From the Video Archives: Coworking Questions answered for Web Worker Daily in 2009
Filed under: coworking, FAQs, From the Business Side, Independents Hall, IndyHall 201, IndyHall U, Videos
Wow…a WHOLE YEAR AGO, I answered a bunch of questions for Web Worker Daily in video format. I completely forgot about them until Gerard Sychay from Cincy Coworks tweeted about them. They answer questions that we answer a lot, so I thought it’d be valuable to post here.
IndyHall History:
Bootstrapping:
Diversity
The Future of IndyHall (from last year)
Coworking Tips
IndyHall 201: How IndyHall Communicates with it’s Community
Filed under: coworking, FAQs, From the Business Side, Independents Hall, IndyHall 201
This week, I got an e-mail from Julie Z. Rosenberg of the Brooklyn Creative League in Park Slope, asking about our newsletter. First off, I always appreciate when people reach out to others for a hand as well as Julie did, as she a great job by asking specific questions and keeping her message brief.
I decided that it could be valuable to share what I shared with her on the blog for others, for future reference and posterity.
Specifically, Julie was asking about format, frequency, content, and distribution.
The rest of this post contains a modified version of my response to her.
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When IndyHall began as a community, and didn’t have a space yet, we operated almost entirely out of a public google group (now defunct), and on Twitter. Once we had a space though (beginning in mid-late 2007), there became a need for public, and semi-private correspondence to happen on different channels. It didn’t make sense to bother everyone with office goings-on, but we also didn’t want people left out!
Right now, our communication stack looks like this, but we’re still experimenting and things change all the time.
Internal:
- We use Basecamp as a message board for all members. Everyone who’s on the roster can post messages to everyone else who is a member.
- We use Campfire as a real-time chat that’s mostly populated by members, but is also open to the public (http://campfire.indyhall.org)
- We still use Twitter a lot
External:
- Our blog (this thing you’re reading) has always been our first line of defense, along with Twitter.
- We’ve used Facebook and AnyVite for event RSVPs, and link them from blog posts and twitter. AnyVite rocks because it doesn’t require a login to RSVP, which Facebook does.
- At some point, we realized that not everyone is following Twitter (or their RSS reader) as religiously as they do e-mail, so a traditional e-mail redux would be valuable.
At this point, we’ve had to work ourselves into a bit of a production schedule to get one e-mail out every other week. One of our full time members, Stephen Winkler, has taken the reigns of the project and is in charge of organizing stories for the newsletter, rallying/drafting content. Dana, our office manager, supplies a couple of specific segments. Other community members have taken ownership of specific segments of the newsletter.
It’s finally gotten into a groove (I think we’re 4 editions in with an actual production timeline), and we’ve only missed the ship date once :).
Bottom line is that we’ve found that no single channel is effective enough. We’re always morphing along with our community and trying to find the balance, and expect that the balance will always be changing!
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By the way, are you subscribed to our bi-weekly newsletter yet? It’s easy, just head to IndyHall.org if you’re not already on the site, and the sign up is on the left hand side of every page!
How IndyHall got the best office manager, without hiring an office manager
Filed under: coworking, From the Business Side, Independents Hall, IndyHall 201, IndyHall U
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.
Coworking 201: Where are all of the people?
Filed under: coworking, FAQs, Independents Hall, IndyHall 201
Every time I see someone who’s struggling to find members for their coworking space and finds themselves sitting alone in an empty room more often than not, I cry a little inside.
As you may have realized by now, there’s not a lot of incentive to leave your house for another room with nobody in it. In order for the value proposition of coworking to be complete, there needs to be *people* to cowork with!
So you’ve already made the mistake of opening the space without any community buy-in. What can you do?
We suggest rituals.
Consistency is critical for building up the mass, and humans are habitual creatures. If you can come up with a way (Tony had some great suggestions) to get people in the mindset of “today’s Tuesday, it’s coworking day!”, you win. Better yet, give them a reason to bring others, and tell others about their coworking day.
Have you also done research on your price point? If the value proposition isn’t well balanced (cost for the day >= the benefit of the day), you’re going to lose repeat visitors and ultimately, members who join.
Are you in an “ideal” location? Location is hard to change once you’ve already started a space, but our friends in Miami learned the hard way the problems with a poorly selected location.
You need to find out where people who might be interested in your space are already hanging out, and become a part of what they are doing. Don’t show up and try to be a pitch-master, you probably aren’t.
When I say “be a part” of what they’ve got going on, I mean pay attention to their culture, their community, and look for ways to give to them something that they are missing. If you can become a part of their day to day rituals, you’ll begin to feel the formation of the critical mass you’ve been looking for.
No events to be a part of? Start throwing some of your own to get the ball rolling. We started early on with The Junto, Cream Cheese Sessions (our variation of Jelly), and lots of happy hours.
No matter what, you’re not going to see change overnight. Keep at it. Remember, ritual = consistency.
Also, listen to what the people who ARE coming out are interested in, and modify your events for them and their interests. Learning how to process feedback early is going to help you a LOT in the long run.
IndyHall 201: Communities of Trust
Filed under: coworking, FAQs, Independents Hall, IndyHall 201, Kudos, Movies, Videos
We’re back with another IndyHall 201 video. This time, we’re talking about the importance of establishing trust as an important community value in your coworking space.
A few weeks back, I gave a professional development seminar at the Comcast Interactive Media group, and this topic came up indirectly. The question was asked, “what makes a coworking space such a hotbed of innovation?” While the diversity of talent is certainly one of the aspects, even diversity provides little value without a network of trusted between the talent that works together.
Proximity helps too, but the most important thing you can do is lead by example. More on that topic coming up soon.
In the mean time, enjoy our video on building communities of trust!
IndyHall 201: The Iterative Process
Filed under: coworking, FAQs, Independents Hall, IndyHall 201, Kudos, Movies, Videos
A couple of weeks back, we posted a rather long “FAQs” style video that Geoff and I shot while in Austin for SXSW. We’ve gotten quite a bit of positive feedback from that post, so we’re glad to continue that effort.
Only this time, we’re not asking you for nearly an hour of your time. We’re going to keep these under 10 minutes.
We’ve started a series that we’ll call “IndyHall 201″ for the time being. These are some of the things that we consider important fundamentals, but are a little bit higher level than the usual line of questioning we get, hence the “201″ class level. Get it? Good. Moving on.
One of the first topics we wanted to cover was one that we take for granted, but people outside of the software world don’t necessarily have exposure to:“The Iterative Process”. In this video, Geoff and I spend a few minutes talking about Agile as a software development methodology, as well as decision making skills that we’ve employed along the way while developing IndyHall.
A whole lot of digging into localized trends happens on the Coworking google group, usually to appease an investor.
One of my favorite quotes is from Josh Kopelman (Philly/SF Venture Capitalist, founder of Half.com):
“I’d much rather fund an entrepreneur that can adapt to change than someone who claims they can predict the future.”
http://twitter.com/alexknowshtml/statuses/783133234
Rather than asking what our (or any coworking space’s) membership, growth, square footage, expense numbers look like, why not ask what things we attribute to changes in our numbers, and how we operate around those changes?
Nobody ever asks us those questions.
The answers to those questions are the ones that provide insight into how to iterate, and grow your coworking space and community, without trying to predict the future. They’re going to make you a stronger entrepreneur, and a happier person in general. How’s that for Kool-aide.
We hope you enjoy this installment, and be on the lookout for more to come! Feel free to post questions here or in the video time line.
