How I built a co-working space with less than $7k

A rising Indian startup ecosystem, skyrocketing rents, and long lease agreements—all these forced young companies to look for an alternative when it came to spending lots of money on office rentals. This gave birth to a wave of co-working spaces in India.

The country has more than a hundred co-working spaces now spread across major cities, which I expect to grow even more as more business owners and freelancers opt for easy-on-the-pocket office alternatives.

Why I decided to run a co-working space

Eh, I have answered this question a zillion times! But guess what, I have been honest in conveying my motive behind opening my co-working space, i.e. to make money and to fund my other startup. (But culture stays as our first priority. Yes, that sounds out of place, but it works!)

I’ve been running this business for almost six months now and the business is good. We cracked our operational breakeven cost within the first three months and have been profitable since our fourth month.

With three big, profitable bootstrap startups onboard and a few midsize IT businesses, we are positive at this pace about breaking even by the end of 2017.

Let me share my experience and the strategies I employed in building my co-working space.

1. Analyze the competition

Knowing your competition is the first thing you should do in any business. This helps you develop your strategies and make better financial decisions.

Here is the plan I followed while doing competitive analysis for co-working spaces in New Delhi.

Founders profile

This is very critical yet ignored by many. You need to know the brains working behind the scenes. Again, you need to. This will help you analyze the different perspectives other founders have.

Learning: The top and most loved co-working spaces in New Delhi, such as Innov8 and 91 Springboard, among others, are run by impeccably talented founders. But there are a few co-working businesses that are run by not-so-entrepreneurial-minded people.

We then decided not to enter the top space since it required a huge amount of money, and businesses there are run by intelligent people. We instead opted for the lower-priced segment, where we could fill in the gap through culture and building relationships with members.

Product and service offered

2. Shortlist a few hot locations

3. Build infrastructure the lean way

4. Have zero marketing budget