Mark, Welcome to the party!
It can be a bit tricky to understand the nuances of these two camps as you define them. We're all still getting a handle on it ourselves! Here's another way of looking at it: *1. You can organize a coworking community without ever having a business. * Go on Meetup, start a group, meet at a cafe. Hooray, you're coworking, without any money involved! *2. You can build a workspace without doing coworking.* There's a whole industry of serviced offices that has been around for a while. Raise some money, get a space, rent bits of that space out to companies for a margin. There's lots of established competition in this world, and it's entirely transactional. No emotional relationship between the space and the customer. If you want to step into that arena, godspeed! *3. You can build a workspace with coworking in mind. * Coworking exists regardless of office space; physical workspaces just happen to be a handy delivery vehicle. Many in the business center industry are scrambling to change their spaces to catch the trend. Many of them think they can get away with offering open plan memberships and fancy decor, but that misses the point. *The point here is that lots of people don't need workspace, but they do need each other. * If you can build something that facilitates real connections between people, then you can do something really exciting and fun and impactful. Even WeWork knows this—they try very hard to build community. But they are always going to be hamstrung by the fact that their approach is one of being a provider to consumers, and it's hard to get consumers to care about you or the other consumers. You, by contrast, are a human, with hopes and dreams. If you find others who share those hopes and dreams in your city, and you invite them to conspire with you to build something that can help lots of other people find the belonging and support they need, you just might be on your way to starting something that will bring both profit and fulfillment. Tony *---* *New Work Cities <http://nwc.co/consulting> * On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 10:56 AM, Alex Linsker <alexlins...@gmail.com> wrote: > Figure out your main "why", then market that. If it is "money and status", > or "community of like-minded people" or "community of people doing a > variety of work", those seem to be the big areas of "coworking". And then > make your place embody that fully. The others can happen in the same place > over time, but they are 3 different ways to start from what I've seen. > > -Alex Linsker, Collective Agency, Portland Oregon > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Coworking" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
