Story
Spacious turned idle restaurants into $29/day coworking, then sold to WeWork
Sam recounts founder Preston Pesek's company Spacious, which leased restaurants during their dead daytime hours and resold the space as hot-desk coworking for about $29 a day before WeWork acquired it.
“But Spacious, what it did originally was they would find restaurants that were only open at night or had most of their business from 6 to, you know, dinnertime. And they would do a coworking thing where they, you would pay a little bit of money, $29, I believe. And you would get access to, to, to use this restaurant as a coworking, uh, place.”
Idea
Hot-desk coworking unit economics: $90K/month per location at 40% margin
Pesek's playbook for a pop-up coworking location: 100-300 hot-desk seats, target 15 check-ins per day at $29, producing about $90,000/month at a 40% profit margin after staff and rent. He believes someone could build it into a $1B/year revenue business.
“The target was 15 check-ins per month. And if a location had that at $29, that comes out to be around $90,000 a month. And the profit margin on that could be about 40%. Right. So one low— and that, and that profit margin includes the person manning the location, and then rent. So quite lucrative.”
Steal thisModel a pop-up coworking spot at 100-300 hot-desk seats and $29/check-in, aiming for ~$90K/month at 40% margin.
Framework
Make coworking sticky with shared interest, not just good desks
Pesek's view: the consumer side doesn't matter much if you pick good locations, but to get members to stay over a year you need stickiness, and the best source of stickiness is shared interest (e.g. The Wing for women). Mine Facebook Groups and Meetup for built-in fan bases.
“You have to figure out how to make your consumers incredibly sticky. And the only way that he could find that can make it sticky is you have to have shared interests. So for example, you know, The Wing.”
Steal thisBuild coworking around a shared-interest community (find them on Facebook Groups or Meetup) so members stay over a year.