Dear Coworking Community: After hearing Jeremy Neuner http://nextspace.us/team at the spring National Business Incubation Association conference in Orlando, FL, I was intrigued by the coworking movement. Thanks to Chris Reddin (Grand Junction Business Incubator) for inviting Jeremy to co-present on coworking at NBIA www.nbia.org Over the past 3 months, our co- founder (Nancy Wharton) and I have visited Next Space (Santa Cruz, SF), Sandbox Suites, the Hub (SoMa, Berkeley) and Independents Hall (Philly, PA). For 11 years I have served as the director of the San Juan College Enterprise Center (Farmington, NM) www.sjc-enterprisecenter.com And I live in Durango, CO, a small micropolitan town in southwestern Colorado. We have poured over the coworking Google Groups site, inteviewed 25 people (and counting), created a full blown business plan and cash flows. And we are taping into our community (where most everyone is only 2 degrees (or maybe 3 degrees in some cases) away. We heard the "Build the community load and clear" from our fellow coworking leaders. Then comes the point of the "leap of coworking faith", we we made this past week. With folks wanting to join our local coworking space, we are starting DurangoSpace over the next 30 days in downtown Durango. When you are in town, we'll be at 1221 Main Avenue, Durango, Colorado (in the only place to be: downtown Durango). Initial photo shoot: http://www.flickr.com/photos/durangospace Our next step is the live fire exercise, and we are both excited and scared to death, like most business start-ups. Only the clinically depressed are realistic. And it takes a bit of "I know this will work" for any new venture to succeed. We are determined to build up our entrepreneur, freelance, and virtual professional community at DurangoSpace. Are we ready? As much as can be, before we overthink this. Just do it at some point.
So here are our questions as we start up: 1) We are looking at a soft opening (Jan to Mar 2011), where we are working on the community, the space and being member driven (on the details). Generating the community and member revenue we can, but focusing on building the community (which we basically have in a small town, but we need to wrap around coworking model). Any suggestions on this initial 3 month process? 2) We have pricing, but it still can be adjusted and tweaked. Basically the daily rate, multi-day passes (on occasional end) and monthly and 24/7 memberships, plus a few reserved (2 per office) memberships. Our question: How did you initial encourage the new member commitments, when the community is getting started? Our small Colorado town gets it, once we explain the coworking community. What did you do to get the early adopters dailed in? 3) What really smart (and really stupid) things do you do in the early days of your coworking community? What really worked? And what would you have changed? 4) Once you survived the shakedown cruize (first 3 to 6 months), how did you go public with the real opening? At what point did you feel ready to really turn on the model and expand the community (from the charter/core group)? Nancy & I appreciate all the models, books like "I'm Outta Here!", site visits (thanks Next Space, the Hub and IndyHall) and the kind e- mails (Jeremy @ NextSpace, Tony @ NewYorkCity). But until you gear up the coworking community in your home town, then you are serious. So here goes.... Your thoughts, ideas and comments are welcome. And come visit.... Jasper Welch jwel...@mac.com Nancy Wharton na...@clientfocusedsolutions.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To post to this group, send email to cowork...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en.
