Some thoughts (I used to run a chain of 20+ coworking spaces)
* Remote individual workers are the least attractive customer for the typical coworking space (that isn't a cafe). Small and unpredictable revenue, plus higher support per head, since the account is only one head.
* Remote workers also aren't a great fit for you. Very few like to hop around. Their reasons are typically avoiding loneliness, finding a reliable place to focus etc. And so would only use your platform until they find a space they like.
* SMBs are the sweet spot. Coworking is cheaper AND less overhead for them. In many countries they don't get access to grade A space even if they're willing to pay. For the coworking space, it's only slightly more work than a solo account and significantly more recurring and reliable revenue. You may be better off targeting small teams.
* One particular pain point is expiring inventory - remote workers actually fit this well since they're willing to go for a floating desk. Most spaces would be willing to offer discounts on this. Kind of like last minute flight or hotel deals.
* Another related product is meeting and conference room bookings. Also expires and has a market in WFH teams.
* The last two also have a better business model fit since they are intermittent and people may be more inclined to shop around, allowing you to take a cut of every transaction. For any kind of recurring contract, you're probably limited to taking a one time lead gen or brokerage fee since you have grounds to maintain a relationship with the customer after the initial match.
Depending on how long you’ve been working on it and how hard you’ve marketed it, it’s important not to miss a signal that you should move on. While we all have problems with motivation from time to time, some things aren’t worth motivating yourself for and it’s important to recognise that. This might not apply if it’s just a hobby project - but a hobby project should probably be fun. If it’s a serious attempt at a business rethink your marketing strategy. Nothing will motivate you more than signups and revenue.
As a past founder this is immensely important. Think very carefully about he financial impacts of "taking the idea to term" and more importantly if you're happy with your current life. In many cases if you're asking yourself questions like this you likely don't have traction to make this a real thing and should maybe consider moving on.
You've got to work on something where there's an immediate distribution channel and customers. Don't work on anything so speculative as this, where you're just hoping there will be someone who wants it.
You have to know how you're going to sell it before you build it. There are only a handful of things that work, which other people are using and you can copy.
Some problems are problems but for a startup to succeed it needs to be a very important problem.
Having a unique insight is also not enough. It needs to be a highly leverageable insight or advantage. One that you can use in this startup; as you grow your leverage it will help you get users and revenue.
Neither seem true here. When that happens, the journey is a grind, you try to push hard but people don't seem interested.
how do I get motivated? well I have to believe there is a 'leverageable' insight or angle that will grow when I make progress ;) belief that it's a big problem people care about and that I am growing unfair advantage over time solving it.
I think it's important to highlight that this kind of advice isn't negative and it's well meaning. As engineers it can be easy to form a distortion field about what we're working on and the perception of those who might actually want (or not want) to actually buy it.
Being honest with yourself is the best way to be kind to yourself. Moving on is not giving up.
I used to be a schoolteacher; I left teaching and became a software engineer a few years ago. For the past two years, I've been building a solo Saas product, that solves a problem I spotted when I was teaching. I hope to launch later this year.
To answer OP's question, about a year ago, I told my parents what I was building. My mum is a teacher, so she's my first test user. Every time I talk to them, they ask how things are going, so I need to keep working on it so I've got something to tell them.
To join in on everyone else's roasting OP's business idea: OP, what are you offering your users that they can't get from typing 'coworking space' or 'cafe' into their search engine of choice? It's not enough to make something useful, it also has to be something that your customers don't already have.
All my solo projects suffered from all the things you mentioned. Once I found a cofounder for my current project, these problems went away because
1. There’s social altruism activated because you two are constantly doing things not just for yourself, but for the other person.
2. View point diversity. You get way more feedback with another talking head at the same table, helps unblock you more than you think. And this can ignite new insight and therefore new notification energy!
Is there a way to hack this as a solo founder? I think so!
I had a former co founder who I would always bounce ideas off of and even tho he wasn’t directly working on my projects, he would check in with me and kind of act like a rubber duck I could talk to. This could be your friends, partner, or strangers!
Also, time is your best friend, for good or for worse. I think back on projects I started and quit after a year, I would like to think those projects would be successful if I just put more time into it.
While a co-founder can help, it can also ruin everything. As you say, there are other relationships and ways of interacting that can easily fill the same role, ie. advisors, board members, customers, etc. Statistically, I think that co-founder infighting is one of the largest reasons why many startups fail. It's also a fantastic way to ruin friendships.
Having just one other person in the trenches is so helpful. I hadn't thought about the social altruism angle but I think there's a lot of truth to it.
I also agree about time. I think new products follow a model similar to compounding interest. It's very small at the start - sometimes negligible but over time things add up.
Lastly, I think we get desensitized to success. Getting the first user, the first ten, etc. These are not small milestones. They're meaningful.
Lastly lastly, if it's something you want to make money from then focus primarily on user acquisition and secondly on product. Commonly difficult for builders to do but not doing so cements delayed failure.
Respectfully, I don't see a viable business here. As a remote worker, I can hardly imagine "signing up" for an app to find coworking space. Your efforts would be better spent on something more compelling. PMF (Product:Market Fit) is hard enough when there's actually a decent addressable market.
> Respectfully, I don't see a viable business here.
Isn't all of WeWork this business? Granted, I know they've had their share of problems with profitability and bankruptcy, however, I think that stems from issues other than the business not necessarily being viable.
Wework’s business was controlling real-estate via leasing. It never had enough money to own meaningful amounts of office space in multiple major markets.
I agree with chrisweekly, it's not even close. WeWork provided value to people by assuming some risk in signing those longer term lease agreements and repackaging it to people looking for shorter term office space or to those who would otherwise not want to enter into a commercial office lease themselves. I don't think OP is really offering any value add over a quick search for "coworking <city>" and I imagine that's why nobody is signing up. Personally, I find that even a free SaaS subscription is a liability these days so the value add needs to be highly compelling.
It will take time to get traction. I have a bigger picture in mind and shipping small updates and features constantly helps a lot. I’m building a tool for myself and I use it on a daily basis and keep improving it with the things I like, that keeps me motivated.
That's an excellent list of positive strokes. I wanted to punch up your bullet on talking to people. Face to face is always better. It pulls me out of the void. Rather than chatting on text-based social media, set up video chats. Going to small conferences in your market is a great way to get a boost of energy. If you're good at it, you can even get a few customers. Seeing the emotions on the face of the person I'm talking to really helps boost my energy.
Your insight is helpful almost as much as knowing that other people like me are out there too.
I think (!?) I've finally let go of a project that I've been working on for a couple of years.
A key tenet of the project (which I frequently forgot) was that it was a way for me to learn|refine technical skills and to keep me entertained|occupied.
The project certainly achieved those objectives for me and I'm a better person for doing it.
Good luck to you and I hope you continue to succeed!
1. Write realistic weekly plans and stick to them. There is satisfaction in being able to reach a goal every week, even if you have to compromise on the quality sometime. It also helps not feeling lost if the project takes a long time.
2. Have frequent debriefs with friends and, if none is available, an IA (which will be less afraid to offend you actually).
When it seems like the mountain is impossible to climb and it's overwhelming I just look for the next small thing to fix/implement and get it done. Rinse and repeat. Don't think about the bigger picture, just get stuff done. Eventually a lot of stuff gets done and you make progress.
I've been grinding on kidcarekit.com for a long while in fits in spurts. I find myself working more on the DevOps side rather than the actual functionality but I've learned so much about rails and DevOps that it's been a net win for me even though it doesn't functionally do much yet!
Be careful if you see yourself spending too much time on the devops side of things. You can be building a tower of work that has zero customer value in the end.
Even the supposed quality improvements found in an automated way may just turn out very expensive compared to just spending the time doing the QA yourself at specific milestones. Unless your career is devops be very skeptical and track your time and return on that time.
I learned this the hard way although I am a build/devops person professional I came to realise I had a tendency to build really complicated processes that would be ok in a hundred person team, while I actually was working solo. The upside is that there is lots of reusability for future projects and I also became very skeptical of custom CI jobs and CD tools, and try to reduce everything to env variables 1 line bash scripts. I also am very skeptical of automated integration tests as they are incredibly expensive to build and maintain.
These are some good tips. One thing I would add is to build habits, once you have a routine of working on the solo project it makes it easier to keep going on not quit.
Thanks for sharing what's worked for you, OP. Some of these are very enriching strategies for when the grind feels insurmountable.
Some of them can also feed delusion or false signals - most people you talk to aren't going to outright tell you that your app sucks, for example.
Non-monetary signals can also be encouraging but misleading long-term. My last attempt at a solo SaaS was a financial data application that had a lot of built-in virality. People really liked it, traffic was growing, and I thought I was succeeding at "product-led growth."
But the monetizable parts of my app appealed to a completely different type of person than the viral parts. What's worse, the sales process for people willing to pay was also very different. I'd built a low-touch marketing funnel with "prosumer" pricing but needed a high-touch sales channel with few clients and a fat price tag!
It was a "pivot or die" moment and a tough pill to swallow as it was the first time I'd built a software project with lots of happy users. Those users just wouldn't pay me, and rather than burn another 6-12 months re-tooling the entire business, I killed it instead.
If you are not getting ANY traction whatsoever it may be time to move on. Please don't take this the wrong way, but I'm your target audience and I would not give you money for this. I might not even use your app, as a search engine could get me viable coworking locations and curated reviews faster and more accurately.
Maybe there is a path to success where coworking spaces themselves pay you for a listing and the remote workers themselves aren't your customers? But as they say, your paid solution has to be 10x better than any free competitor and in this case your free competitors are Google and Facebook.
I'm afraid, those remote workers you're trying to help prefer working solo, for the same reason you're working solo. Perhaps, try to change your idea: make it an airbnb-style office rental app, where tech workers rent a home office to other tech workers.
Welcome to the world of crowded apps and busy professionals. In coming future real problem would be getting people's attention, building apps is the easy bit.
You stay motivated by remaining as close to the value you are delivering to your customers as possible, so you can feed energy from their use of the product.
This is almost impossible in a marketplace business, which is one of the infinite number of reasons that building a marketplace inevitably fails.
Some thoughts (I used to run a chain of 20+ coworking spaces)
* Remote individual workers are the least attractive customer for the typical coworking space (that isn't a cafe). Small and unpredictable revenue, plus higher support per head, since the account is only one head.
* Remote workers also aren't a great fit for you. Very few like to hop around. Their reasons are typically avoiding loneliness, finding a reliable place to focus etc. And so would only use your platform until they find a space they like.
* SMBs are the sweet spot. Coworking is cheaper AND less overhead for them. In many countries they don't get access to grade A space even if they're willing to pay. For the coworking space, it's only slightly more work than a solo account and significantly more recurring and reliable revenue. You may be better off targeting small teams.
* One particular pain point is expiring inventory - remote workers actually fit this well since they're willing to go for a floating desk. Most spaces would be willing to offer discounts on this. Kind of like last minute flight or hotel deals.
* Another related product is meeting and conference room bookings. Also expires and has a market in WFH teams.
* The last two also have a better business model fit since they are intermittent and people may be more inclined to shop around, allowing you to take a cut of every transaction. For any kind of recurring contract, you're probably limited to taking a one time lead gen or brokerage fee since you have grounds to maintain a relationship with the customer after the initial match.
Depending on how long you’ve been working on it and how hard you’ve marketed it, it’s important not to miss a signal that you should move on. While we all have problems with motivation from time to time, some things aren’t worth motivating yourself for and it’s important to recognise that. This might not apply if it’s just a hobby project - but a hobby project should probably be fun. If it’s a serious attempt at a business rethink your marketing strategy. Nothing will motivate you more than signups and revenue.
As a past founder this is immensely important. Think very carefully about he financial impacts of "taking the idea to term" and more importantly if you're happy with your current life. In many cases if you're asking yourself questions like this you likely don't have traction to make this a real thing and should maybe consider moving on.
You've got to work on something where there's an immediate distribution channel and customers. Don't work on anything so speculative as this, where you're just hoping there will be someone who wants it.
You have to know how you're going to sell it before you build it. There are only a handful of things that work, which other people are using and you can copy.
I don't see this to be a problem worth solving.
Some problems are problems but for a startup to succeed it needs to be a very important problem.
Having a unique insight is also not enough. It needs to be a highly leverageable insight or advantage. One that you can use in this startup; as you grow your leverage it will help you get users and revenue.
Neither seem true here. When that happens, the journey is a grind, you try to push hard but people don't seem interested.
how do I get motivated? well I have to believe there is a 'leverageable' insight or angle that will grow when I make progress ;) belief that it's a big problem people care about and that I am growing unfair advantage over time solving it.
I think it's important to highlight that this kind of advice isn't negative and it's well meaning. As engineers it can be easy to form a distortion field about what we're working on and the perception of those who might actually want (or not want) to actually buy it.
Being honest with yourself is the best way to be kind to yourself. Moving on is not giving up.
I used to be a schoolteacher; I left teaching and became a software engineer a few years ago. For the past two years, I've been building a solo Saas product, that solves a problem I spotted when I was teaching. I hope to launch later this year.
To answer OP's question, about a year ago, I told my parents what I was building. My mum is a teacher, so she's my first test user. Every time I talk to them, they ask how things are going, so I need to keep working on it so I've got something to tell them.
To join in on everyone else's roasting OP's business idea: OP, what are you offering your users that they can't get from typing 'coworking space' or 'cafe' into their search engine of choice? It's not enough to make something useful, it also has to be something that your customers don't already have.
I’m in a similar space. Solo working on an Edtech solution. Man it can be hard. @cjs_ac, I’d be keen to chat, if you’d have time.
All my solo projects suffered from all the things you mentioned. Once I found a cofounder for my current project, these problems went away because
1. There’s social altruism activated because you two are constantly doing things not just for yourself, but for the other person. 2. View point diversity. You get way more feedback with another talking head at the same table, helps unblock you more than you think. And this can ignite new insight and therefore new notification energy!
Is there a way to hack this as a solo founder? I think so!
I had a former co founder who I would always bounce ideas off of and even tho he wasn’t directly working on my projects, he would check in with me and kind of act like a rubber duck I could talk to. This could be your friends, partner, or strangers!
Also, time is your best friend, for good or for worse. I think back on projects I started and quit after a year, I would like to think those projects would be successful if I just put more time into it.
Forget AI Girlfriends - let's launch AI Co-Founders.
The only problem is I'm a solo developer so need to bootstrap my own AI co-founder first.
> The only problem is I'm a solo developer so need to bootstrap my own AI co-founder first.
Here you go: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67d9acd9106881919145eacc538ec9a2-vir...
Just used it, I thought this response was hilarious
https://i.imgur.com/UqA7eHy_d.webp?maxwidth=760&fidelity=gra...
AI co-founder with equity.
2 years time:
"My AI co-founder has just stitched me up on the cap table. Does anyone know a good AI lawyer that can sue them?"
While a co-founder can help, it can also ruin everything. As you say, there are other relationships and ways of interacting that can easily fill the same role, ie. advisors, board members, customers, etc. Statistically, I think that co-founder infighting is one of the largest reasons why many startups fail. It's also a fantastic way to ruin friendships.
Having just one other person in the trenches is so helpful. I hadn't thought about the social altruism angle but I think there's a lot of truth to it.
I also agree about time. I think new products follow a model similar to compounding interest. It's very small at the start - sometimes negligible but over time things add up.
Lastly, I think we get desensitized to success. Getting the first user, the first ten, etc. These are not small milestones. They're meaningful.
Lastly lastly, if it's something you want to make money from then focus primarily on user acquisition and secondly on product. Commonly difficult for builders to do but not doing so cements delayed failure.
Having built many things I agree with most of the comments here. Step back and built something else.
I have had MVPs turn into something years later when I didn't expect it anymore, some projects, the majority to be fair, never made it tho.
Respectfully, I don't see a viable business here. As a remote worker, I can hardly imagine "signing up" for an app to find coworking space. Your efforts would be better spent on something more compelling. PMF (Product:Market Fit) is hard enough when there's actually a decent addressable market.
> Respectfully, I don't see a viable business here.
Isn't all of WeWork this business? Granted, I know they've had their share of problems with profitability and bankruptcy, however, I think that stems from issues other than the business not necessarily being viable.
> Isn't all of WeWork this business?
No, it's not even close. WeWork owns real estate.
OP is trying to sell subscriptions to an app that helps users find coworking locations.
Wework’s business was controlling real-estate via leasing. It never had enough money to own meaningful amounts of office space in multiple major markets.
I agree with chrisweekly, it's not even close. WeWork provided value to people by assuming some risk in signing those longer term lease agreements and repackaging it to people looking for shorter term office space or to those who would otherwise not want to enter into a commercial office lease themselves. I don't think OP is really offering any value add over a quick search for "coworking <city>" and I imagine that's why nobody is signing up. Personally, I find that even a free SaaS subscription is a liability these days so the value add needs to be highly compelling.
I was only making a technical point about real-estate.
Critiquing the OP’s project doesn’t interest me intellectually.
Is this a side project or your main endeavor?
It will take time to get traction. I have a bigger picture in mind and shipping small updates and features constantly helps a lot. I’m building a tool for myself and I use it on a daily basis and keep improving it with the things I like, that keeps me motivated.
That's an excellent list of positive strokes. I wanted to punch up your bullet on talking to people. Face to face is always better. It pulls me out of the void. Rather than chatting on text-based social media, set up video chats. Going to small conferences in your market is a great way to get a boost of energy. If you're good at it, you can even get a few customers. Seeing the emotions on the face of the person I'm talking to really helps boost my energy.
This really resonates with me.
Your insight is helpful almost as much as knowing that other people like me are out there too.
I think (!?) I've finally let go of a project that I've been working on for a couple of years.
A key tenet of the project (which I frequently forgot) was that it was a way for me to learn|refine technical skills and to keep me entertained|occupied.
The project certainly achieved those objectives for me and I'm a better person for doing it.
Good luck to you and I hope you continue to succeed!
What’s the app? Might not sign up but am interested in creations
1. Write realistic weekly plans and stick to them. There is satisfaction in being able to reach a goal every week, even if you have to compromise on the quality sometime. It also helps not feeling lost if the project takes a long time.
2. Have frequent debriefs with friends and, if none is available, an IA (which will be less afraid to offend you actually).
3. A lot of sport
When it seems like the mountain is impossible to climb and it's overwhelming I just look for the next small thing to fix/implement and get it done. Rinse and repeat. Don't think about the bigger picture, just get stuff done. Eventually a lot of stuff gets done and you make progress.
I've been grinding on kidcarekit.com for a long while in fits in spurts. I find myself working more on the DevOps side rather than the actual functionality but I've learned so much about rails and DevOps that it's been a net win for me even though it doesn't functionally do much yet!
Be careful if you see yourself spending too much time on the devops side of things. You can be building a tower of work that has zero customer value in the end.
Even the supposed quality improvements found in an automated way may just turn out very expensive compared to just spending the time doing the QA yourself at specific milestones. Unless your career is devops be very skeptical and track your time and return on that time.
I learned this the hard way although I am a build/devops person professional I came to realise I had a tendency to build really complicated processes that would be ok in a hundred person team, while I actually was working solo. The upside is that there is lots of reusability for future projects and I also became very skeptical of custom CI jobs and CD tools, and try to reduce everything to env variables 1 line bash scripts. I also am very skeptical of automated integration tests as they are incredibly expensive to build and maintain.
This is the way
These are some good tips. One thing I would add is to build habits, once you have a routine of working on the solo project it makes it easier to keep going on not quit.
Thanks for sharing what's worked for you, OP. Some of these are very enriching strategies for when the grind feels insurmountable.
Some of them can also feed delusion or false signals - most people you talk to aren't going to outright tell you that your app sucks, for example.
Non-monetary signals can also be encouraging but misleading long-term. My last attempt at a solo SaaS was a financial data application that had a lot of built-in virality. People really liked it, traffic was growing, and I thought I was succeeding at "product-led growth."
But the monetizable parts of my app appealed to a completely different type of person than the viral parts. What's worse, the sales process for people willing to pay was also very different. I'd built a low-touch marketing funnel with "prosumer" pricing but needed a high-touch sales channel with few clients and a fat price tag!
It was a "pivot or die" moment and a tough pill to swallow as it was the first time I'd built a software project with lots of happy users. Those users just wouldn't pay me, and rather than burn another 6-12 months re-tooling the entire business, I killed it instead.
If you are not getting ANY traction whatsoever it may be time to move on. Please don't take this the wrong way, but I'm your target audience and I would not give you money for this. I might not even use your app, as a search engine could get me viable coworking locations and curated reviews faster and more accurately.
Maybe there is a path to success where coworking spaces themselves pay you for a listing and the remote workers themselves aren't your customers? But as they say, your paid solution has to be 10x better than any free competitor and in this case your free competitors are Google and Facebook.
I'm afraid, those remote workers you're trying to help prefer working solo, for the same reason you're working solo. Perhaps, try to change your idea: make it an airbnb-style office rental app, where tech workers rent a home office to other tech workers.
Maybe it’s time to pivot?
Welcome to the world of crowded apps and busy professionals. In coming future real problem would be getting people's attention, building apps is the easy bit.
Attention is easy. Tikok is able to get mass attention in any niche.
You stay motivated by remaining as close to the value you are delivering to your customers as possible, so you can feed energy from their use of the product.
This is almost impossible in a marketplace business, which is one of the infinite number of reasons that building a marketplace inevitably fails.