Million-dollar weekend #1 - niche coworking spaces.
My first million-dollar weekend (#mwd) project was a niche coworking space. I saw a need in my own life — I used to pay for a coworking space in Montreal, called Crew Collective, but recently cancelled because I found it expensive for what I was getting. Being new to town, I was looking for a space that would focus on events and meeting new people. Initially, that was their pitch. They did more than any other coworking space in town to connect members via events. It was great. Another thing I liked was that there was a gym in the same building. Initially, it was great. I was meeting lots of people and my workout routine was well integrated into my schedule. Over time, the events were quieter and at one point they even paused events. So I decided to leave a few months ago.
I also observed that there’s a lot of new people to Montreal. There’s a big meetup culture here and I go quite often. A few months back, I was at a ~25-person meetup and we did a show-of-hands of who’s new to Montreal. It turns out there was only ONE GUY. A lot of the newbies are remote tech workers like myself. A lot of the people I meet at these meetups also want to meet new people, have good jobs, and are friendly/fun to hang with. Why not make a coworking space for them?
So, my idea is to build a coworking space in Montreal for “new townies” that focused on events and connecting members. My goal for the weekend was to get 20 pre-payments of $200, for a total of $4,000. My plan was to get enough to prove there’s consistent demand for this niche and then figure out the lease from there. I figured that if I got this far, the lease could be a large, collaborative project between the members and I, where I could get further info on what their problems, needs, and desires are. I asked a handful of friends to see if they would prepay. No bites. The responses were quite positive, however people’s positive opinions or encouragement is not what matters — solving their problem is what matters and this means getting a commitment or money.
I then tried again in a different potential customer segment: a bitcoin-only coworking space. I figured I’d have better odds if I cast a wider net and since I have a bigger network here, it was worth a shot. I wasn’t able to get any commitments, but I still have some things brewing. I realized there’s a much larger opportunity here. Bitcoin companies want to work and be together. There’s not only just solo remote workers but whole startups which could be customers. But, not getting ahead of myself or falling in love with the idea, there’s still some work to do here. A couple of people I contacted are interested and we’re planning to have coffee later this week to discuss more. Keep you posted.
What did I learn?
don’t launch in the summer. People are checked out for the summer. All meetups are being pushed to Sept. People just aren’t making big decisions in spring/summer
Remote tech workers are a little flaky and hard to pin down. Most people I spoke to are interested but don’t know where' they’ll be in a few months. This kills the sale, but also makes them hard customers to work with if I need to sign a long-term lease.
Probably not a great starter project if you don’t have an audience. It takes time to get in front of the right people. It also requires a larger commitment to get started. Compare it to a dog-walking service or something with lower barrier to entry, this is much bigger.
Need to find a more direct channel and access a larger, more compatible audience. For the first attempt, I asked a handful of friends who I thought were in the same boat as me. Maybe if I went to a meetup and asked around in person I might have better chances. So, I came up with this meetup strategy:
Meetup strategy:
Find a meetup that I’m interested in and go to their next event.
Hit up the organizers and ask for a 10 mins presentation to the audience.
Introduce myself, tell a fun story, and use the rest of the time to ask the audience questions to determine if they have any problems you can solve:
Raise your hand if it’s your first time?
What sucks about [x]?
What do you love most about this meetup?
Reminder: I’ll get a notetaker in the audience so you can focus on connecting with the audience.
Create a call to action for them to contact you if there’s anything I can do for them
To close out this section, I am sharing two upgrades to the subscriber plan for all members: 1) a dedicated notion space for all my #mdw notes & upcoming projects, and 2) a custom GPT for this newsletter. See below for links.
Notion space: https://adamjohannsson.notion.site/Hi-I-m-Adam-Johannsson-c47e5bbb1bab452fa5a28e48f1d04e76?pvs=4
Adam’s newletter GPT: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-0r7GIK8RH-adam-s-newsletter-gpt
Sneak peak at my monthly essay and deep dive.
Deep Dive: Tesla Energy
I recently came across Tesla Energy in the TSLA 0.00%↑ financial statements and it caught my eye. My plan is to invest and investigate. I already made the investment and I will spend the rest of June diving deep into their business to answer some of the following questions (and more):
How does it work?
Why start Tesla Energy, who are the customers, and what are their alternatives?
What problem does this solve and how big is the total addressable market?
What are the energy market implications?
Essay: How dating apps have impacted Dating Quality
I’ve always been fascinated by dating culture and lately I’ve come to see it as a barometer societal health. I have been forming a thesis around modern dating apps being fundamentally about quantity and how this negatively impacts the dating experience for both heterosexual men and women. I argue that a new paradigm of quality-oriented dating is possible and likely to be highly beneficial or even refreshing in today’s dating world. There’s a whole lot to say on this topic, so I am trying to keep it concise and focus on:
Cultural observations
Arguments for & against quality-oriented
Alternatives
Moral & ethical implications of status quo or alternatives
Conclusion
Voila!
Other things in the X sphere I found interesting.
In the Notion page, I have a section I call the “Xphere”, which is whatever happens on X.com (of substack) that I find interesting. Give it a read: https://adamjohannsson.notion.site/0108e0298c134c909d370814b2240ec2?v=8d86e606807a41c3b22126b3e37b0e95 I will also be providing a few notes in this newsletter on highlights from the xphere that I think are worth writing about, whether they’re related to #mdw or not…
https://x.com/grassfedbitcoin/status/1796311998466003418?s=12
this is probably the longest post on X that I’ve ever read… I love that the community is becoming more aware of Bitmain and Antpool dominance and how this can be a problem for bitcoin’s decentralization. It’s pretty clear that this group doesn’t really care about decentralization, only the appearance of it, so they can sell more machines. This has really awakened a sense of purpose and interest in finding potential solutions away from pooled mining. In my mind, there’s a couple things that can help:
open source asic
sv2 and other business model improvements at the pool level
I’ll touch on those next week. For now, have a great week and reach out if you have any questions!
Best,
A