Guest Post: Joel from Deskwanted
The Story of Deskwanted
We launched Deskwanted at the end of 2010, along with our online magazine Deskmag. We realized there was a need for a highly functional search system for coworking spaces and shared offices. Although there are several lists of coworking spaces, and several search engines for business centers and office rental, none of them seemed very user-friendly nor helpful. Most business center search systems won’t even give you a price.
We also realized that coworking and shared offices was a market undergoing an extreme expansion. The number of coworking spaces has increased from under 350 at the start of 2010, to 820 today. At least one coworking space opens somewhere in the world every day!
At the same time, the number of flexible and contract workers is just skyrocketing. Whether we like it or not, so many of us are being pushed out of traditional jobs in company offices, and are forced to become freelance contract employees with no fixed place of work.
In the mid 90s, “work from home” was all the buzz. But people tried it, and found it depressing and isolating. Then we tried working in cafes, and that was fine until the staff started getting angry about people sitting for hours with one cup of coffee. The noise and distraction didn’t help either.
Coworking has come along just at the right time. People need a place to work, they need to interact with other individuals. They don’t want to return to the traditional office or the coffee shop. Coworking sits somewhere between these options, in terms of aesthetics and concept. Coworking allows you to plug into an instant network, to make new connections, find jobs, share information, build teams, develop joint projects. That’s why it’s taking off.
Deskwanted is the gateway to these shared offices.
Soon we’ll be launching a new product - a coworking management tool, to allow the operators of coworking spaces to organize their finances, coworkers, booking, equipment and security. This is something really needed in the coworking industry right now.
The other half of our start-up is Deskmag, our online magazine about coworking. Deskmag was originally supposed to be the blog about Deskwanted, but it has become so much more than that. It is now one of the most read and trusted sources of information about the coworking industry. Each week we publish two or three researched articles about coworking trends and statistics, which are of great assistance to people who run coworking spaces, and to those wanting to know a bit more about this booming movement. As a result of the high quality of reporting on Deskmag, we regularly get approached by mainstream media to comment on coworking. So we are market experts, not just market actors.
We are still a very small team - there’s only four of us. We are completely self financed. We’d like to expand, so funding will be necessary soon, but we’ll keep our lean start-up approach.
We are based in Berlin, which is one of the four capitals of coworking (the others are San Francisco, New York and London). Berlin is a wonderful city to have a start-up. It’s cheap to live here, and the lifestyle is great. The only problem is access to funding, which is quite hard to find. It’s not like the U.S. where anyone with half an idea has millions of dollars thrown at them. But being in Berlin has allowed us to be at the center of the coworking conversation, and to link up with other key players in the industry.
