Greetings, HN. We got the idea for this during our years of building a large virtual community of remote workers and wanting an easier way to create bespoke online places for people to connect and meetup around a specific purpose or theme. Kind of like MySpace meets Zoom.
*We wanted to make it easy to do three things really well:*
1) Create rooms on the fly that others can join with just a browser
2) Heavily customize them to a specific purpose or group
3) Have fun designing and being creative (the Internet needs more creative spaces we can make our own)
Every room has the following (and more):
- A front door that can be left open or closed
- A dedicated URL that can be shared for easy access
- Simple theming and design tools
- Customizable background music
- Slack notifications to a channel or DM when people show up
I linked this to a "neighborhood" so you can see a collection of rooms in one place. This view helps to inspire what is possible when you create a group of spaces.
workfrom.com/try requires sign-up though, far from "Create rooms on the fly that others can join with just a browser", is it possible to try it without signing up? (maybe with limited features?)
I think you nailed it. The community is a huge asset and has proven time and time again to source great spaces. It's not hard to find the location of a coffee shop or coworking space, but it is difficult to know if it's a good place to get work done. Having others who have been there and provided their insight is big.
We built Workfrom to help all of us who work outside a traditional office find great places to do our work. Fundamentally, we believe this data does not come from Foursquare or Yelp. It comes from the people who actually work from these places. Like me. Probably like you.
With help from thousands of like-minded people around the world, we now have a great resource to find and share all types of spaces that have been vetted by actual humans!
Search anywhere and everywhere. A brand new face, optimized for mobile. Create a favorites list to keep track of spaces you like and share them easily with others (I use this all the time). Check in at spaces you work from and new filters to customize the way you work (including booze). Easy to find both public and private spaces, because sometimes you need one or the other.
We've gotten a lot of feedback from business owners that the average patron staying to get some work done is a good steward of their space and spends money often. We hear stories of people staying for hours and hours, not buying anything - but we've found this is just not the norm. With that said, we do encourage our community to support businesses with their evangelism AND money.
That's nice to hear, I've always wondered about that. I grew up in a small town where every business for young people to hang out would fail. It was partially because we didn't have much money to spend, but I realized later in life that we didn't feel any responsibility for supporting the businesses in return. It's not that we were selfish necessarily, we just didn't understand how things work. Then when a business would shut down we would all complain about how we had nowhere to go, but failed to consider the fact that we had utilized the place to the fullest extent without making many financial purchases. As I recall this happened with an arcade, a couple of coffee shops, a skating rink and various other businesses.
Now that I'm older I do see a lot more clearly that when you find a business that you like, you should make a point to support them and help them to stick around.
Local coffee shop owner here in town echoed that to me last year. The teens hanging out rarely buy anything. Adults 'hanging out' are often working (or studying) and are far more spendy(?). He counted me in that 'spendy' lot, but I'd rarely spend more than a couple bucks every hour ($4 coffee, then a few hours later a coke, banana or $2 tea). So... the 'non-spenders' really are not spending (I feel like a cheapskate half the time I was there).
If you're not there during peak times, then your presence potentially serves as some social proof that the place is worth visiting too. Probably better to have one customer on their laptop than a completely empty café.
Totally. I work from coffeeshops all the time and find it a form of good patronage to buy something every few hours and leave a tip. Most people I know do the same.
We are eager to find a home in Chicago. We need to hunt down some great places there first. We rely heavily on recommendations from the community. Once we have enough places to be useful, we make them visible on the site.
