dangerouslyawesome

Last week, Cadu de Castro Alves of Bees Office in Rio de Janeiro (!!!) noticed that it was nearly the 5 year anniversary of when Brad Neuberg announced coworking at The Spiral Muse in San Francisco.

My how we’ve grown since then. Thanks go out to Brad for not only trying something, but then sharing. He took his idea and what he’d learned, and shared it. And so it began.

Other than some Tweeting, I unfortunately didn’t get to do much to celebrate this year, but plan to change that in years to come. That doesn’t mean I didn’t take some time to reflect on what it meant for Brad to recognize and propose a simple solution to a problem that many of us have experienced first hand:

Traditionally, society forces us to choose between working at home for ourselves or working at an office for a company. If we work at a traditional 9 to 5 company job, we get community and structure, but lose freedom and the ability to control our own lives. If we work for ourselves at home, we gain independence but suffer loneliness and bad habits from not being surrounded by a work community.

From Brad’s first writings about coworking, it was clear what this was about:

choice.

Most recently, Coworking Seattle (one of the first, if not the first, regional organization of coworking efforts) wrote a definition that is among the best I’ve seen for coworking:

Coworking is about making the personal choice to work along side other people instead of in isolation.

Look familiar?

It’s on days like this, through ideas like this, that I’m reminded how lucky we are to have people paving the way for us who wish to recognize that we DO have the ability to choose, from where we work to who we work with, and we’re total dummies if we’re not taking advantage of those abilities.

I’ve spent more time involved in coworking than I did in college, and I’m 100% confident that my life has improved more from being involved in this network, this community of people, than anything else I’ve experienced in my 27 years.

I’m thankful for those who I call mentors, colleagues, and friends through this process: Brad Neuberg, Chris Messina, Tara Hunt, Geoff DiMasi, Tony Bacigalupo, Matthew Wettergreen, Jacob Sayles and Susan Evans. This short list is barely representative of the number of people I’ve learned from, though.

Every day, in some ways more enjoyable than others, I learn something on the coworking google group. When I joined, that group was less than 100 people. Today that group is subscribed to by over 2700 people from around the globe.

And the members of Indy Hall, who saw their own story and vision in mine, and decided to join us on this crazy ride. From one crazy voice to over 100, the stories told by Indy Hall members about this time in our lives are stories to be cherished, as I’m confident we’re doing something unique, remarkable, special, and amazing.

And like Brad, we’ll continue to share. Our successes, our failures, our ideas, our opinions, and our insights.

On this August 9th, and every August 9th from here on out, I look forward to reflecting and remembering the history of where one of the most important groups of people in my life came from.

Thanks Brad. Thanks Everyone.

The power of coworking is not in the facilities, because those elements are commodities and have forever decreasing value. Scaling facility up is relatively easy…you can just throw more money at it. And despite how you might feel about funding your efforts, money is and will always be the easy part.

Culture, on the other hand – which is the glue of what holds a strong coworking community together – is difficult. Especially through fast growth, which is often desired to help achieve an end like scaling the space and the facility.

Culture is composed of norms, which can be established by anyone within that culture. They can be dictated – which tends to be the way offices are run. In coworking, something different can happen.

One of the things that fascinates me about coworking spaces is that we have the ability to provide a workspace, a context that most people are relatively familiar with, and actually REMOVE the rules for how it is “supposed” to work.

Ask yourself, “What happens in an office where nobody tells the workers how to act? How to interact? What to do? Where to go? Who to talk to?”.

There’s some chaos, but chaos is good.

I learned to Embrace the Chaos from early coworking founders like Chris Messina and Tara Hunt. Our human tendencies are to control chaos, and put things in order. By avoiding that, and allowing order to emerge a bit more organically, new behavioral patterns emerge. These patterns, in the context of coworking, are the things that our members love and subsequently, the things that the press likes to write about: collaboration & work exchange. Increased charity and giving. Better support for local industries. Happier people. Increased business foundation. Camaraderie and friendship. We’re building blank canvases for work patterns to emerge from, and I think that the work patterns that exist when nobody told them to are the most interesting and the most sustainable to practice.

Those elements don’t truly emerge until someone gets out of their way and simply lets them. Telling people to collaborate is a lousy way to have it happen, because it’s always dependent on you telling them. Creating opportunities for people to discover collaboration on their own terms creates a rolling effect that’s difficult if not impossible to stop once it starts.

I like to look at coworking and ask:

Are you contributing to the development of an ecosystem – one dependent on the health of its host – or a community – a self sustaining organism that while it may have a figurehead, could live on in other capacities without you?

All of that said…the question at hand is: what are the challenges to growing/scaling, and how do you overcome them?

The interesting thing is that these same elements that provide a very strong cultural base for a coworking community can also pose challenges as you grow. But the results of overcoming those challenges are richer than if the barriers weren’t there to overcome in the first place.

Consider this essay by Michale Lopp (of Rands in Repose). In it, he talks about a pickup hockey game played by Netscape employees every weekend for 14 years. A game with only 3 simple rules. Unwritten rules, but understood rules.

Rather than referee every game and start by reminding everyone of the rules, they just played. If someone new joined the game, and disobeyed one of the rules, it was up to one of the other players to let them know the rules, and then they could play on.

That is, until, a larger group with its own critical mass came in all at once. In one game, more arguments and fights, occurred than ever had in the history of the game.

Its not because that group was unnecessarily feisty, but because it’s much harder to grow a group that’s built on cultural norms – like the rules of the pickup game or the interactions of a coworking space – when lots of new people show up at once.

So what do we have at our disposal within our various coworking communities?

First, we have our membership. Existing membership is the foundation of your culture, not you. If they want something to change, its best to embrace the chaos and let it change, for the better. Making sure that existing members are having opportunities to build strong relationships is key, because they’ll be there to defend the cultural norms important to them.

On the Coworking Google Group, some people have made recent mention of “Town Hall” meetings and members lunches. These are excellent for building relationships because they allow coworkers to interact with each other with the context of membership but without the context of work. That means they are not worried about interrupting or otherwise inconveniencing each other.

Every time Indy Hall has deviated from a focus on helping create these contexts, and at the same time experienced a growth spurt in membership, we have had issues. Some can be small, like a noticeable increase in people who come in, put on their headphones, work all day without talking to anyone, and then going home. Others can be large, like the introduction of a disruptive member. Truly toxic things, like poorly ending collaborations and even theft, are more likely to occur when people aren’t on the same page with what to expect from one another.

If you don’t know what “normal” looks like in a given culture, how are you supposed to know if something is wrong?

When the community grows quickly but nobody is there to introduce the newbs to the cultural norms, the “hum” of a coworking space – the thing that gets most people excited but they can’t quite put their finger on – tends to decrease in volume. I’ve seen it repeatedly times, and not just at Indy Hall. I’ve seen it happen on the coworking e-mail list as it has grown from less than 100 people to over 2500.

Consider your coworking efforts like mini-societies, and consider the challenges of scaling ANY society when looking for solutions.

In the last 4 years, I’ve come up with some pretty wacky ideas for how to get IndyHall into the brains of more people and, more importantly, the coworking concept into the mindshare of the ever-changing workforce.

I’ve noticed a relatively typical trend in that the kind folks who operate places where coworking takes place seem to struggle with how to market it and build a sustainable operation to support it.

I’ve been guilty of parroting the “build the community first” as the solution to nearly every problem that brand new coworking spaces encounter. It’s not a silver bullet, and it’s not meant to be. What it does is put the person who’s in the leadership role in the right state of mind – that of a leader and not just a proprietor - of the community space they’re about to attempt to operate. Being in that state of mind puts you in the most advantageous place to solve the typical, un-special problems that you’re bound to come across. That makes solving the weird, hard problems your focus. And if you give it enough time, they will show up.

But that’s not the point of this post. Lets say you’re doing a great job of developing the community before you’ve even got a space, and now you want to start converting those people to paying members so you can support a home for them to work in.

Freemium doesn’t work with coworking.

Free trials are an epidemic with new coworking entities.

It seems to make some sense. Coworking is a new concept, so charging a new member-potential to try something new raises the barrier far too high for them to walk in the door at all.

Except now you’ve created a new problem for yourself. That member-potential has significantly diminished value associated with what you just provided them. How are you supposed to charge them for the same thing the next time they come in?

In most cases, free coworking is being offered by prepubescent coworking spaces. Those coworking spaces lack the critical mass of smart, interesting, creative people that represent the primary attraction for most of the members they don’t have yet. Once you have that, it’s easier to diminish the value a little bit because you’re starting from a much higher offering of value.

But if your goal is to get people in the door that will stick around and help you sustain the business that will operate their clubhouse, you’ve gotta charge from day 1.

Case Study – The Free Trial of Doom

I got a panicked email from a coworking space owner who I’ve corresponded with a fair amount in the past, and I have full confidence is in this for all of the right reasons. The space was only a few months old, but she felt her runway shortening and was concerned about their member acquisition rates. 8 members had joined in 3 months (which, by the way, isn’t that awful when opening a space with 0 members). She was doing all of the things I typically prescribe: get out there and meet your potentials. Find ways to support them. Get them involved. Here was an excerpt from the email:

Many come and try out the space (we offer a one week free trial) but they dont come back, sometimes even after the first day. They all say they love it, the vibe is great, etc., but wtf. For the life of me, I don’t get it. We follow up, send emails, and even anonymous surveys to figure out what we are doing wrong, and people usually respond with either “it’s too far” or, “I absolutely love your space, and will sign up soon.” Soon. Soon doesn’t come soon enough. Rent in our area is high, and even though we got an AWESOME deal on our rent, we aren’t anywhere near break even.

How many times I’ve heard this isn’t a number I care to count, and it breaks my heart.

We offer a one week free trial. Kiss of death.

My response included the following:

A one week free trial is WAY too much. In fact, I don’t believe in free trials at all. You’re devaluing your Workspace before people even walk in the door by making it free. Don’t be afraid to exchange money for goods and services. It’s the only hard rule of business You’re using free space as a “bell and/or whistle” to get people in the door, but it gives them zero reason to stick around. If you can’t get them hooked in an hour, you’re not going to get them hooked in a week.

She took my response to heart and immediately made some changes. Among them was dropping the free week trial.

A few weeks later, I got a follow up:

…over the past week and a half, we’ve gotten 13 new members!!!! I guess I may have spoke to soon… not to mention that a one day trial as opposed to one week has made a HUGE difference! People come in, love it, and sign up!

In 10 days she had more than doubled (nearly tripled) membership growth that had previously taken almost 10x that long to achieve.

These specific results are admittedly anecdotal, and your milage may vary, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this sort of course correction.

I also included:

There’s nothing [inherently] sticky about that onboard process that you described. Show up … for free, and then a wishy-washy “I’ll sign up when its right for me”.

Not only does charging from day one give us the ability to maintain value from the moment the member-potential walks in the door, but it provides us with an extremely effective conversion point. It works like this.

Your first day is $25. But if you decide to sign up that day, we’ll happily apply that $25 towards whatever level of membership you’re interested in!

Which works nicely when our basic membership is $25, the same price as our drop in day. So you essentially get 2 days for the price of one just for signing up, and then your 2nd day lets you explore Indy Hall as a member, rather than a drop-in.

Also, because we have the aforementioned critical mass of smart, interesting, creative people, the rate that drop-ins sign up for ANY level is extremely high. We convert our paying drop-ins at a rate of 2:1. That is, for every TWO people who drop in, ONE of them typically joins at some level of membership. At our spring 2010 drop-in rates, that’s a relatively consistent 10 new members a month, and the numbers only climb as our presence grows in our region.

Other things to consider

• Not charging for drop-ins (who contribute relatively less) for the access to space that you charge to members (who contribute relatively more) is disrespectful to the people who pay their hard earned money and contribute
• What kind of people continually use something that provides value and are OKAY with not paying for it? Now compare that with people who happily pay for the things that make their lives better. Who would you rather spend your time doing business next to?

So free is bad?

Absolutely not. But it’s unwise in an early stage business to give ANYTHING away that you wouldn’t otherwise charge for. Instead, give away things that cost you nothing!

• Run free events and make them awesome and open to anyone. Work with local businesses as sponsors. Find a local bar or restaurant and make them your watering hole. They’ll appreciate you consistently bringing them customers, and you’ll love having a place you can walk into and have a good chance of bumping into someone you know.
• Partner with other local organizations and cross promote ideas, events, and opportunities when your core values align. Don’t be a logo slut: make sure partnerships are mutually beneficial, and you’re giving with purpose.
• Share knowledge. Collective knowledge is at the core of coworking and a great way to get people in the mindset of sharing is to lead by example. What have you learned that you can give away and will be interesting and of value to your member-potentials. Who else has interesting valuable things to share, and what formats can you help provide for sharing that?
• Start or support a local Jelly! Many have said that Jelly is a gateway drug to coworking, but I’ve discouraged coworking spaces from hosting Jelly in their spaces for all of the reasons I’ve outlined in this piece. Instead, participate in a local Jelly as members of your coworking space and go with the intent to meet people, not with the intent to recruit. Help a Jelly get started, but I wouldn’t run your own. Heck, even send the people who don’t want to pay for your membership to a Jelly as a free coworking alternative. Let them get hooked on a free version of coworking…there’s a great chance they may end up back on your doorstep wanting “Jelly Everyday” and decide to try out that membership after all.

P.S. Hey Alex, what about offering TOTALLY free coworking all day, every day?

That’s another post, another day.

For the last few months, I’ve been quietly been working on a new project. Actually, I’ve been working on the contents of the project for over 3 years now, but recently, I’ve been plugging it into a new framework.

Back in the fall, I was approached by David Hauser from Grasshopper with interest in helping him set up a new coworking space in Boston. David’s whole “empowering entrepreneurs to change the world” value statement for Grasshopper is clear alignment with coworking, far beyond the business proposition. Furthermore, on a very personal note, he might be the only person I’ve met in business who harps on core values as an operating model more than me.

I dig that.

David and I quickly made it past the superficial conversations about coworking spaces and got to talking about community, people, empowerment, higher purpose, and the big questions like “why” we do things the way we do them at IndyHall. David’s eyes went wide and I watched him “get it”. He said, “more people need to hear this, why haven’t you written it down?”

Fact is, I have written it down. Most of it, in fact. The problem was that it was all over the place. Blog posts on this site as well as IndyHall.org. Literally hundreds of posts to the Coworking Google Group. But no cohesive story arc unless you got me in a room and put a beer in my hand.

So we decided that it was valuable enough for David to get behind the project, not just for himself, but with the goal to create something that would help many others kick ass. The end result of the project be something with larger value.

And so, I began writing The Coworking Book.

Now before I go on to post the excerpt, I’m sure you’re asking,

“But what about everybody else that’s written about their experiences? Who the hell are you, one guy, to tell this story by yourself?”

If you’re not asking that question, you should be, because I asked myself the question long and hard before deciding how this project would take form.

Instead of thinking I could take on that task, I instead set out to write the framework. That’s it. I’m building a framework that we can hang ideas from, and to guide people in to coworking from whatever vantage point they are coming from.

I’m writing what I hope is a cohesive story arc that makes the content interesting, valuable, and somewhat linear. And I’m telling it from a single lens: my own.

That’s version 0.1. The alpha. My version. That’s what I’m releasing this week at SXSWi. I’m going to be taking time out of my schedule while in Austin to put the finishing touches on the work I’ve done so far, and to follow my own advice - just effing ship.

Beyond alpha

My plans for next steps are to begin something that begins to look like the communal composition of some of the oldest texts in history. I’ve decided that within the margins of each paragraph of each chapter of version 0.1, I’m inviting people to tell their stories.

Through their own lense.

There are going to be holes that need filling in. I need you to patch them. There are going to be disagreements on points of execution. We need to discuss them.

But in the framework I’ve constructed, there are always decision-guiding tools to make resolving disagreements simpler and to remove ego, including mine, from the end product.

All of the discussion that goes on in the margins will then be folded in to the primary text with some guidance and support of others. What others? My hope is that some people step up from the margins and want to become co-curators.

Addendum: For the coders in the room, think of the main text as the trunk, the commentary as patch submissions/pull requests, and the curators as “core team”. And lets not forget the ever growing user base that ultimately will want to use this tool because it helps them kick ass.

The tool we’ll be using to collaborate is actually built on top of WordPress, it’s called Digress.it. It’s a plugin + a theme, and while it’s not perfect, it’s pretty badass. This sort of interface was largely inspired by the DjangoBook, the official book for the Django Project, a framework for the programming language Python. What’s important to me is that people can comment with accountability and attribution on every post AND every paragraph individually, and this tool gives exactly that.

On Curation

Dave Troy has been talking about a “curatorial economy” on his blog, and its an idea that I like. Curatorial is not inherently exclusionary. It does, however, push for people to step up to plate and act. The ones who are considered are the ones who act. It’s not the same as a “do-ocracy”, where those who do get to make the decisions. This is about guiding but not imposing.

Curation is about making a choice, but with shared and articulated vision.

And that is my hope for the final product of The Coworking Book. That through a number of iterations, and communal curation, the work product that emerges is a clear, high value, extremely accessible utility for people interested in the past, present, and future of work.

Lots of commas in that last sentence. Sorry about that.

About the content

This part is important: forever, each version of the text, and the related comments and discussions in the margin, will remain online for free. Searchable. With 100% attribution.

At some point, we’ll need to “release”. Versions will each have a roadmap, with a set of goals that it needs to accomplish. When we achieve those goals, the book will be released.

When we reach a 1.0 version, we’ll only have a snapshot. It won’t be the bible, because it will continue to evolve. But we’ll have a snapshot, something that’s missing from the history books for our movement and our community.

The important part is this: we don’t stop at version 1.0. We don’t ever stop. We keep telling this story, and evolving the text. The growth and change in the sphere of coworking has changed immensely in only 3 years, and the change is accelerating. Lets snapshot things now so we can continue to measure that growth moving forward.

And without further adieu, I present you with an excerpt from the chapter “Finding your Coworkers”.

FIGHT CLUB

If you’ve seen the movie “Fight Club”, the main character who’s known as “Jack” is a hypochondriac who attends self help groups to feel better about himself. Demented and selfish intentions aside, something interesting happens to Jack: he meets Marla Singer, another self-help group junkie. In order to not appear awkward in front of their group members, they decide to split up the nights.

There’s a good chance you’re going to find a similar situation along your journey of community exploration. Except this time, this works to your advantage instead of being a detractor like in Jack and Marla’s relationship.

When you start recognizing people at multiple events, or on multiple lists…you’ve found another connector.

Connectors are the most important people in any community building effort because they are catalysts for speeding up your process. If a person is already dedicated enough to be participating in multiple events and groups, it’s not a reach to think they might want to team up with you to more efficiently map the topography of events and activities going on. They might even be able to help find more connectors.

These connectors tend to also make great leaders, and are critical to the mobilization efforts you’ll be embarking on very soon.

Over time, you will find yourself building a map of the existing communities and the active pieces of your region. Coworking can augment many of them, and they can all provide channels for potential members for your space.

More mature communities may already have these maps established, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go through this process on your own. You may uncover something that hasn’t received as much exposure as it deserves and it will go on to be one of your greatest assets once you open a space.

I’m a heavy Gmail user, with 6 (soon to be 7) separate Gmail and Google Apps accounts. On my Macbook, I actually IMAP in to all of the business accounts using Mail.app for one reason: cross-account search. For my personal account, though, I’m extremely reliant on Gmail’s web interface. I’ve used Mailplane in the past, and really loved it…with the exception of the inability to do cross-domain search. I use that daily.

On the mobile, there’s no option for cross-account searching. Mobile Mail.app gives me some native functionality and speed, but without cross-account searching, I’d much prefer to use Gmail’s mobile web app. HTML5 support in recent releases has made it faster, easier to use, and hands down one of the best mobile apps on the internet. I used Mobile Mail to connect to my Gmail accounts over IMAP because having multiple bookmarks was clunky no matter how I configured it, but I was always looking for something better.

In all cases I use IMAP because it keeps accounts in sync; changes made on the computer, the web, and the iPhone are all synchronized via IMAP.

I never used Push for my email because, well, I get a lot of it. I rely on Push for contact and calendar updates, but for email…if I haven’t checked my mail in 10 minutes, I can be sure that there’s something new in there.

Worse are unread counts. I’m compulsive about unread accounts. Mail, RSS feeds, Campfire, whatever it is…I hate having things unread. It’s a bad behavior, because I treat unread counts like to-dos, and in all of the scenarios where unread counts keep me on my toes, they are essentially to-do lists that OTHER people can put things on to. I’m already busy, I don’t need someone else to put more things on my to-do list.

The biggest loss in using Mobile Mail.app is tags, something that I do use pretty extensively. I’ve learned to get around it in Mail.app, which has better drag and drop support for moving things into folders that represent tags over IMAP. Mobile Mail.app was just clunky, and I resolved to not do that interaction on the go unless I had to.

I know I’m not describing everyone, but I am describing a lot of people. And as more corporations move their mail infrastructures away from Exchange and into Hosted Google Apps accounts, the group with this set of needs grows more and more.

A few weeks back, Dave Martorana (of MultiFirefox, Multiplex, and Two Guys on Beer fame) slung me a prototype of an app he’d been working on at IndyHall. It was called “MultiG”, and was basically an app that did fast account switching between Gmail and Google Apps Gmail accounts. It was rudimentary, but instantly useful for me. He quickly added an “unread” count to the accounts dashboard, but then did something I had never seen in an email client. He added a secondary badge that showed how many messages were actually new. I mean, how many of your unread messages weren’t there the last time you looked.

Think about that for a second. The anxiety of unread counts has finally found its Prozac.  All I care about is how many messages are new! In casual conversation, I dubbed this feature “TrueNew”, something that I hope other developers build into their app notifications.

At this point, I was hooked. But Dave wasn’t done.

He’d also whipped up integration with the iPhone’s native address book. I haven’t gone through the process of moving my address book into Google, and again, I have multiple accounts so where would I sync my address book to? Not all of them.

Dave added a button to the chrome of the Gmail browser window in his app that let me pull up my iPhone address book and insert email addresses right into the “To:” field. Sneakily, if I turned on CC or BCC, the exact same feature gave me the choice of which field to put the address in to. Simple, sleek, lovely.

Since emails tend to include attachments and links, Dave also put in a handler that made sure that they opened without leaving the app, much like our favorite iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie.

This feature set changed the way I interacted with mail on my iPhone. It made my life better. It made one of the most painful parts of my day, dealing with email, less painful.

We realized that “MultiG” was a lousy name, and Johnny Bilotta (the other Guy on Beer) proposed “Mailroom”.

Sold.

He whipped up a sexy icon, and we were off to the races.

Dave got the app in the hands of a few other testers, worked out some kinks, processed some feedback, and with the hand of myself and co-conspirator Amy Hoy pushing him to “ship as early as possible”, got it into the App Store.

Initial feedback was mixed. People who were like me in terms of email use loved it. People who had different email workflows weren’t as convinced, and many people saw it simply as a “wrapper for Gmail”.

Technically they were right, but they were missing the progressive enhancements because they didn’t augment their workflow. The app wasn’t for everybody, and we knew that. We’d still struck a chord with a good number of our initial users, and got some great feature requests.

2 weeks later, Dave pushed out a significant release to Mailroom. We’d prioritized feedback against our desired feature set, and introduced some new ideas of our own. At the root of the new release was a settings screen.

Badge Icons were a huge part of our 1.0 release feedback. We’d been hesitant to include them by default because, without Push (which I’ll get to in a minute), the counts were largely inaccurate most of the time.

Since we wanted to encourage people to start using TrueNew, we made that the default badge icon if enabled, but gave the user the ability to turn on unread counts instead.

Another major improvement was both workflow and performance related. If you only had one account and used Mailroom, launching the app to the dashboard was wasteful. If you left Mailroom on a given account screen to go to another app, launching put you back at the dashboard again, which was undesirable. We gave users the opportunity to remember the last account used, meaning that as soon as they launched the app they were where they left off last. This immediately made my email experience more efficient.

And as a bonus, Dave gave the user the option to lock screen orientation. Not something I was particularly needy for, but a nice touch nonetheless.

And then there’s that last setting. Cache management. What’s that, you ask?

Well that brings us to the biggest quiet improvement to Mailroom 1.1. The app is now taking advantage of Gmail’s HTML5 offline storage. What does this mean?

It means that every time you visit an account, the entire interface is cached locally and a HTML5 database is created/updated with the email on your screen. Kill your connection (because ATT sucks, because you’re on an airplane, or because you’re in a meeting) and Mailroom is still useful. In fact, you can not only read messages, but you can reply to messages and even COMPOSE NEW MESSAGES without a data connection. As soon as you reconnect, your cached messages are sent while retrieving new mail.

He even made the multi-account dashboard smart, only allowing you to enter accounts that had offline caches from a previous visit.

Yesterday, all of these 1.1 features hit the iPhone App store, and already a large percentage of our users have upgraded. One of them left us a review in the app store that commended us not only on the app and how great its icon is, but on Dave’s responsiveness to feature requests. Big win for us, that’s exactly what we wanted.

We’ve already talked about feature roadmap for 1.2 and 1.3 releases, and it’s very much in the works. The plan is to continue with iterative releases, process feedback, and continue to grow the user base all at once.

Two “issues” continue to arise: the lack of Push badge updates, and the $2.99 price point of the app.

First, push isn’t as “simple” as some of our reviewers seem to think it is. Among the scaling concerns we have about people who move a lot of email. I ran some averages and my smallest inbox gets well over 24,000 emails a year. Those numbers aren’t staggering, but across the customer base we’re targeting, that becomes a LOT of notifications to deliver.

The real technical challenge is more complicated though. In order to accurately update badge icons over push, we’d need to store email addresses and passwords on a server somewhere, and that’s a HUGE security risk that we can’t figure out how to justify. I know I wouldn’t want that info out there, and I have to imagine that our users wouldn’t like it either.

So until we come up with a more elegant way to support push, Dave has built in an app-specific URL handler. Calling mailroom://username@domain.com from another iPhone app or even from a mobile web page launches Mailroom, and even jumps straight to the account if there’s one in mailroom that matches the email address in the URL. We’re hoping that other push services like Boxcar and  Prowl can build in support for our app. We know it’s not the best solution, but given the infrastructure for Push provided by Apple, we’re pretty limited in what we can do. We don’t want to deliver a half-assed experience, so until we figure this out, Mailroom will not support push. If anyone has suggestions for how to overcome this hurdle, our ears are WIDE open, so please, sound off in the comments or via email.

And about that price point. Some customers seem to think that $2.99 is too much for an app that’s “just a webkit wrapper”. I won’t do more than touch on the fact that it’s not just a webkit wrapper for the right users and workflows since I’ve already explained here. But why $2.99? First, we’re targeting business users and we know it. They’re more comfortable spending more money on apps because in most cases, businesses equate cost with quality. But more importantly than that is the fact that this is, in most cases, a high-touch app.

99 cents for an app that you’re most likely going to touch at LEAST once an hour, if not several more times in a given day, feels undervalued. Like Tweetie, which I launch several times a day, I feel like I get an immense value for the $2.99 I spent on it.

Fact is, our first release might not have been worth $2.99 for everyone and you could say they got pegged with an “early adopter” tax. But since we’re not charging for the updates, and plan to roll them out often, we don’t think its really a tax at all. It just means that you will continually get more value from the app you already paid for.

We’re confident that future releases in our roadmap will continue to win people over the price point and even the “it’s just a webkit wrapper” theme. Mostly because, we’re listening. We hear what people like, don’t like, and how they are using the app. The more people feed back, the more they help to shape the future of Mailroom.

If you haven’t already, please consider heading to the App store and picking up a copy of Mailroom for your iPhone or iPod Touch. We’d love your feedback, and absolutely appreciate you supporting independent software development. You can also follow us on Twitter for app updates, or send us ideas and feedback there as well.

I was just tipped off to Cobot (thanks to Allen at Centernetworks). In the last 2 years, I’ve evaluated a LOT of options for improving the management of IndyHall. None of them have fit the bill.

All of the issues stemmed back to the same thing that is wrong with most coworking spaces: the focus of the software is on the desks instead of the people.

Cobot has found a way to strike the balance between functionality that helps a coworking space run (like analytics and billing support), but also paid careful attention to the needs of the people in the space, helping them get signed up, oriented, and solve their own problems so we don’t have to do it for them. They even have a support ticket system for our members when something goes wrong. Even the pricing model is based on the members instead of the desks.

This is smart. Very smart.

Being people oriented is what’s gotten IndyHall as far as it has, and seeing software that supports that is extremely exciting for me.

Even more exciting, is software that is designed to help people get into the mindset of being people-oriented…if they aren’t already. I think that software that helps train people into good habits instead of reinforcing bad ones is great software.

Feature-wise, it’s not quite there for what we need, but I’m going to be paying very close attention to this venture because it’s got the right direction. Our feature needs are what they are, and while I hope they can support them, I’m much more interested in how they continue in the direction they are going where everything else I’ve evaluated in the last 2 years has totally missed the mark.

Coworking is growing, and there’s no question about that. New spaces are opening to the tune of a few a week, and press coverage is anything but limited.

We’ve hit “trend” status, it seems, and a number of publications are taking notice.

Trends don’t just include positive growth, though, they include negative growth as well. While spaces are opening up and the coworking google group is humming with activity, I’m concerned about a number of spaces that are struggling to find break-even between their membership and their expenses.

Moreover, nobody is talking about the big R word that is normally saved for corporate human resource departments.

Retention.

Coworking spaces are jumping through all kinds of hoops to get people in the door. But are those people staying? Are they contributing? Are they collaborating as is suggested by most coworking literature?

What things are people staying for? Why are they leaving?

I’m currently working with our intern Parker on sifting through our 2009 numbers to produce some concrete numbers and data related to our retention rate. I’ve gone on record to say it’s been good, but have never been able to say how good.

My goal is to find concrete numbers relating our growth and our retention directly, and to interview people who’ve left or lowered their membership level to find out why. I hope that we can produce numbers for 2008 and the 2nd half of 2007 (while we were open), but our recordkeeping methods might make that difficult.

We need data.

This post is an open call for participation from other coworking spaces to do the same. In order to participate in my research, I’d like the following:

1. A month-to-month assessment of membership counts, and what level of membership they pay for (full time, flex, etc).
2. A month-to-month assessment of member exits, and any insight into what those exits were related to.
3. A month-to-moth net gain of membership.
4. A count of drop-ins that returned, and how often they’ve returned.

To speed things up, I’ve created a very basic one-year worksheet to get you started. You can download it as an .xls here.

The number of spaces that have been open for over 12 months is small, so I’m hard pressed to limit these responses to spaces that have made it beyond their first year. Instead, I’d like to suggest that you have at least six months of active membership under your belt in order to submit your statistics. The more data you have, the better, but I won’t turn anything down.

You can send your space’s stats using this handy dandy form.

Then what?

I’ll be publishing all of the results, along with our own results, openly and licensed under creative commons for mashing up, sharing, and inclusion in other coworking materials.

Thanks for your help and participation.

Finally, a distinction I can live with.

More soon. This weekend was very healthy for my brain. Thanks Tony, Jacob, Peter, and others.

I write a lot about IndyHall on this blog, but I don’t think I’ve spoken at any great length about another local organization, Philly Startup Leaders. I’ve recently joined the organization as part of a newly formed advisory board, along with a number of other people from various local organizations that support and contribute to the local scene, as well as others who have been long-time fixtures and observe Philadelphias growth from another vantage point.

Philly Startup Leaders, like IndyHall, has modest beginnings: started by a couple of people who had or were involved with startups to discuss the challenges of being a startup in Philadelphia. Those early meetings, all held over beers as far as I’m aware, have transformed into a strong mission for the Philadelphia startup community:

“…above all else, startup entrepreneurs need each other.”

So what’s been fascinating to me has been watching IndyHall and PSL, two different communities grow alongside each other with similar purpose and vision. Lots of crossover has taken place. We share a number of members. Some of us have worked together. All good, healthy things for the ecosystem.

The PSL board has done a great job of growing membership, creating and evolving new events for the membership to participate in, crafting a manifesto, and providing the primary venue for community: the PSL-Talk e-mail list.

That e-mail list, a phenomenal resource for the community, seems to also be one of it’s greatest weaknesses.

There’s currently a flare-up (well, it’s currently as public as the e-mail list is…another issue…and it’s persistent in back-channels) about “self promotion and sales” in the list. When a new thread author, or an existing thread responder, posts something that is less about contributing information to the community and instead, advertises themselves as the solution to a specific problem, they receive a slap on the wrist (public or private, at the board’s discretion). The response is usually something like this one, from PSL co-founder and president Blake Jennelle:

Steve, you could have sent this solicitation to Yasmine directly. Promoting your consulting services is not appropriate over PSL talk. This is your public warning as per the policy you see in the footer. If this happens again you will be removed from the list.

The policy in the footer that Blake refers to reads:

The PSL Talk List is /not a sales channel/.  If you use the PSL Talk List to make a sales pitch to the community, you will be warned, publicly. If you do it again, you will be removed from the list.

I want to be clear and say that I understand why this rule is in place. Lists that are primarily solicitation, job postings, and the like do a lot of harm to the balance of “has” and “needs” of a community.

I liken it to the situation that IndyHall has with recruiters and job-postings. We wanted to make IndyHall a place and a community where people can be more effective at getting their work done. If the ecosystem becomes a place where people can come to get work, vs a place where people come to do work, the has/needs balance gets out of whack.

This is a tricky situation to deal with, for a couple of reasons. First and formost, the LAST thing I want is to be the person, or organization, that gets between a person and the opportunity of their lifetime.

When there’s contact from recruiters, startups, companies, etc about the talent at IndyHall and their availability, we explain that we’re an organization that provides physical space and community resources to our membership, as well as a highly collaborative environment that they can use to get their work done. Work exchanges hands all the time, but we don’t get in the middle of it. If you [recruiter/startup/company/etc] is interested in coming to IndyHall as a member, to use the space and community resources in the same way as anyone else who walks in our door, we welcome you!

So rather than police their intentions, which are to find a candidate for the job they have open, we frame it appropriately. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from walking in the door and joining IndyHall. So long as you can work from anywhere, pay your membership, come on by.

What’s nice is…because the culture is established by the existing membership, most anti-culture behavior sorts itself out. Rather than police culture, which is a very top-down way of looking at things, we carefully frame the situation.

If that person, whoever they are, feels they aren’t getting what they came there for, odds are, they came for the wrong thing. And most importantly, they won’t come back.

So, I came down on Blake’s response in the e-mail list where he slapped the so-called service provider on the wrist for an infraction that I’ll keep referring to as “anti-culture behavior”.

Someone who specializes in the topic of a question responds, and it’s sales. Someone who’s novice (or less experienced) responds, and it’s a-OK. Does anybody else see the problem here? I think there’s a difference between letting the group know what you do (within the list, which is the only unified point of membership of PSL) and overtly selling it to the group. What happens when someone asks about office space, and someone other than me recommends IndyHall? What if that person is a member of IndyHall? Is it better if they aren’t a member of IndyHall? It’s not me selling, but they’re selling for us (without my direct influence). What happens when somebody asks for help, like in this case? Experts aren’t allowed to be responded to in public discourse? What does that accomplish? I know that a LOT of energy goes into keeping this list anti-sales, and don’t think that I don’t understand why. Maybe if that energy went into focusing on what this list is, instead of what it’s not, the message would be clearer to people joining PSL. I don’t think the barrier to entry is to high or too low, I just think that you’ve put up the wrong barrier.

I admittedly painted some broad strokes, for the sake of illustration. But I made my point, and framed in the context of this post, I think it makes even more sense.

So Blake responds:

All Steve had to do was answer Yasmine’s question over the list and let his expertise speak for itself. This would have been a much more effective sales pitch. Alex, when you share your expertise on workspaces, when Wil shares his expertise on SEO, when Aaron shares his expertise on marketing, that unquestionable adds value to the list. It’s when you send a solicitation, beyond giving freely of your expertise, that people get annoyed. PSL talk is about helping each other for the sake of helping each other. That’s the culture that draws so many people to this community, as to Indy Hall. That’s the culture that we care so much about protecting and nurturing. That’s what PSL IS about.

Which, again, I completely agree with. Except this part:

That’s the culture that we care so much about protecting and nurturing.

I think it jumped out at me because I said something very similar in an unrelated conversation with Sean Blanda, co-founder of TechnicallyPhilly just yesterday.

Blake and the PSL board have always taken the approach of policing, posting signage (the footer warning), and warning/banning offenders.

What concerns me about this approach is that I don’t know if you can protect and nurture culture at the same time. By protecting it, you’re not letting it build up its own cultural defenses, which would truly be nurturing it into maturity.

My most recent post to the list encouraged Blake in two directions: first, to take some of the board-only-back-channel-discussion into a public forum, and make the most of the smart problem solvers he has as peers in his community. Second, to focus on what PSL is and stands for, instead of trying to keep out everything that it isn’t. Since, Blake has started a new thread doing just that, in which I’ll be sharing this post, as well as participating in the group discussion as much as is appropriate.

I don’t have the exact solution for PSL. I’m not a genie. And believe me, I’m far from perfect.

But I do know that policing culture is historically ineffective (culture’s going to go where it wants) and if the PSL board and the community it represents put more energy into nurturing than protecting, the solution would likely begin to materialize as a much clearer, and more sustainable approach to the problem.

Even if you already have license for RipIt, Multiplex, or both, you can benefit from the other 9 apps… and you can share the extra licenses with a friend. Who will soon be a very good friend indeed! The IndyHall Labs crew teamed up with the good folks at MacUpdate to present an amazing bundle of great Mac apps — worth over $500 in total — for just $49.99. But only for a short time.

Grab your bundle quickly! http://www.mupromo.com/?ref=6602 (please, use our affiliate code, it helps us a lot!)

This bundle also includes titles like MoneyWell, Posterino, and the wildly celebrated Parallels (you know, that thing that lets you run Windows INSIDE of Mac OS X)!

Why buy this bundle (besides your love for supporting great Philadelphia tech)? We’ve thought of a couple of reasons for you:

1) To justify finally snagging a copy of Multiplex to manage your ripped DVD collection: Whether you already own a copy of Multiplex or not, the other apps in this bundle are too good to pass up at this price. Even if you’ve got BOTH, DVDRemasterPro is worth the price and fits great in the RipIt/Multiplex workflow for getting your movies onto other devices like your iPhone, AppleTV, etc.

2) Fresh gear for your Applications folder: This bundle is full of apps for all occasions! From OS Virtualization (need to test in IE6 or run QuickBooks for Windows?), to designing postcards and picture frames for your relatives, to having some hard drive diagnostics and repair software on hand for “uh oh” moments, to blowing off some steam (by killing space monsters)!

3) Gift season is coming up! Ok…so the holidays are still a few months off, but there’s nothing wrong with Christmas in May! Go ahead and give this bundle as a gift. Trust us. We PROMISE you that the Mac Nerd you love will love you back.

So go ahead, act now (while supplies last), and help us spread the word about this great deal by sharing THIS LINK:

http://tr.im/IHLabsMUPromo

I thank you kindly, honestly, and deeply from the bottom of my heart for supporting our endeavors at IndyHall in bringing finely crafted Mac software to your desktop.