My wife & I have recently started a new project, opening the first co-working facility in Northeast Ohio.
Working out of my home for the past 5 years has been great and all. But for many reasons (which you can follow on my new blog (www.officespacecoworking.com), we felt the need to find a place where I could work outside the home.
Long story short, I wanted individuality without isolation, as Susan Evans of Office Nomads might say.
That said - when launching a new business venture you’re faced with a ton of questions.
For us these questions included:
- Would you be interested in this?
- What would you expect to pay for this service?
- What would you expect in the way of amenities?
- How often would you use it?
On the other side of the equation, we had several business questions we wanted answered before we laid down money on anything.
- How big of a facility should we get?
- How long did it take you to break even?
- What will the utilization % be?
So we created two 10 question surveys.
One for potential customers.
One for people who’ve already launched a co-working facility.
Luckily for us the co-working community is growing rapidly and the people involve din the movement are in a word - exceptional.
They’re happy to answer questions, do whatever it takes to see co-working succeed.
So posting a survey to this group was easy. We simply asked and people were happy to help.
To survey potential customers, we decided to follow the model used by another facility owner and simply went out to local coffee shops and looked for people with laptops. The logic being, if you work out of a Starbucks you’re probably wanting to get out of the house and at least observe the community around you.The results:
We’re still in the early stages of our surveys and the number of respondents are in no way statistically viable. It’s not like we’re able to survey 10,000 people here and prove a business model to a X% derivation.
You never can, in my opinion.
However, you can get enough of sampling to point you in the right direction.
We immediately were able to confirm some of our hypotheses as well as discover brand new ways of thinking just by stimulating conversation with people in our target market.
For instance, we learned - the average facility size should allow for about 50 simultaneous users. This based on a survey of existing facility owners and what has proved profitable in their local communities.
We also learned that the facility size should allow for about 100 square feet per person. This seems to be the ‘magic’ number to correlate between member desks, common areas (kitchen, lounge etc), conference rooms.
On the potential customer side, we learned that there is an interest in Northeast Ohio. So far, 7 of 10 people said they would try the facility. And even those who initially said no asked to be kept informed of it’s progress.
Granted, we haven’t received any cash commitments yet, which is the ultimate test.
But have we gained enough confidence to keep pursuing the idea? You bet!
It’s all about clarity
In the end, any business idea is a crap shoot.
With all the decisions you have to make the only sure thing is YOU have to make them.
There’s no guarantee you’ll get the right business model, whether you’re surveying 50 people or 5,000.
And you have to be careful, because as a recent commercial jokingly declares - 90% of statistics can be made to say anything 50% of the time.
But if you engage people, ask them questions, stimulate conversation, AND listen…you get answers.
…answers that help clarify pivotal decisions in the early stages of product development.
I can’t tell you how powerful it is to have a customer tell you what they want.
It just eliminates so much of the noise and so much of the debate.
The handwringing is gone — the customer has spoken!
photo credit: liz_com1981
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