The Hard Part Isn't What You Think -- also, building coworking maps?
This week's piece: Conversation-Hard Problems
I originally wrote this week's piece in May of 2018, but it's an idea that I refer back to often. Essentially, it's too easy for people to frame challenges within what they know. It's a version of "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Some variations I'm trying to capture:
- “To a hammer, nails are the highest calling.”
- “To a hammer, nails are the hardest part.”
The problem is when you’re acting like a hammer you just stare down nails all day you forget what you’re even hammering together in the first place. Are you actually nailing things together that build towards something larger and more useful? Or are you sometimes banging nails into wood just because hey, that's what you do?
One of the most revealing things about shipping something is you are confronted with all the pointless hammering you'd been doing. All those to-do items that felt so urgent before often feel utterly meaningless and out of touch.
Last Week
Speaking of shipping, I shipped something within a day last week. A few friends have moved to Madison recently and they've all asked about coworking spaces in town. Having been through the search myself, I knew there was no single source that makes it easy to compare spaces.
So I threw together a Notion doc that makes it easy to compare them all on one page. Check it out here: Madison Coworking Spaces.
My goal is essentially two sided 1) Make it easy for people to find a coworking space that matches what they're looking for. 2) Help coworking spaces fill desks so that they can succeed.
The page seemed to really resonate with people. I posted it on the Madison subreddit where it got 62 upvotes and 20 comments from other people. This is pretty high engagement for that subreddit, and I think it was in the top 2 posts for the day. Before posting my rough grading rubric was as follows:
- bad: downvotes
- ok: any upvotes
- cool: 5 upvotes
- great: 20 upvotes
- maybe I should do something more with this: 50 upvotes
So I hit the "maybe I should do something with this" threshold, and now the question is "what does that look like?" Is there a business here? I'm not sure, but probably not a big one.
I talked to the director of the space I work at which helped me get a sense for the possibilities. Basically, coworking spaces are always looking for exposure, and yes, some of them do spend money on advertising. She also showed me coworker.com, which is a version of what a business around this sort of information could become.
So will I pursue this to any degree? I'm not sure. It's a bad business for me for several reasons:
- People only look for a coworking space once. Once you find a space you're happy with, there's no reason for you to return to the site. This minimizes the number of visitors you can really hit.
- Coworker.com does not charge a lot of money for their offerings to spaces. Their tiers for charging spaces are $9/$17/$26 per month, which explains their focus on listing as many spaces as they can across the world.
- I'm not sure it plays off of any unique strengths I have (besides perhaps a strong desire to organize information well).
Reasons that it's a good business for me:
- It provides a genuinely useful service that is helpful to both coworking spaces and those looking for coworking spaces.
- I've been working out of coworking spaces for 6 years so I feel connected to the problem.
- It's a bad business (for the reasons listed above) so there won't be any hyper-funded large competitors that comes in and crush you.
- Coworker.com is not very good and their SEO seems poor (they don't show up in the top 2 pages for any "city name coworking" queries I entered).
- Coworking is a growing industry.
- Maintenance is simple enough that it could potentially be delegated.
- It's a small enough idea that it could be tested quickly.
So, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this idea. I'm currently considering trying to build the site for a single city or two as pretty strictly timeboxed efforts to see how it goes. Build out the content, try selling some ad space, and see where we're at.
That's it for this week, would love to hear your thoughts :)
Benedict