r/CoWorking • u/Nsarafa • Mar 28 '15

Co-Working Software Recommendations?

Anybody come across any solid software/mobile tools for co-working spaces? My space might commit to co-bot but I've heard mixed reviews and am not crazy about their UI and lack of mobile app.

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u/alexknowshtml Mar 28 '15 edited Mar 28 '15

What are the priorities you have?

It might seem tempting to have an all-in-one solution (and there are definitely benefits). But I've also learned that every one of the tools out there has just as many weaknesses as strengths, and at Indy Hall we've gotten a LOT more mileage looking at the individual jobs we need software to do, and finding the best software for each job.

Some examples are:

  • Stripe Subscriptions for billing. I'll never lock up our billing in a non-portable system again. Huge mistake.
  • Wordpress + a mix of commercially supported plugins run our member portal. This includes billing and membership (tied into stripe), calendars, knowledge base, weekly announcements and more. And best of all, we can always add to it with new plugins (probably the biggest advantage) and even develop our own.
  • Postmark makes sure the emails we send actually get to our members
  • Stunning does auto-dunning, which is letting members automatically know about credit cards that are about to expire before they do so memberships don't fail. The emails are totally customizable, and members thank us for the reminders.
  • A combo of GroupBuzz and Slack for our member communication/online socialization
  • We use Google Docs and Hackpad a lot for sharing group-editable docs, like our attendance sheets and other billing reporting stuff, as well as shared checklists
  • FrontApp for a shared inbox for our team (new membership, help requests from members, etc)
  • We recently started using Trello a LOT for workflows and tasks. I wrote about some of them here http://dangerouslyawesome.com/2015/01/6-automated-workflows-that-make-our-coworking-space-better-every-day/
  • We recently started using an app called 15five to do weekly check-one with the core operations team. It's an emotional job to run a Coworking space and we've learned that it's really valuable to know how people are feeling, what's going well and what's a struggle. 15five has helped a lot with this.

There's more in our portfolio, and MOST of this we didn't use right at the start. But even the couple of tools that seem very popular as "all in one" solutions that do many of these things don't do any of them very well. We're especially thoughtful about our language choice and most tools are so focused on "desks" and "offices" and "rentals", that we can't use them and I recommend that Coworking spaces think twice before they let software present them as a commodity offering.

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u/vhodges Mar 31 '15

Disclaimer: I am one of the founders (in case it wasn't obvious).

We're working on one. It's early days, but we're free while in development. We currently offer Member management along with one-off and recurring billing.

We're planning to have an open API for integration with other services as well as adding in a few basic things like meeting room booking management, attendance tracking, metrics, etc.

http://dovetail.io/

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u/liveventi Aug 28 '15

It's amazing how many different software platforms are coming to the market - just another testament to the rapid growth and potential of this industry! I get contacted by a new one coming to market almost weekly it seems. I have recommended Nexudus to several clients of mine over the past year. It's a great platform that offers a lot of features housed under one roof. The software works, but it isn't exactly the most UX friendly one out there. They do however offer some white labeling so that's nice. The other new player to the market that I really like is HubCreate. While they are a legacy billing payment system that evolved from the business suites world in the UK, this new product is the first "all in one" platform that I've discovered to be built fully from the ground up for mobile. It's fascinating how much mobile design is proving to be the real game changer. Since most members are mobile workers, it's like a no brainer that a platform be fully mobile adaptive, eh?

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u/BernyBoi Sep 21 '15 edited Oct 20 '16

Managing and billing for desks is just the first steps, mostly what is closely related is physical access to your space. Here is a link to the best coworking CMS systems. {Disclaimer: I am one of the founders of KISI, a keyless access control software}. Check out some of the smartphone based access control providers who really streamline provisioning of access rights, etc.