Item — HN Reader

There IS a market for a WeWork like service.

A WeWork-like model has appeal to someone like me that would love good coffee and an office/hoteling space! Especially as I travel a lot and sometimes want a reliable private workspace in an arbitrary city. Coffee shops frankly don’t cut it for working/meeting with people all day.

Also there’s often a need for meeting spaces in arbitrary cities. my company would have used an airBNB style conference room scheduling solution half a dozen times last year.

All to say there’s at least a potential customer base here. Whether it’s a profitable business model, well, maybe :)

7 comments

There's definitely a profitable business there, even. WeWork is absolutely a very reasonable, solid business. It's probably just not worth $50 billion.

I feel like a missed opportunity for WeWork was a kitchen. AFAIK none of them sell food for purchase. Why not get all the workweek lunch revenue?

If my friend who owns real estate can be used as an anecdotal bulletpoint: At the pub last night he told me how he and numerous other property owners here in Chicago have people who are trying to start their own catering/dinner party businesses and will rent out airbnb's with especially nice/large kitchens to do all of their food prep over a couple of days, check out and leave. A couple of them graduated to being able to sign leases on their own commercial kitchens once their respective client bases grew large enough.

At first, he said he was confused why the kitchen of all places was constantly the most time-costly area of his properties to clean. Then one of the renters let him know what was going on.

Now there's an opportunity.

Wow, that is fascinating. There's clearly a larger market for commercial kitchen space than is being satisfied.

Yes, I mean that is what Travis Kalanick is doing with his new company Cloudkitchens

Oh you gotta be kidding, really?

Edit: Googled it, You are NOT kidding wow. On the one hand, it's a great idea. On the other hand CloudKitchens?

I grok that, but...is the target market here DevOps people who make a great alfredo on the side?

Would WeWork operate the cafeteria themselves, or make kitchen space available for cuisine-inclined people to make and sell food to the people using the co-working space?

In either case, you can imagine opting in to a monthly spend for N employees of your company, at some kind of discount, to spend at the cafeteria. Wouldn't be much different from the private club model of running a restaurant, where you have a given monthly spend that you have to use no matter what. And everyone in the WeWork already has badges so it'd be simple tap-to-pay that would go directly onto/against your monthly coworking bill.

There's IWG. The unsexy competitor whose been doing it for longer and has more properties and isn't valued at 100x their worth.

>> my company would have used an airBNB style conference room scheduling solution half a dozen times last year.

These exist. They exist all over the world. Regus being one.

There are companies that provide office space everywhere. Check out Regus for example -- http://regus.com.

Can't most hotels provide a conference room and other services?

It’s called a hotel or motel. They contain all those things you desire.

Not really. Having tried to use hotels for meetings, they are unreasonably expensive and do stupid stuff like “the whiteboard rental fee is $500/day”

Maybe that's just the cost of offering these things. How much money do you think they're making off of those fees? They're probably covering costs and are low margin.

I think they are making a killing. If you have a business meeting in progress with your client, you are not going to move to another hotel bc of $500 whiteboard fee. You cringe and put this expense on your corporate credit card. And hotel knows this.

As someone who's been around enough people who book conventions, they're making a KILLING off these fees. It's the business model of the industry; they get you on the extras. Every little coffee or snack break is outrageously expensive. God help you if you cater a lunch through them.

If you think the services for a wedding are expensive, try booking a convention. Companies have way more money to spend than random couples do, and the hotels/convention centers know it.

For example, here's a typical catering menu for a convention center. Note that most of these prices are per person, and also note all the extra fees that they'll ding you for on pages 2-4 on top of the already high food costs (e.g. $2 per meal and break per person for plates).