One year ago, we signed the lease & opened to doors to Cospace. The idea that had been in formation for more than a few months became a reality and North Austin’s first coworking space was open for business. This week we celebrate the completion of our first year of business.

It’s been a successful year.

We started with three members that first couple of weeks; one year later, we have a member family of more than 30. Craigslist & Ikea were our furniture suppliers of choice. We now enjoy a partnership with Turnstone to provide our members with some of the best office furniture out there. Our community stretches beyond our members, as Meetups and groups of all sizes and interests meet here on a regular basis.

We’ve gathered some thoughts and photos from the past year.

I’m going to walk around with a big, goofy grin all week. It’s been a whole year. I don’t know how I’m going to top 2010. We set the goal of launching this business and making it successful and so far, we’ve succeeded. One of the goals for Cospace, early on, was to make it an intersection of ideas, people, and resources. This grew from the first core message of Cospace, which was “meet here”. We wanted this to be where people came to work, to learn, to meet colleagues, to collaborate, to create, to grow. Cospace grew right alongside our members. Here’s to year two!
– Pat

I had lunch with @damon this week. Amongst many other things including his idea blog, we talked about how it’s important to share your intentions with others. Often times, the likelihood of intentions to manifest in reality increases if you share them early and often.

So, I decided to share a story that I tell every day. Every time a new person comes by to check out Cospace, this is what I share with them:

The Cospace mission is: To be a foundation for small business owners, entrepreneurs and freelancers.

I believe that there are 3 critical components to this foundation:

1) Affordable Infrastructure: Everyone needs a stable foundation to build their business from. Infrastructure is traditionally expensive and inflexible. It should be affordable and flexible, so that’s what Cospace provide.

2) Relationships: Everyone needs a foundation of core relationships to grow their business. It typically starts with your own personal and professional network. Cospace believes in helping people expand that network. Getting connected to other like minded professionals can make or break your business.

3) Resources: Everyone needs to continue to develop professionally to keep pace in the fast changing world of business. Cospace is committed to supporting networking, learning and training opportunities to the best of our ability.

The Cospace vision is: That the future of work is Lean, Mobile and Diverse. We hope to someday provide a nationally accessible network of foundations(Cospaces) for business owners, entrepreneurs and freelancers.

The Cospace plan is to:

Step 1: Continue to grow our membership at our Anderson Lane location. For September, we had 21 paid memberships + 4 co-founders and were about $980 from breaking even.

Step2: Expand to 2 full-size locations in Austin in the next 12 months. We are currently targeting Round Rock as the next location.

Step 3: Expand to 1 cafe size location in Austin in the next 12-18 months.

Step 4: Expand our offering to Franchisees across the US in the next 18-24 months.

Somewhere along the way: We expect to partner (and we’ve already started that process) with amazing Resource and Relationship providers. We don’t want to be a incubator or accelerator. But we’d like to have an app for that.

And Then: When people visit Cospace we also take a tour, learn about each others’ business and background, talk membership, talk about Cospace members, etc. Not everyone is interested or is looking for all 3 of things I mentioned above, but if you haven’t toured yet, and you’re looking for a foundation please schedule a visit!

Talk to you again soon.

Love,

Kirtus

Kyle de Haas, one of our new members at Cospace, penned a great writeup on us for one of the neighborhood newsletters this month. Titled “Coworking: an Alternative to the Home Office,” it’s a nice mention & one of what we hope to be many outreaches to our neighbors here in North Austin.

The Crestview Neighborhood Newsletter is published monthly by the Crestview Neighborhood Association & can be found online at crestviewna.org.

Can you feel it? The energy in the air around Austin’s tech community?

It’s almost palpable. SXSW is just around the corner and the Interactive portion, otherwise known as Spring Break for Geeks, starts in less than a week! SXSWi is like one big battery charger for tech professionals and we’re ready to ride that wave through March, on into April and beyond.

March 27th is MondoDB Day, where you can learn about the open source, high performance, schema-free, scalable, document-oriented database. Hosted by Geek Austin and sponsored by 10gen.

April 3rd, we’re having a Drupal Install Fest, led by Lynn Bender of Geek Austin.

April 10th will be our WordPress Install Fest. Pat Ramsey, of Cospace & slash25 code.

Those events take us through the first half of April.

What will we do after that?

The Cospace Founder Membership

After months of research, feedback and lots of planning, we have opened the doors to a fantastic space. We already have a handful of members coworking away, but there is space for many more. Our membership prices are already very competitive, we have all of the necessities you need to work effectively, and we have plenty of free parking spots right next to the building. Additional benefits for our members include discounted rates on meeting rooms, and special pricing for events and training sessions.

To kick Cospace off with a bang, we’re offering a special Founder Membership available to the first 25 members of Cospace. Signup now with Cospace and receive 10% off your Community or Keymaster membership price for as long as you keep it active. With that discount, the Community membership is only $180/month and the Keymaster membership is only $270/month.

Coworking is catching on fast in Austin and around the world. We’d like to see you & your colleagues participate in the phenomenon as a member of Cospace. Your first day of coworking is always free, so you can experience coworking without any commitments. You can email us at info@cospaceatx.com, tweet us: @cospace, or give us a call at 512.814.8379 to start the process or to learn more about coworking at Cospace.