Independents Hall Philadelphia

IndyHall Turns Two Guys On Beer, Megaparty on September 1st

Filed under: Announcements, Community Support, Independents Hall, coworking

Mix

• Two Year birthday of our beloved Philadelphia coworking space
• The release of the 100 episode of the duo of beer guys that share their knowledge and tasting notes with you 5 days a week.

Stir in

• Our awesome community
• Free beer
• Great music

Thats right, it’s been TWO YEARS since we moved into the 32 Strawberry Street location, the first home, the first clubhouse, for IndyHall. Since then, we’ve accomplished so much together, not the least of which is growing to a size that demanded a new office almost 3 times the size of 32 Strawberry. We’re nearly 100 members strong, and that’s just the people who pay monthly memberships. Dozens more use desks, many while traveling to Philadelphia from all around the world. Our community is much larger, and we’re so proud of that. Our goal of putting Philly on the map for tech, creative, and independent workers is certainly being achieved every day.

It’s also been nearly a year and a half since the first episode of Two Guys on Beer went live on the internet. I wont link to it, because Johnny and Dave will kill me. Lets just say that they’ve become a LOT more comfortable behind the camera, and the show has matured substantially.

The show, not Johnny and Dave.

But I digress. The Two Guys on Beer show has matured and grown enough to gain recognition through the region, from the invited participation in Philly Beer Week, notable appearances at popular beer events, tastings, and tappings around the city, to the most recent announcement of the placement on Philly.com’s beer page! Every day, Two Guys becomes more of a fixture in the Philly beer scene, which is awesome because this is one RAD city to drink beer in!

These two milestones are so exciting, we couldn’t contain ourselves and decided to jam them together and celebrate all at once!

This is where it all begins. Join us at National Mechanics on Tuesday, September 1st. Festivities begin at 7pm.

RSVP now for updates and reminders.

What’s in store? Well, you can be sure of two things: there will be geeks, and there will be beer.

What else do you REALLY need?

We’ve got some more really fun stuff in the works that we’ll be announcing over the next couple of weeks leading up to the event, but now’s the time to RSVP.

And as always, on behalf of IndyHall and Two Guys on Beer, a HUGE thank you to our hosts National Mechanics. No other bar would let us get away with what you do, and we don’t think you’d have us any other way.

Sponsorship Opportunities

Our friends to the south, the Flying Dog Brewery, have agreed to help us out and are helping us get a selection of their beer for the night. We’re working out the details, but we’re still looking for some financial contributions to help make this party awesome.

Contact me (alex@indyhall.org) if you’re interested in sponsorship of this event, which includes the Two Guys on Beer show and it’s thousands of monthly viewers!

They Like Us! They Really Like Us!

Filed under: Community Support, Independents Hall, Kudos, coworking

I’m going to do my best to make this NOT become one of those posts where we pat ourselves on the back. Instead, I wanted to THANK the amazing people that have been leaving reviews in our reservation system.

We get a lot of folks coming through our doors, and we don’t always get a chance to ask them how their day was. More often than not, they come back…which we take as a good sign. But these reviews…wow. You’re all making me blush over here. My #1 favorite part about IndyHall has been hearing what it means to all of you over the last 2 years.

Some choice excerpts:

What sets IndyHall apart is that it combines both the comfort and efficiency together. I am definitely returning to this place. - Arturo Osorio, Lite Member

Most of the members introduced themselves to me. There wasn’t a “don’t look at me” feel that you get when you see people working in a coffee shop. There’s a mixed vibe of getting work done and having fun. - Steve Gruberman, NJcoworking.com

When I was there, it was cupcake day (Thursday) and there was a happy hour of sorts at 4 pm. -Julia, a visiting member of Carrboro Creative Coworking

Got a good chunk of work done, was able to book the conference room for a mid-day project kickoff phone meeting, and enjoyed several cups of darn good coffee complete with half & half and raw sugar. -Kris Gale, Basic Member

IndyHall provides an opportunity to work beside other living/breathing humans and increase my productivity because I’m not sitting around feeling so isolated. - Carolyn Redmond, Drop-in

I had a great day despite the brief power outage. In fact, I think that made it better. -Carl Leiby, Basic Member

Energy nor mass have anything on Indy Hall. It is a wellspring of creative flow. The nucleus around which the crackling excitement of ideas and inspiration revolve. Serendipity incarnate. -Some unnamed poet

However, for those of us who do not dream in SQL, IndyHall is still welcoming. Desks, internet and a place to work that isn’t a coffee shop or a library- who could ask for more!? -Carrie Jurney, wife of one of the geekiest members we’ve ever had.

Indy Hall is a great environment filled with a hard working core of people that sometimes collaborate and share ideas, and other times just leave each other alone to get things done. You can usually find a lunch partner or an answer to some cryptic technical riddle. -Lou Fuiano, Basic Member

When I started at Indyhall over a year ago, I was amazed how fast I became friends with Alex and everyone there. -Jon Bettcher, Basic Member who has since left us for San Francisco, much to our chagrin. We miss you Jon.

Of course, there are others that I didn’t include here because you can read the whole shebang yourself. I sincerely thank all of you from the bottom of my heart for your support and continuing participation in IndyHall. Just wait until this fall. It’s going to get even better!

IndyHall gets a Weekly E-Mail Newsletter

Filed under: Announcements, Events, From the Business Side, Independents Hall, coworking

After nearly 2 years of being open, IndyHall finally has a regular e-mail newsletter.

We haven’t really actively communicated in public via e-mail since the earliest days of IndyHall’s community building, when we had a rather active google group. Over time, that e-mail list fell into the typical form of most of the regional e-mail lists, being primarily job-postings.

Multi-way communication improved within the community despite the loss of the Google group, mostly thanks to Twitter. We no longer had the need to clutter up each others’ inboxes. We extended that with the relaunch of the IndyHall website, including an aggregate Twitter feed of IndyHall members on the home page.

Internally, the IndyHall community continues to use e-mail as an extension to BaseCamp, which we use for community discussions, to-d0s, sharing, ideas, announcements, etc. The problem with Basecamp is that it’s private, only available to IndyHall members.

And so, we move back to e-mail for announcements of weekly activity in the local tech, creative, independent, and entrepreneurial community. We’re using Newsberry, an email newsletter application built by Wildbit, who are active members of the IndyHall community. Our mailings will be weekly (well, that’s the idea anyway) and will include things like:

• Weekly Events. Events coming up soon, both IndyHall and throughout the Philly creative, tech, and entrepreneurial landscape. We can’t link to everything, that’s why we have a calendar (and anything we miss, Technically Phillyand Philly New Media Hub catch). Consider this your weekly “here’s what you’ll find IndyHall folks doing” redux.
• Event Tips. Events you should “save the date” for. Maybe not coming up this week, but coming up soon. Watch this spot if you like to be in the know BEFORE Technically Philly.
• New Member Welcomes! We’ve got new folks coming by every week, and sometimes it can be a few times to IndyHall before you catch someone’s name. We’re gonna try to put the kibosh on that problem by welcoming new community members every week in our newsletter.
• Event Recaps. Missed an event? Feeling guilty? Went to an event, think it was awesome? We’re going to start taking community submissions of short event recaps of local events so you can feel, or at least act, like you are in the know.
• In the News. Any mentions of IndyHall activities, or mentions of our community members, in press. Local or national. You’re getting ink, and we wanna spread the word.

The newsletter itself is meant to be collaborative from the perspective of content, meaning we are welcoming community contributions, tips, articles, ideas….really anything. We’re not pumping out newsletters for the sake of pumping out newsletters, we want to continue being a conduit for useful information for the community, and e-mail lets us reach a whole group of people who aren’t active participants in the social networks we usually use to share.

We’ll be posting a link on the blog to each weekly newsletter as well, for those of you who are more into RSS than you are into e-mail.

Check out this week’s inaugural newsletter!

So any thoughts, tips, article ideas, or even just kudos and high fives…drop us a line.

Oh, interested in subscribing? It couldn’t be easier. Toss your name and email into the form on the left column of any page of this site, or just visit the simple sign up form.

Hat tip to our friends at Caroline Collective in Houston, Texas for the inspiration on the execution of the newsletter.

IndyHall New Member Lunches, every Friday!

Filed under: Community Support, Events

It’s no secret that we’ve had a giant influx of members since moving into the new office, and admittedly haven’t done a very good job of helping everyone get to know each other. Most notably, there’s been very little interaction when new members join. This is to be expected when we grow the way we have, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to try to improve the situation.

Starting next week, we’re going to start having “new member lunches” every Friday. Each week, all new members are invited and encouraged to come out to lunch with other members, and get a chance to hang out outside of the workday. Everybody needs to eat, so this seems like a perfect opportunity to chill out without disrupting anyone’s workday or personal lives.

Of course, we hope this happens more often than just on Fridays and on your own schedules, but we wanted to take the lead one day a week.

Locations are to be determined, but the premise is simple: a group will be heading to lunch during the usual lunch hour (around 12-12:30) and heading somewhere for lunch together. Sometimes, we’ll have brown bag lunches here at the Hall. Anything we can do to mix things up.

You are responsible for paying for your own lunch, we’re just organizing everyone at the same place.

They’ll always be open to everyone, and this first one in particular I imagine will be a sizable group. We’re making RSVP simple, all you need to do is visit this link: http://anyvite.com/qxwlxerbp0 and click “yes” on the right.

Our first new member lunch will be at National Mechanics, next Friday August 14th.

Hope to see you there!

Oh, and you don’t have to be working from IndyHall that day to join us for lunch. If this is an excuse to get out of the house/office and change your scenery over your lunch hour, that’s awesome!

How IndyHall got the best office manager, without hiring an office manager

Filed under: From the Business Side, Independents Hall, IndyHall 201, IndyHall U, coworking

Posted first to the Coworking Google Group, mostly copied here for sharing/recordkeeping.

The question was in response to something rather timely, as we’ve been discussing the issue quite a bit recently.

I wanted to talk about the issue of hiring a space manager from our experience in the last 2 years.

We took a fairly holistic coworking approach to bringing on someone to help me run IndyHall day to day, and here’s how and why.

Dana, our office manager, came on a year ago as an assistant to me, with the job of taking administrative tasks away from me as she saw fit, and finding ways to improve things around the office. That meant I paid her (and still do) a portion of her income out of my pocket, as she helps me…be effective at being me.

At the same time, rather than employ her, we brought her on as a contractor to help administrate IndyHall.

This was important for two reasons:
1) it helped us keep our overhead low
2) it gave us the opportunity to cultivate another successful independent as a part of the IndyHall community

Dana knew that IndyHall could only afford to pay her a certain amount per month. Having a desk to work from is an obvious perk, but a perk nonetheless.

Most importantly, the rest of the time, she needed to find other things to do to make ends meet. Most of you haven’t met her, but Dana is exactly who you’d want to be greeting you when walking into …well, anywhere. She’s smart, friendly, outgoing. She’s the perfect person to have at the other end of the phone lines, email, or on the other side of the desk.
She also had a wealth of skill-sets and mentor-ship at her fingertips in the IndyHall community, a resource that someone with a little gumption and focus can do some real damage with.

And she has.

Rather than be cornered into an admin job, Dana took advantage of the fact that her skills also make her an awesome candidate for doing support work alongside the other talent in the room. She took on the role of doing email support for one of the products born at IndyHall, RipIt. Since then, she’s grown that role to supporting 4 products (including RipIt, Beanstalk, Freckle Time Tracking, and another that I don’t even know anything about) which is now consuming the majority of her time and she’s looking at ways to grow and scale that business of providing affordable customer support to indie products.

What does that mean for IndyHall, now that she’s dedicating more time to her own ventures?

Well, for one, it means we succeeded in cultivating a successful independent (some would say that I’ve ruined her for any “real” job. i consider that a success as well). Not only that, but along the way Dana has single handedly contributed to a sizable chunk of our growth in the last year, by not just being a “desk admin” but someone who makes it part of her job to make sure people in the office are happy. Things like cupcake Thursdays. And that awesome mural many of you have seen in pictures of our old space, was painted by her. And comic relief, of course.

Furthermore, she helped me get my life back, because I was dedicating all of my personal time to running IndyHall AND my own consulting business. Now, I focus on vision and strategy and leadership for IndyHall, and less on the management of it.

But she’s growing this support business. So now what?

With her able to dedicate 20% or less of her time to the office, our admin needs an admin.

So the cycle repeats itself. We’re about to start looking for an intern to repeat the cycle we’ve gone through with Dana in the last year. We’re splitting Dana’s role into two, a general manager and an admin. The best part? Dana figured this out on her own. She split up the role like this:

Indy Hall Administrator -  8:30a – 5:00p Monday – Friday

Responsibilities would include:

- opening the space every morning
- being available at the front during the day to answer any questions
- give tours of the space
- in charge of reservations
- keep daily attendance records
- daily invoicing for drop ins

Indy Hall General Manager-  5-10 hours a week

- monthly invoices
- membership management
- planning events (show and tell, 2 hr. workshops, etc)
- contact form emails
- general management of things that need to be done / improvements to IH
- cupcakes on Thursdays

The plan would be for the admin to report to her, and in time, have the admin become the GM as Dana continues to grow her support business.

And then the cycle continues.

Geoff and I are really excited about this process and how it has worked out, and think it’s great for the long term sustainability of the management of the space. It lets me focus on the stuff I need to focus on, and it creates a constant cycle of opportunity for new people to build their careers in creative management roles.

Of course, if your cashflow allows it, you can just pay someone outright. But we think this aligns more with the goals and values of coworking than just hiring an employee. We truly wanted that person to be a part of the community, rather than a service for the community. By going the route of empowerment rather than employment, we achieved a lot of goals together.

Oh, and if you ever meet Dana at IndyHall, SXSW, or anywhere else…be sure to say hi.

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as Tru Blood, so IndyHall and National Mechanics co-host an August Blood Drive!

Filed under: Community Support, Events, Independents Hall

Over a year ago, we hosted our first Red Cross Blood Drive and got over 20 donors. Back in the spring, we turned it into an annual event and more than DOUBLED the donations with over 50 donors coming out on donation day. As such, we moved the donation site to National Mechanics, who graciously turned our favorite bar and restaurant into a blood donation center.

Never a group to shy away from a challenge, we took on a bid from our Red Cross liaison (and long time friend and community member) Reed Gustow: to match our donation batch from the spring, but this time, in August.

August is a slow month for blood donations, what with everyone going on vacation, to the Shore, etc. We want to buck that trend!

We’ve already got around 50% of the signups necessary to hit our goal of 52 signups. This is where you come in.

If you are an eligible donor and will be in Philadelphia on Monday, August 17th, we need your help.

The drive will run from 9am-3pm, and slots are still available from 10am through the end of the day!

Sign up is easy, especially if you’ve donated before. First time donor? What better way than to do it in the company of friends and community members.

Not only that, but since it’s summertime, the American Red Cross has upped the stakes (no, that’s not a vampire joke). By simply donating blood, you can win either an overnight stay in an Atlantic City Casino Hotel + $200 spending cash, or a $2500 (that’s two thousand, five hundred dollars) Sunoco gas card. One hotel stay is raffled off every week, and at the end of the summer, they’ll be giving out the Sunoco gas card.

Questions?  Drop us a line, or send Reed a message on Twitter (@tangofoxtrot). We hope to see you out on August 17th (its a Monday)!