I Built A Coworking Community To 5000 Members
Hello Everyone, My name is Simon Lewis, founder of CoWorking Days which I started more than 5 years ago as a way for me to find other like-minded remote workers I could work with in cafes around Athens in Greece which is where I lived at the time.
Our first tag line was “Are You Bored Of Working At Home Alone” which was a simple reflection of how I felt at the time as I had been working remotely for years and didn't have any coworking spaces close to where I lived.
The idea was to create a community of remote workers who could explore the city together to help us work more productively and socially at different venues around the city.
Imagine this was 2016 well before remote work was a thing … We now have 10 communities in different cities around the world (around 5000 members) who meet up regularly to work socially and I run the biggest community of 1700 in Barcelona, Spain where we have two events per month and have partnered with coworking spaces which enabled us to have our biggest meetup of 70 people pre-pandemic. At the very start of the pandemic, we were able to pivot quickly to online events within 7 days to help our community cope with what was happening around them in different countries.
Post pandemic we have partners who help us connect our global community with an AI Match Making tool & community Perks our members can take advantage of around the world to add extra value to our members.
What's your backstory and how did you get into entrepreneurship?
I have worked in marketing/business development and events mainly in travel and tourism for many years and attended many conferences around the world and been on many extended business trips visiting clients. One day I realized I didn’t need an office as most of my work was online and if I did go to my office it was simply to plan the next business trip or conference. I, therefore, decided to give up my office and work from home back in 2009!
I soon realized the main thing I missed was other people to work around so I moved to work from coffee shops but the next realization was that I missed the sense of community and accountability of working around people you know and could potentially collaborate with.
They validate my idea I used my extensive social media network and started with Facebook groups and invited people to join me for a day working in a cafe on the beach in Athens and people in my network from around the world saw the events I shared and contacted me to ask if they could start a community in their city.
The most interesting city was Cape Town South Africa where I used to live and a business friend contacted me saying the city would be interested in attracting digital nomads to experience the startup life and cafe culture in Cape Town which led to me creating an event in London called Swap London For Cape Town which was hosted by a local coworking space in the Shoreditch and attracted over 60 people. The event was sponsored by Wesgro which promotes business and tourism in the Western Cape of South Africa and they selected 10 people startups and entrepreneurs from the attendees to go on an all-expenses-paid trip to Cape Town so that they could experience the city and be part of our CoWorking Safari.
At that time I was working freelance creating influencer marketing campaigns and events for international travel brands and destinations so I had no real financial backing to create CoWorking Days so you could call it a bootstrapped side hustle that I was passionate about as I knew working remotely would be a trend in the future.
Take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How did you go from day 1 to today?
Over the years I have tried many bootstrapped entrepreneurial ideas and always like to create new ideas and take them to market quickly to see what potential clients or customers think which of course you can only do with ideas that don't take a major financial investment.
If you try to prevent a mistake you waste valuable time. In short, be prepared to make mistakes and be happy to fix them.
This way you can learn from your audience and validate your idea quickly rather than offering a finished product or service that nobody wants.
With CoWorking Days the process was very simple in getting groups of people together who all have the same pain which is they are all Bored Of Working At Home Alone then creating the style of event that benefits them and helps them be productive while working socially. Then the next stage was to find out which other products and services they would like or need online or offline.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Today we are still definitely bootstrapped and our in-person events are becoming popular again in Barcelona but in some cases, people are still not comfortable with attending events so we are expanding our online offers such as our new AI Matchmaking Tool so we can connect our community better world wide.
Over the past few months, we have seen a lot more subscribers to our newsletters on Whatsapp and our Facebook communities are of course growing as more people understand CoWorking and are working from home/remote and feeling the pain we solve of having a community to work with.
At the moment I run the main community in Barcelona and we have a couple of volunteer community leaders in cities like Berlin, Cape Town & London but we hope to add more paid community leaders once we can validate a payment price for each event in each city.
I will personally be launching our Malaga, Spain community in January 2022.
In the near future we hope that more people will notice what we are doing and start a community of their own for me remote work was a lifestyle choice but for some people, it's now a way of life and I hope our experience can help others understand how you can work productively and be part of a community that benefits you professionally.
Long term we hope to engage our community and run retreats and events similar to CoWorking Safari in cities and destinations that need help as tourism recovers as remote workers are the future and can become an important travel/tourism niche.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
I have learned a lot through my entrepreneurial journey and I would say be prepared to make mistakes and don’t overthink things to try and prevent mistakes. If you try to prevent a mistake you waste valuable time. In short, be prepared to make mistakes and be happy to fix them.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
We started our communities on Facebook but have found people have become less engaged so we are moving to Whatsapp & Slack in 2022 plus we hope to move our members to our platform in Q3.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
If you don't know how to do something that's OK as in your entrepreneurial journey you will have to learn every day. If you are bootstrapped you should try to learn the basics of the tools you are using before enlisting an expert to help you as that will mean you can tell if they know what they are talking about (lots of people don’t and want you to pay them while they learn on the job).
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
It would be great to have a CTO co-founder who could help me improve what we do and also we could use some guest bloggers who can create content our community will love.
Where can we go to learn more?
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
