Alex: Definitely. Thanks for calling me out on it. Excuses never get you anywhere. Hearing from someone how Houston has tackled this problem would also be great.
Rather than individually, I'm just going to adress the rest as a coherent message. Coworking is exceedingly new here in Dallas. There's a space that's been open for (I think) a year, but they have an exceedingly different model for coworking than we're trying to take. There is however another space which has just opened up at the beginning of april, another one set to open their doors in July(?) and yet another in the works. Each is located in an exceedingly different part of the area. I don't think there's less than ten miles between any of us. One of the things I've been trying to do with that is to get all of us talking and working together... I guess that's something you could call one of our regional idiosyncracies. Of those I've been in contact with, we've all been cross promoting back and forth pretty regularly, and while there is some friendly rivalry, there's been far more of the friendly than the rivalry. You're right that our population density is an important factor to be considered, which was the intent of my original statement, rather than to provide a reason why CoWorking can't work here. I firmly believe it's something which can be done, but a methodology of mine has always been to try to put as many of the factors faced on the table at the beginning so that they can be analysed and weighed. Still, I'll say thanks to Alex again because it's always tempting at that point to let the potential adversity provide you with reason to give up. According to what I just checked on Wikipedia, Dallas is the 9th largest city in the US, and we're the 4th largest metro area, but the population density for Dallas proper is about 1.2 that of Houston and 1/10th that of Philly. However, we're also apparently one of the top growing cities. The city itself is surrounded by highways and byways that are laid out fairly well and allow the population to be spread further out along the plains. We also lack alot of the public transit infrastructure enjoyed by other metropolitan areas. Even though there's light rail, generally speaking there's still a commute to it, and the further you get away from the heart of the city, the wider the bus routes seem to run. As such, yeah, we're pretty used to driving everywhere, and an hour-two commute over fifty miles is far from unheard of. Because of this though, people get very specific about the places they're willing to drive. Company|Dallas is actually located a bit of a ways north of what would be considered Dallas proper, and even further from the heart of Dallas. We are however located pretty close to some main thoroughfairs, and so something that immediately occurs to me is to court the commuter crowd. I used to make that hour commute both ways each day, and now I'm 3 minutes from my apartment on a bad day. As I said before, C|D is itself a start up created out of the parent software company that I work for. Because of that, population, and other things, our end goal is a bit different from that of IndyHall, NWC, or others. One advantage I see that we have is that backing which means that we're not going to lose the space. The rest of it though we've been operating out of our own pockets (which I feel requires a huge shout out to our CEO whose idea this whole thing was in the first place and who has poured more in than anyone) and so we've got a bit of a shoestring budget for the rest. I do think we've made the mistake of getting started too quickly though, but that backing also helps us balance that out. We may have officially launched, but rather than treating things as if we're live, perhaps a better way to approach this whole thing would be to treat ourselves as if we're still in a pseudo-CoWorkingCatalyst stage - build community, host jellies, and host meetings, rather than trying to directly recruit members at the moment. While I've been trying to focus on bringing people in to be members, given the response here I think rather I should focus on getting the space used for events. We've got some, but I should shift that gear into doing more of that. I should also get to the nitty of really incorporating our awesome husband-wife team who decided to jump on from the get go. Tony, I don't know if that's what you've meant, but these guys are great and have really been spending alot of their own time getting things going and trying to make this place as comfortable as possible. Also Tony, I want to say thanks again for the comment about not getting hard nosed. I get most of my ideas about how to deal with people, market and sell the space from my grandfather. He was a Dale Carnegie graduate and a terrific salesman, and he did it by being good and personable to people, going that extra mile to work to help other folks with what their needs were, and to promote and make sure that everyone succeeded because that menat that he succeeded even more. I often worry that trying to take that tack with things these days won't work out because we live with a rather cut throat version of capitalism these days, and it's good to hear someone say I'm on the right track with it. Matthew --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
