How to Start a Student Coworking Space
In the Fall of 2012, I was standing in an empty 5400 square foot basement. 18 months and $150,000 later, I was standing in the exact same spot. But this time, I was with 300+ supporters celebrating the launch of Spark Boulder.
Since then, I’ve had countless conversations with students across the country who want to create similar spaces. It’s inspired me to share with others about the process during those 18 months that led to Spark’s creation. This was originally posted on Spark’s Blog, but I decided to refresh it and post on Medium.
We’re also currently doing our next round of fundraising. You can donate here: https://www.generosity.com/education-fundraising/help-spark-educate-colorado-s-startup-talent/x/15734352
Step 1: Build an awesome team
The first step in any great business is building a team. We brought together a diverse team of student leaders who helped make Spark a reality. It was important that these students came from different disciplines and colleges because one of the big value props is the ability to bring together students from across the campus.
The initial founding team included Bill Shrum, an environmental design major, Ben Buie, an MBA student, and myself, an Electrical and Computer Engineering major. We met weekly over the course of the spring of 2012 with various constituents such as Lexi Winer, who was in student government, and others in the university, building the initial vision and financial estimates of a co-working space.
Finally, we met Jamie Wise, a Communications Major, and Stephanie Bigelow, an Architecture student. Colin Drake and Shane Blick came on as the first employees right before we opened. We truly had a cross-campus team of entrepreneurial leaders who helped not only build the financial model, the brand, and the website, but also did all of the architecture and interior design. This both reduced our costs and helped create a positive story that attracted the right type of students and people to help us along the way.
Building an extended team
Part of building an awesome team is knowing when to seek expert advice that may not be part of the typical student knowledge base. For example, getting legal help is critical, and many law firms may be interested in providing pro bono assistance because of the long term connections that a student startup space will bring to the firm.
In May of 2013, I met David Cline, who at the time was working for Archer Bay. I told him about the concept of Spark, and he wanted to know more. He sent me this follow up note:
I sat down for lunch the very next week with him, his CEO, and Spark partner Ben Buie, and on the spot they said “we’re in.”
David’s firm wanted to support us financially as well as with free legal work, and committed to renting out an office in the space once it opened. Ben and I were blown away, but looking back it made perfect sense for a small law firm to take a leap like they did. As a transactional law firm, they’ve put themselves in the middle of a whirlwind of startup activity and up-and-coming entrepreneurial leaders who may not be clients today but are great relationships for the long term.
David and his partner, Stuart, helped us set up Spark as a non-profit. We chose to be a non-profit for two main reasons.
- We wanted to have a good relationship with the school.
- The core mission of Spark was to enable others — student entrepreneurs, companies, accelerators, and events. We wanted to be driven by that mission, not by profit. That being said, we do have a viable business model in co-working that allows us to break even without relying on donations.
Notice that getting donations was not part of the decision to be a non-profit. This is because most companies can give money and write it off as a marketing expense, so it doesn’t matter if they get the tax benefit.
David and Stuart also helped us negotiate the lease with the landlord. This was huge. The landlord had a legal team on their side, and there is no way we could have gotten the deal we did without David & Stuart on our side. They helped negotiate a rate far below market value, with a generous TI budget. Suddenly, we had something real. But, we didn’t yet have enough money to take the space and turn it into somewhere that students would love to work.
Step 2: awesome early adopters and supporters. Play the student card.
After building a great team, we built a simple sponsor guide that had donation levels from $10-$25,000, with a wide range of benefits from stickers to naming the conference rooms. Then, I started sending emails to CEOs of local companies. They had a subject line of “The Best Thing to Happen at CU”, and went something like this:
Hey NAME,
As an undergrad in engineering at CU Boulder, I’ve been frustrated by the lack of university connection to the startup community. So, I’m working on fixing that by creating Spark Boulder, a student entrepreneurship center just a few minutes walk from campus on the Hill. It will be a space to incubate student companies and host internship fairs and hackathons. It will also build a much needed bridge between the university and the Boulder/Denver startup community. You can read about it more on David Cohen’s blog.
I thought COMPANY or yourself might like to support something like this. It will be a great pool of student talent to be involved with. Let me know if you are interested in hearing more.
Thanks for your help,
Fletcher Richman
This email was crafted and optimized through a series of iterations. It has a couple of key elements that made it successful:
- It’s short and to the point so a CEO will actually read it.
- It’s got a compelling subject line and gets straight to the point with the first sentence.
- It’s got a couple of links that allow someone who is interested to learn more
- There’s some validation that important people are supporting this already from the link to David Cohen’s blog.
- I played the student card in the first line. This is key. People love students.
- It’s not a hard sell. I’m not asking them to give money now, just piquing their interest and trying to get them on the phone.
The email worked incredibly well. I had over 75% of CEOs email me back, got most of them on the phone or met in person, and was able to get a wide variety of excited and generous donors. In total, we were able to raise about $150,000 in donations, as well as a variety of in kind services including Herman Miller furniture, IT equipment from Applied Trust, donations from TapInfluence, Arcstone Partners, Pivotal Labs, Zayo, and many more.
Step 3: BUILD AND LAUNCH!
Now we had an awesome team, a space, and some money. We’d done most of the hard work, but still needed to actual build out the space. We spent some time finding and negotiating with a contractor. It’s extremely important to be as specific as possible with contractors when they are giving you a bid.
Try to have all the space design finalized before getting a bid, and make sure you get a bid from 2–3 different contractors. Ask tons of questions, and keep communication lines with your contractor as open as possible. The other thing to keep in mind is that contract work always ends up being finished 2–3 months later than you think. We originally wanted to open in Fall of 2013, and kept getting pushed back into the spring of 2014.
If building out a space is not an option for your budget, consider renting an existing space to learn more about your needs and then building out a larger space later. Working with the university or another organization to find a smaller or free space to start could be a good first step option.
The one positive piece of the fact that the contract work took longer than possible was that it allowed us to build a lot of hype. There was some impact in terms of credibility, but building anticipation seemed to be more important. First I told people we were launching in October of 2013, and got a few friends to sign up and commit to being members of the space. Then it was pushed back to January, and I got a few more people signed up. Come January, we were almost done with construction but not quite, so I pushed it to February and we were able to get a few more signups.
The contractors finished the first week of February, but the space wasn’t done. We still had to paint and stain it, which we decided to do ourselves. Although that also took way longer than I thought it would, it had an amazing side effect. Over 50 different students came in over the course of 3 weeks to help with painting and staining. This was the core of our initial community, which is key in any successful coworking space.
All of these students actual helped make Spark a reality, so they were invested in making it work. On February 21st of 2014, we officially launched. We had over 300 people in the room — all of our donors, supporters, mentors, and students. We offered a final discount for students who signed up on our launch day, allowing us to get up to almost 75 members the first day we opened.
Today, Spark has been alive and running for 2+ years. We’ve seen hundreds of student companies come through our space, and hosted thousands of students/community members for events. Our big change was making our coworking memberships free for students, and adding classes that help students get the skills they need for an internship or entry level job.
I hope this is helpful for students who want to create a similar non-profit coworking space at colleges around the country! It also stands as an amazing example of how much students can accomplish while still in college. If you’re a young entrepreneur trying to builds something, feel free to hit me up with questions, happy to help!
