When two Nomads took over a Co-working space for one month
“Wait. How would you feel about us taking over your space for 1 month?” “You know what? That’s not a bad idea, what kind of setup are you thinking about?”
Little did we know that two weeks later we’d have the keys to a brand new Co-working space in Lisbon.
Why are we writing about this? For one, it’s to reflect on something we did that is out of the ordinary. To motivate other coworkingspaces to build communities that people want to be a part of. And maybe because we’d do this again one day.
Some background info
We had never ran a co-working space before. Ash and myself have probably worked at over a combined number of 60 co-working spaces in the world as customers in the past years, I’m an Online Marketer for E-commerce clients and Ash owns and runs one of the top 1000 websites in the world.
Let me rewind to a few months before. Ash and his wife had decided that after 5 years of roaming around the world, Lisbon was going to be their base for a while. Ash took the initiative to restart the Digital Nomad Meetups that I’d been organising ever since 2015 (at the time, I’d do those through NomadList). He started doing meetups in January 2017 and when I came back to town in April we teamed up and took turns organising different types of events. We’d not only organise meetups, where we would just pick a bar to meet, but also dinners, sailing trips, art nights, Portuguese courses, and more. We also started a weekly free co-working day for the group. Around 20 of us would either work from a café together or we would get in touch with the many co-working spaces in town. We’d ask for free spots during a certain day in return for promotion via the Meetup.com group. At the time of writing this, it has over 1600 members.
Just as a side note, the Summer of 2017 is when Lisbon became the indisputable Nomad Hub of Europe in terms of community. A great illustration is how the Meetup.com group grew over the past months
The Meetup.com group was started in April 2016 by Ioannis Papoutsis before he embarked on his venture with Terminal 3, a group that would go on an organised trip together with different destinations every month. Ash took over the meetup group in January 2017 when he got back to Lisbon.
Back to our co-working days. We started to get inbound requests from various co-working spaces to do these. With over 20 of them in Lisbon alone, we had plenty of choice. Co-working space hOurSpace had just opened a few months before and was asking if we wanted to do one there. The first spot we had available was in August, and Tânia answered that the space was closing for August (a month when many locals leave town for their holidays).
And this is where we didn’t think twice and proposed a Nomad Takeover.
What’s a Nomad Takeover? Somehow we had a clear vision of what was missing at the local co-working spaces and quite frankly, in many co-working spaces in the world.
A welcoming, collaborative community. A place where any Nomad could walk in and instantly be plugged in to an interesting, supportive and fun group of people.
While sorting out the legal implications of our collaboration with hOurSpace, we set up a few goals for ourselves:
- Give the Nomad community in Lisbon what we think they will appreciate — a platform to meet, connect, collaborate, get sh*t done but also have fun.
- Learn something new ourselves, how is it to run a co-working space and what is the market like? Are our assumptions, observations and ideas correct?
- Offer hOurSpace the opportunity to learn with us and from our experience, and give it back with new energy and ideas to grow the customer base.
- Not lose money.
The 14th of August, we opened up shop and called it Nomad Takeover with hOurSpace. We made up a logo, our own social channels and Pricing packages.
When we started, the packages were:
- €200 incl VAT premium membership for the whole month
- €45 incl VAT for a 5-day pass
- €10 Incl VAT for a 1-day pass
A few details about the space:
- It has 13 desks, a meeting room for up to 6 people and a balcony
- The original price model of hOurSpace was €2 per hour if you’d buy a package of 2–10 hours, and €1.50 if you’d buy a package bigger than 10 hours. We decided to still offer this as an option in case someone would ask for it, but expected this would give us a lot of trouble to manage capacity if we’d fill up the space. There were also day passes and a monthpass.
- The space had never been used at it’s full capacity of 13 spots.
- The location is in the center, but still not in the “Nomad Center”. If you’re a nomad and you like walking everywhere for maximum 15 minutes, you’ll know what we mean.
- Coffee and fruit was offered for free. We decided to continue this service.
Week 1
We announced our first day as Nomad Takeover was free (and that there would be cake). Even though we only had 13 desks, 18 people showed up.
Looks like fun right? Well it was, but it was also a nightmare. What we didn’t know is that the internet wasn’t strong enough for more than 6–8 people. The internet provider wasn’t delivering the internet speeds on the contract (100/100) and it just blocked completely whenever someone would download or upload big files or even just make a Skype call.
We decided to back out on promoting the space to the Digital Nomad community until we had this sorted. We did however announce our first “Pay what you want Friday” with limited available spots to avoid the internet from collapsing again. Interestingly enough, most people paid the equivalent of a daypass (€10) or if they were only in for half the day, around €5 or even €8. “Pay what you want” seemed an invitation for non-committing nomads to come check the space out and didn’t attract non-payers (except for 1 person during the whole month).
In the meantime we had also asked the internet provider for an upgrade, so we would have 1GB/100 speeds. It was pretty frustrating because it took the Internet provider a week to finally make the change. But from then on, the internet was blazing fast and we were motivated to start again.
That week we promoted “First day is free” to get people to come check out the internet speed for themselves, in case they’d heard through the Nomad Grapevine that our internet was crap.
Week 2
On that same day we had our first NomadTalk. NomadTalks were talks by interesting members of the Digital Nomad community who were happy to share their skills. Justin West did his talk about “Hacking the Gig economy” and explained to us how he was running his Content Agency by recruiting writers on platforms such as Upwork. When we first promoted the event a week earlier we asked for a symbolic attendance fee of €2 to avoid No-Shows, which would be charged directly using paypal via Meetup.com. A few days passed and no one signed up for the talk. Disappointed about this, we removed the €2 and hoped for the best. On the day of the talk, this brought about 15 new people to the space for the event, when our maximum capacity was around 25. Not a bad start, we thought.
That second week we felt like we wouldn’t recover from our internet speed mistake. The few people who came used their first free day and didn’t return or sign up for our “rest of the month” pass. People who came to the first NomadTalk didn’t seem to come back either. It’s hard to promote a space as the go to place to meet people, when there are barely any others there. Interestingly enough, “Pay what you want Friday” seemed to attract some more people again. This is why we decided to discard our “First day is free” and from the third week on every first day was “Pay what you want”.
Week 3
In the third week, we had the second NomadTalk. This one was by Kalle Moen about “How to run A/B tests that work” and had good attendance. We couldn’t charge upfront to ensure attendance as our previous attempt had failed. So, we calculated about a 30% no-show rate based on our experience with meetups and other events. We made 30 spots available for the event. This seemed just about right since we had an attendance of about 20. This became our strategy for managing attendance from then on.
For newcomers, offering the first day as a “Pay what you want” seemed to work better than a free day. Somehow people would value the space and more people came back for a daypass or a 5-day pass. Slowly things were looking up.
This was also the week when we asked many of those first 18 people who came to our opening day for feedback. We had promised them they could come back for another free day to make up for the shitty internet day. Common reasons for some people to not come back was Location, and some had already paid for a coworkingspace until the end of August. September was however approaching, so we decided to change our package a bit.
The 5 day pass was still €45, but if you’d sign up for two of them, we would automatically upgrade you to a premium member. Premium members would get a locker, free use of a screen and keyboard and 2 hours of free usage of the meeting room.
The tipping point was somewhere at the middle of week 3. More of the first-timers came back, and so did some of the people who came to our opening day.
“Pay what you want Friday” was a success again, so we started promoting other events to acquire more customers. “Productive Monday’s” where we would set an intention at the beginning of the day with attendees and collectively used Pomodoro’s to get stuff done. Some people had mentioned they needed headshots done, so we found a Photographer who was willing to offer an affordable package if we’d get the customers. Our goal was more footfall, more eyeballs, and a way to support our community.
Week 4
With two NomadTalks that week, one by Ali Binazir about “How to be a compelling speaker” and one by Tal Gur on “How to Discover Your Calling and Master The Art of Fully Living” we had a full on schedule. An event every day of the week. We’d film the NomadTalks and share them on our youtube channel afterwards, we’d share photos of our lunches and other activities through our Social channels.
Our usual Digital Nomad Meetups didn’t stop, we kept them going. And the word also started spreading at those. People would come to us and ask if they could come try the space out or reserve them a spot.
The hard work was really paying off. We had several days which were 8AM-12AM affairs but it was worth it! Our community started helping each other more and more. One day, a few people showed up at the space and said “We’re here for the meetup”. We had no idea of what was going on. Apparently, one of our premium members had decided to use the meeting room for a cryptocurrency meetup! It was the moment that we felt this had truly turned into a community co-working space.
We kept up the successful events, discarded the unsuccessful ones, and kept trying new ones. We hosted a workshop on “Personal Growth: Emotional Intelligence and Self Awareness” by Passionise, tried things like “Themed Thursdays” where we invited three Pro Bloggers to come work with us and offered others the opportunity to work alongside them and ask questions. We’d have loved to do more of these but we had only 5 weeks to work with. There are many more ideas that we’d like to try out!
September was an amazing month for Nomads in Lisbon as there was also the DNX Global event and the DCX. We had a couple of people at the coworking space who were in Lisbon for those events, so that got us some extra footfall.
Week 5
This was our last week when we were just getting used to having a full house. We knew about a bunch of things that worked, we knew what didn’t work, had a great workflow and the vibe in the co-working space was exactly what we hoped it would be.
The NomadTalks this week kept coming from the Lisbon Nomad Community, with Branko Mijatovich about “How to Quote what you’re actually worth” and Kat Stroehm about “How to optimize your Facebook Ads”. Everyone who we invited to talk had very different skills and topics to speak about. It was amazing to see that even when some of them had never spoken about it in front of a group, they each did an amazing job.
Until the end we kept the NomadTalks going, even when we noticed we didn’t acquire that many customers from it. It was a way to give our community a moment to recognise and share their own expertise and to help others with it. It also helped to tighten the sense of community at the co-working space, when some of the members would attend (and support) the talks as well. Our members were definitely proud to be part of a space where talks like these would happen regularly. Several more of them came forward as they wanted to give their own talks but we didn’t have any space left in the schedule.
Our Daily Lunches would not only be a way for the members to stop what they were doing and get to talk with each other, it was a way for other nomads (some who were new in town) to meet people, so we always had those open to visitors as well.
Luckily, we were able to keep selling the 5 day passes as the owner of the co-working space agreed to letting people use up their days until the end of the month.
Conclusions and takeaways
So our four goals were:
- Give the Nomad community a platform to meet, connect, collaborate, work and have fun.
- Learn something new
- Help hOurSpace grow the customer base and
- Not lose money.
We learned that this is very hard work but also incredibly rewarding. Watching our community members take to the space and treat it as their own was the best that we could’ve hoped for, and it happened!
As we filled up, more and more ideas started coming in from our community. They wanted to be a part of the process and with more time, we would’ve definitely brought more of these ideas to fruition.
During Week 5, it was obvious that our members didn’t want the takeover to end, neither did we! We would have loved to showcase more talks from the community. Given more time, we’d have tried out a larger variety of events to gauge response from our members as well.
What would we do differently if we’d do a takeover again? The one thing that we’d do differently next time is how long the Takeover takes place. If we would have had 2–3 months to grow the community we’d have more time to really solidify it, try different events and tactics.
Another thing we would do differently is giving ourselves enough time to create a buzz beforehand. While we were sorting out the legal agreement we wanted to hold off from announcing anything. After signing the contract we had about a week to start promoting the takeover.
Learning new things — boy has this been a learning curve! One where we couldn’t really afford to screw up, since we felt responsible not only for the community but also Tânia and hOurSpace.
We delivered our report to Tânia and desegmented everything we tried in those 5 weeks. What worked, what didn’t, and how we would recommend moving forward with the space, with whichever Target Audience she would decide to go.
Although we felt like we hit a good stride with our final pricing plans, we believe we could’ve squeezed out more value on both sides of the equation by fine tuning what we offer. This would need time and responsive iteration. In case you’re wondering: we didn’t lose any money on this experiment. Phew!
Ultimately, we validated our initial hypothesis. There is a need in Lisbon for:
A welcoming, collaborative community. A place where any Nomad could walk in and instantly be plugged in to an interesting, supportive and fun group of people.
This need almost certainly exists in various other nomad hubs. If you want to ask us any questions or if you’d like to know more, get in touch with us.
