A Co-working Community in the Cloud?

What I’d like to see in the ideal online platform for solopreneurs

The announced death of Mailbox has made me reassess my current communication strategies, lately. Not that I actually used Mailbox anymore. On the desktop, I have yet to find anything that meets my e-mail needs better than Apple Mail with a couple of add-ons (MailTags and MailHub in particular), and Spark has been my go-to iOS e-mail app for the last few months. Unfortunately for Spark, though, Mailbox’s demise has made me switch back to good ol’ Mail on my iPhone, too.

Don’t get me wrong. Spark is a cool app, but if Mailbox couldn’t make it in mailspace, what are the odds that Spark — or any other app — can escape the same sort of fate? A Product Hunt user has put together a list of alternatives to Mailbox, and there are some pretty cool apps on that list, but most of the more interesting ones focus on Gmail, and I’m an iCloud man.

Unfortunately for Spark, Mailbox’s demise has made me switch back to gool ol’ Mail on my iPhone.

I use iCloud for various reasons. I used to use Gmail, but… well, I don’t even remember exactly why I stopped initially. Looking at Gmail now, though, I just don’t quite get the appeal. Why would you want to keep your e-mail for ever and ever and label and search it for all eternity? And what about all the spam? And the creepy advertising algorithms? Plus somebody out there keeps using the wrong e-mail address when they create online accounts for themselves — a natural-enough mistake given how addresses work in Gmail — so most of what comes to my Gmail account these days is actually newsletters for this other person. Ick.

So I use iCloud because Apple. I use iCloud because not-Google. Yeah, I’m a fanboi. So sue me! I use iCloud because it’s simple and relatively pain-free. It’s the least annoying way for me to get e-mail, which is annoying enough all on its own, regardless of the platform or app.

But now there’s Slack and message bots and the chattification of everything, so surely it won’t be long until e-mail goes the way of telegrams, telex, snail mail, and the fax machine. Unfortunately, though, while great for organizations and other stable teams, Slack isn’t so great for the self-employed. For freelancers, the concept of teamwork tends to be much more fluid.

This fluidity is the main reason we become freelancers in the first place, but it is also the source of most of our biggest challenges, such as solitude and the constant battle to establish credibility. Physical bricks-and-mortar coworking spaces are a great way of overcoming these challenges if you can find one in your area and can afford one. What I would like, though — in addition to this — is a true coworking space in the cloud.

Slack isn’t so great for the self-employed. For freelancers, the concept of teamwork tends to be much more fluid.

There are actually a couple of startups on my radar that are working in this direction. The only one I know of for freelancers of all sorts is Domino. The other that I’ve been very much interested in as a translator is Fluently. Both of these companies are working in the same general direction of helping freelancers help each other to attract well-paying customers and provide them with tangible added value.

They’re the only ones I’ve come across that really grok what it means to be self-employed these days. All the other freelance-job sites I’ve seen give all the power to the customer and don’t really do anything to help freelancers work together as a community. In the world of translating specifically, some sites kinda sorta do this, but they all end up being places where the emphasis is on low cost for the customer and not on the actual quality of the work being done.

[Domino and Fluently are] the only ones I’ve come across that really grok what it means to be self-employed these days.

With true coworking spaces, whether physical or virtual, what happens is that solopreneurs establish a sort of unified presence and pooled resources which lends them greater credibility in the eyes of the customer. But this greater credibility comes not out of the mere fact that there’s a single location the client can refer to to find the cheapest labor, but because the people who work there all work together to make each other better professional creatives. The site or the coworking space becomes a symbol of quality, credibility and professionalism, not of convenience and low cost.

But how did I get here from e-mail and communication? What I would like to see replace e-mail for the solopreneur is a combination of physical and virtual coworking. Focusing on the virtual here, what I want is a platform that gives me an awesome landing page to show off my services, and from that landing page, customers and other freelance colleagues can interact with me — Slack-like — to discuss and collaborate on potential and ongoing projects.

As I said, Domino and Fluently are both working in this direction, but it’s still very early days for both of them — although they both do have Slack groups that I participate in. While I wait patiently for their platforms to develop, I think I’ll just have to make do with my simple, reliable Apple Mail and stop chasing the pipe dream of the “ideal” e-mail app.

Related reading:

The True Potential of the Freelance Economy

5 lessons from Mailbox's shut-down