride sharing app in Africa, and because of how it worked, it was likely that drivers and riders would end up paired regularly.
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.
What ?! Working are you crazy ? That's super unproductive ! I've heard that at Fluber they were also trying the 3 hour work week which is of course much better than the 40 hours working week. \s
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 think the biggest benefit AirBNB has over Craigslist / dealing with someone directly is insurance. Before AirBNB existed, I'd use the vacation/temporary section of Craigslist. I'd go stay at someone's place, and hope that I wasn't going to be kicked out, and lose the rest of the money I gave them for my stay. It was worse for the people subletting - if I damaged their place, they had almost no recourse.
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.
I kinda want to say, if you're worried about this being a likely thing that might happen, own it. Have a section of the site where you talk about enduring relationships accreted on your service.
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.
The potential for having a go in someone elses professional/semi pro space sounds wonderful. I can imagine 3d printers,photo and video editing, well tooled workshops etc..
I've been thinking about this idea for a while; it seems really compelling. Think of the things you might be able to do with this:
- 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.
So when does anyone get down to doing any work in your plan? I mean, you're there assuming everyone is there to do things for you (talk about your ideas, test your stuff) or free to waste time with you (talk about things that interest you). Presumably everyone else is coming to it with basically the same idea.
If someone is trying to go heads-down, then can let other people know (or maybe use a do-not-disturb sign / flag or similar), but I think of it more as something you would do when you're in the mood for possible engagement/interruption rather than just straight working; in cases where you wanted to be sure you'd not be interrupted, there's always regular co-working spaces/your apartment/regular coffee shops. This would be more for "I'm working, but not so intensively that you can't talk to me" times.
It is exciting. Work is always going to be the default activity but you should have a read of this: http://whatiscoworking.com/ Note this is Coworking without the hyphen, sadly lots of self described "co-working" spaces don't get the balance quite right.
After more than a year of co-working, I had this idea, too. I don't know if it is like that everywhere, but it is hard to connect with people - they are just focusing on work, and often aren't very talkative. Which I find very weird.
A related idea would be to get small/medium businesses to allow coworking in them. Rather than being in someone’s home why not be around other workers and helping the business pay its rent.
This is a pretty good idea. A friend of mine ran a startup in downtown SF for a while, which had some extra desk space in a nice office. They rented out desks to people who wanted a space to co-work. It went pretty well, AFAIK, and I bet there's a market segment in matching workers with workspaces, especially if your app handles all the brokering, screening, reviewing, and payments.
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.
It is a bit unclear from the techcruch article why loosecubes died. Do you know of any better writeup?
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.
The write ups that came out during their demise were all trash and typical tech reporting. They did not spend all, or even close to all, of the money.
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.
UK: hairdressers - you often see 'rent a chair' in hairdressing shops. You pay a daily fee and the chair, sink, products, towels &c are all provided and you just bring in your own clients.
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.
Redgate in the UK do (or did... i don't know if they still do) this for small startups. I went for an interview there once and in one corner of the main office was an area with a few desks where 3/4 person startup was just getting going. This was in 2009 so they may not have the spare capacity now, but it's certainly been done.
> “The potential for weirdos is too great, and $20 or $30 simply isn’t worth it,” says Julia Schweitzer, a Brooklyn-based startup employee who works remotely.
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.
Is she kidding, weirdos is what makes this worth while! Anyways, the whole point of the sharing economy is accounts are associated with Facebook / LinkedIn. I just love the serendipity of it.
I find it interesting to see history repeating itself.
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.
It is hard to know why loosecubes died (do we have any alumni here that can answer this). My gut feeling is difficult to monetize at the level required to support investors. It would seem the demand is there, but the market is likely to be too small - good concept for a bootstrapped lifestyle business though.
I actually am an alumni, though I left before the end. I'd characterize your gut as accurate.
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.
The other thing I like about this idea from a business perspective (if the host stays present) is that unlike with AirBnB, you don't have to worry as much about things like keys, lots of upkeep, insurance, etc. The barrier to entry for this seems much lower, and it's nice to see some of the listings going for "coffee money" ($5-15 for a day.)
The main value I think is the networking aspect - I have no need for the money, but it would be great to have a constant stream of intelligent and interesting people passing through that you could meet and discuss things with.
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.
You wouldn't want me in there then, I'd just have headphones on and be down and writing. That is what I need a space away from my own house and our lovely open plan office for!
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.
Actually if we ever get remote working working then it would allow people to live anywhere (including cheap places) and still have jobs - as more of our lives move online geography will matter less and less.
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.
Unless we somehow lose the need to socialize, I can't see myself agreeing with your first point. People are excited to move to SF/NY so they can be around young, bright, like-minded peers.
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.
As more of our socialising moves online the need for physical socialising will decline. Anyway there are plenty of cheap places in the world with a great social life, but without local jobs. Remote working would allow you to have your cake and eat it.
In regards the two incomes I was referring to my wife’s income and mine :)
I remain unsold on the feasibility of remote working at scale. I also sense a backlash against "fake" ways to scratch the social itch, such as accruing likes on a facebook photo or watching countless Snapchat stories. A lot of my friends are getting fed up and ditching the services. They still go out and socialize physically just as much as before.
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 :)
It is hard to know if remote working can be made to work at scale - my feeling is it could once we reach a certain bandwidth, but we are few years out for this.
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.
I've been in a strange city and just wanted a quiet place with wifi to work. I would have paid for it.
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.
You can get a Regus Gold membership for free if you're a United MileagePlus member (or maybe you need the credit card too, I don't remember). This gets you into the "lounge" area of any Regus location, with wifi, free (bad) coffee, etc.
Reverse the idea: turn all of this workspace that is used only during work-hours during the work-week into space that can be rented and lived in during non-work-hours.
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.
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.
I really like the idea of being able to rent specialized spaces with equipment. The examples were things like a beadmaking studio, but I could see other specialized working spaces like a machine shop with lathes and welding equipment also being listed. Once you establish a reputation for being a decent person that takes care of tools of others you might use in their workspace, it would help in people approving you to work in their space.
52 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadThat 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.
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.
thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9785941
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.