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.

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.

It’s been quiet around here. Why?

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

Well, the short version of the story is, we’ve been busy. The office has been a constant stir of excitement, new faces, new developments, and a whole lot of Alex being on the road. (So crazy that I’m now referring to myself in third person).

First off, I wanted to thank the people who’ve been stepping up to help complete the list of projects at the new IndyHall office. Dedicating your own time to help get things complete is appreciated beyond words, especially when it comes in the form of manual labor. Members and non-members alike have contributed, and it’s astonishing. This community is truly fantastic.

I also appreciate everyone’s patience while things have been in flux. We’ve tossed a HUGE rock in the pond that was IndyHall, and everyone’s done a killer job riding the waves. With everyone’s hard work and persistence, we’re continuing to grow and develop IndyHall as more than just a space, but as a community.

Which is what this post is about. The summer has been tricky, with weird schedules and lots of new faces, it’s been tough to make sure that people are getting to know each other at IndyHall. By the fall, I really want to return to a regular schedule of events, both at the office and outside of the office, to make sure that our presence isn’t limited to when people are working.

This is where all of you come in:

First, IDEAS! If you’ve got events/gatherings/concepts that you think would benefit IndyHall, speak up. Even if we don’t get to it, sharing these ideas always get people thinking in new ways.

And with that, I want to kick off a couple of my own ideas to let you ruminate on, and if anyone has interest in discussing them further, just tap me (virtually, or f’real if I’m in the office).

1) A weekly open lunchroom. I’ve been really enjoying the ability to sit somewhere other than my desk and eat lunch, catch up with people, etc. Observationally, it looks like I’m not the only one.

Any thoughts on opening our lunchroom to other local peeps, sort of brown-bag style? Something really informal, no planned material or anything, just a certain day of the week that people know it’s cool to come by and eat their lunch at IndyHall.

2) Newsletter! So, we’re a bunch of twittering fools, right? Well, not everyone’s on twitter…not everyone who’s already at IndyHall, and definitely not everyone who’s yet to stop by. Archaic as it is, e-mail is still probably the best way to update LOTS of people…and we have a bunch of people signed up to be getting those. Shouldn’t we be using that to let people know what’s going on at IndyHall?

So before we get too deep into execution on this idea, I’m curious what SORTS of things you think should go in the newsletter? I’m thinking something monthly at least, but possibly every 2 weeks.

I think that’s all for now…oh, in case you’re wondering where I am over the next couple of weeks, I’m doing this thing: www.whuffaoke.com

You can catch me on the livestream starting tonight around 6pm PST, and we’ll be coming through Phily on July 26/27. You’re ALL invited to come sing Karaoke on our crazy karaoke winnebago!

peace, love, and coworking,

Alex