Hi Melissa, I've been planning to do a long post about the lessons we learned when we had the grand opening of Cowork Frederick <http://www.coworkfrederick.com>at the beginning of September. Pricing was going to be part of that post, so thanks Melissa for prodding me to get off my butt and share some of what we learned now rather than in one big post.
Like you, I read posts here and scoured websites of other coworking places. We started with a soft opening / open house in early August. We started with a "pay as you go" plan of one day per month and add-on days as needed at a reduced rate. We also had part-time (3 days/week) and full-time (5 days/week). The day of the open house, I was watching Twitter because I know its used heavily in our city. The tweets and comments from in-person visits had a common theme: why isn't there a 1 day/week plan? I thought members would want flexibility, but I didn't realize they also wanted 1) a predictable monthly expense and 2) just like having signed up for a class at a gym, the motivation that comes from the expectation that you've now committed to going to the gym/coworking once a week. So we asked if they'd like 5 days per month, and at present over half of our members are on that plan. Over HALF. My lesson was: it's great to ask this community, but in the end it's VERY good to ask your potential member community what they want. Keep it simple, and stay flexible so you can adapt to the needs of your community. Regarding printing, we're going with "please limit printing to reasonable usage" until we get a better understanding of how our members will actually use our space. Right now, people rarely print, so I'm glad I didn't put a lot of effort into creating a policy we don't need. I did get a printer that would support department IDs, so we can put something in place later if we need it. The lesson I learned - again, was: keep it simple, and ask your members what they want/what's fair. Believe me, they won't hesitate to tell you what they want. And that works both ways; I even had one member tell me we were providing too many reserved conference room hours at her membership level. Have fun with launching your space, Glen Ferguson @CoworkFrederick On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 5:47 PM, Melissa Saubers <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm getting ready to open a new coworking space. Trying to nail down > pricing and plans. In my research I've seen many different ways to do this. > Need some advice/thoughts from this community. I will have 5 dedicated > desks, 20 open seats, 1 conference room, 1 phone room for private convos, 1 > collaboration lounge, 1 cafe area. I was thinking of setting up pricing by > the number of days per week. > > 5 days per week, dedicated desk = $A > 4 days per week, open seating = $B > 3 days per week, open seating = $C > 2 days per week, open seating = $D > 1 days per week, open seating = $E > daily drop-in rate = $F per day > punch card for discounted daily rate = $G per day for 10, $H per day fr 20 > > Everyone would get wi-fi, coffee, printer/copies > Based on your tier you would get so many copies/prints and conference room > hours > Dedicated desk gets locked storage > Hours at beginning - 8:30 to 6pm - M-F > > Thoughts? Thanks! > > -- > Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com > > > -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com
