The Debrief: Coworking Pop-Up #1
Wow!! I cannot believe that I hosted our first coworking pop-up and it was a huge success! Honestly, it went better than I expected and I learned SO much.
In the spirit of transparency and all of us learning from each other to make everyone better, I wanted to put all my thoughts, notes, and data together in one place.
I’ll go into the strategies behind the planning and marketing of this event, plus logistics and lessons from the day.
This post is not as organized as I would have liked and coming out later than I had planned, but what can I say, I have 2 other jobs and 2 kids and I’m tired! So I decided that done is better than perfect and I’d rather share the information now than sit on it waiting for it to be exactly right.
If there is anything missing that you want to learn more about, let me know! I’d love to hear from you :)
THE STRATEGY
Minimum viable product
I really want to build a permanent coworking space in Humboldt County. But I also know that building a permanent space is going to be expensive.
I am a big believer in the concept of minimum viable product - testing your ideas as cheaply and freely as you can, so you can learn as much as possible from your future customers. It is all about iterating and gathering data so that when you do go big, you do it wisely.
With that in mind, I had the idea for a coworking pop-up - a low-cost, one-day event that would allow me to see:
If anyone would sign up for coworking
If anyone would pay for coworking
What kinds of people are interested in coworking
As with this blog post, I focused on getting things done - not perfect :)
Setting realistic goals
I decided that I would cancel the pop-up if fewer than 3 people signed up.
I hoped to make some kind of profit, but planned on breaking even or slightly losing money.
My top priority was to get as much information from my attendees as possible - how did they hear about me, why did they sign up, what matters to them most in coworking, etc.
That’s it! Beyond that, I focused on providing maximum value for minimum cost. I thought about how much I could do for free. I tracked my expenses (even those little $5 costs add up if you don’t pay attention).
Networking, social media, & email marketing
Marketing is my area of expertise, but this was my first time building a business like this from zero all by myself.
I started with a pop-up coworking survey and I told everyone I know about it, whether I thought they personally would be interested in the event or not - because you never know who might not be interested in your product themselves but who knows the people who would be :)
Then I started talking about it on social media. I had been working hard to make interesting reels and connect with local businesses for months before, and wouldn’t you know - that turned out to be key!
Familia Coffee reached out to me when I posted a reel about my pop-up idea and they offered up their space to host it! I connected with the owners via email and sorted out all the details. It was AMAZINGLY simple, and I will be grateful to them forever for this!
Once I had the space reserved, I sent messages to my email list, which is where I knew my most engaged audience would be - since it was mostly made up of people who had taken my market research survey, showing they were already invested in my idea and coworking in Humboldt.
I created and boosted a couple of reels on Instgram about the popup for about $3-5 each. My total spent on Instagram marketing was $13.66.
Signup process & $$$
I didn’t want to spend any extra time or money creating a complex signup system, so I just had people enter their email and name to register via a simple form on my squarespace site.
I put the event info at the top of my Link In Bio page from Instagram, so that when people clicked through, they would see the pop-up details right away - with a button to take them to the event page with signup box.
On the landing page, I gave the essential details and explained the sliding scale price ($0-20) and included a link to my Venmo.
I didn’t want to invest time or fees into creating a product listing that would allow people to pay right when they signed up, and in general, I am happy with that choice! It kept things simple and easy for this testing phase of this whole idea.
However, only 1 person paid when they registered!
I chalk this up to:
Having to take the extra step to link out to Venmo - it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but online, people really don’t take the extra step and are much less likely to take any steps that aren’t seamlessly built in
I think a lot of people wanted to make sure this was real before they paid some random person on Venmo…
Because, ultimately, every single attendee paid - it’s just that 90% of them did it during/after the event rather than in advance
So who signed up?
In the end, I got 14 signups. I was shocked!!! This was so many more than I was expected - my dream-big, stretch goal was 10 signups, if that gives you any idea of what I was expecting :)
I picked 10 as my stretch goal because that was what I thought could comfortably fit in the half of Familia’s Old Town location that I had been planning to use. (This was actually an incorrect assumption on my part…but more on that later!)
Once I got to 10 signups, I closed the signups until I could confirm with Familia that we could take up more space than I had originally planned on. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it gave me the opportunity to introduce scarcity into my marketing strategy.
I posted reels about how the event was so popular that signups had closed and I had to open a waitlist. This was really helpful for creating a sense of exclusivity and legitimacy, which helped push the last few signups over the finish line (including folks from the waitlist).
Eventually we got the go-ahead from Familia to use the entire cafe if needed, so I reopened signups and shared about it.
Here is the data on who signed up:
3 people I know personally
3 people who were subscribed to my email list (most likely via taking my market research survey) - and this is where my 1 in-advance paid attendee came from!
8 people who saw a post (or, more commonly, were sent my post by a friend or loved one) on Instagram
THE EVENT
Touching base with attendees
I emailed every attendee personally after they registered, to thank them and to ask how they heard about the event.
I also emailed them the week before, the day before, and the day of the event to remind them of the event details, including a detailed schedule of the flow of the day.
And guess what - HALF of them cancelled!
In the 24 hours leading up to the event, I heard from about just under half of the attendees that they could no longer attend.
Why?
For most of them, it was meetings! One person had a meeting come up where they had to discuss confidential information, which they obviously couldn’t do in an open-work setup in a coffee shop.
For the others, it was just back-to-back meetings - which would have meant they couldn’t really meet people and they’d be talking to their computer for most of the coworking time. Given that my pre-event email talked about taking long conversations elsewhere to preserve the focus of people around them… yeah, that was not going to work.
One person was a no-call no-show, but she told me later she was sick that day. That made fully HALF of my registered attendees cancellations!
The cancellations turned out to be a blessing
I was surprised how many people cancelled, but it turned out to leave us with the perfect number - 8, including me.
This meant we all fit in one section of Familia - the big window area I had envisioned, which I was happy about.
Setting up the space
The event ran from 1-4pm, so I arrived at Familia around 12:15pm.
Luci, one of the owners of Familia, was so incredibly helpful in getting the space set up perfectly. She made “reserved” signs for all the tables and helped show me a few table configurations so we could find what worked best. I was SO grateful to have her there showing me how to creatively and most effectively leverage the space.
We got it configured so that everyone would have their own two-top table to themselves - except for one two-top, which ended up being shared. I think (I know) those people felt cramped.
I think even a full two-top felt like the bare minimum to many workers - people like to spread out and have breathing room!
In the future, I would definitely configure it so people had more room.
Low-cost value offers
I wanted everyone to feel like they got a lot of bang for their buck from this event, so I found a few low-cost ways to make everything feel extra special.
Flowers at the check-in station (which was just a stool from Familia) but many people commented on them
$4 gift cards for Familia for each attendee (enough to cover most or all of a drink, but I hoped people would have a pastry or snack to help generate cashflow for Familia during a slow time of day - which I think almost every attendee did)
Free Ink+Volt and other fancy notebooks - I get these through work for free and can’t use them all, but they’re extremely high quality and I offered a spread of them to “shop” from for free
Tony’s chocolate bars with a hand-written thank you and illustration as a gift on the way out as people left for the day
My terrible introduction
This was definitely my biggest failure from the event!
Right at 1:00, the scheduled start time, my first attendee showed up and there was a steady flow of arrivals until about 1:15. I made a point to spend time talking to each attendee as they arrived and giving them my full attention as much as possible.
Around 1:10 is when I discovered that the wifi wasn’t working, so I was coordinating with a staff member to get everyone online promptly and feeling VERY worried that my attendees were getting frustrated that they couldn’t get online right away.
We got the internet fixed and suddenly I thought, “Oh, and I need to stand up and introduce myself and the event!”
I did not think through what exactly I wanted to say, and I really wish I had. Instead, I freestyled it and tried to figure out what was important to say right on the spot, and I think I came off a little confused and not as professional as I wanted. Not a good first impression!
I had generally planned to keep it short and let people get right to work, but even if I had done this perfectly, this also turned out to not be the best strategy and is something I would change in the future.
What I learned:
I wrote out what I wanted to say in advance for all of the other times I had planned to speak to the whole group. This went SO much better - even just writing a few bullet points made a big difference.
My original strategy for my intro wasn’t the best. I had been thinking people would want to get right to work, and maybe do networking later. So I kept my intro short and didn’t give people a chance to introduce themselves until our first break at 2:30. As a result, no one really spoke to their neighbors until then, and most attendees told me they wished they had felt free to chat earlier.
The focused work time was wonderful
I have practically no notes on this part :) I got so much done and so did the other people who attended!
We had about 2 full hours of focused work, from 1:15-2:30 and 2:45-3:30. I worked through a bunch of annoying admin tasks I had been putting off for weeks, which was so gratifying!
The networking was so great
The highlight for me - and for most of the attendees, I heard from them - was when we all started networking a bit more.
Two attendees discovered they had a skill-need match and shared some great info. Other attendees were proactive about talking to people they didn’t know and making new connections. I really enjoyed learning about the diverse work experiences and goals everyone had.
At our 2:30 break, I invited everyone to introduce themselves and talk a about what they were working on. And then again at 3:30, the chat kicked off again as people started to wrap up their work and have that “end of workday” conversation with the people around them.
THE AFTERMATH
I was smiling from ear-to-ear after the event wrapped up.
I got such positive feedback from everyone who attended, and I think every single person there asked me to please host another one.
It doesn’t get much better than that!
Running the numbers
All those good feelings are nice, but let’s talk money okay?
Expenses: $77
Familia gift cards
Name tags for attendees
Flowers for check-in table
Paying Gloria to make a flyer for the Arcata Chamber newsletter
Instagram boosted reels
Income: $95
Most frequently paid: $10
Lowest payment: $10
Highest payment: $20
Profit: $18
How about that?? I expected to break even or slightly lose money, so any profit on this event was a win :)
I’ll reiterate, though, that I was not doing it for the money - I was doing it for the data, and I got a TON of value from what I learned through this experience. It’s so important to be clear on what your goals are.
The post-event survey
I sent a survey on the evening of the event, asking attendees to give me their feedback.
I am not sure why, but for some reason, the link didn’t work. It hasn’t happened with any of my other surveys, so I still don’t know why, but this is something I would definitely be sure to test before I send surveys to anyone again!
I got survey feedback from 6 out of the 7 attendees, which is a pretty good 85% response rate! The feedback was overwhelmingly positive - the negative feedback I heard was that:
The music at Familia was too loud
The chairs became uncomfortable over time
There was not quite enough table space/breathing room
Most of the positive feedback I got sounded like this:
And then came the question I really wanted to know the answer to…
SO WHAT COMES NEXT?
Another popup. For sure. A new type of location, though maybe we’ll go back to Familia again one day.
What kind of location would you like to see?
And in the meantime, I will leave you at the end of this very long and not-as-organized-as-my-content-manager-self-would-prefer post with this little idea I had, that maybe you’ll hear more about soon…
