tangentalizingly delicious

Tuesday February 28, 2006

My thoughts about Second Space have mostly been backburnered for the past few weeks as I focus on chore.tl and blogathon but they’ve been burbling around a touch.

I am split on whether to focus on offering dedicated office and cubical space, or renting it as first-come first-serve. The problem is one of pricing. If I can double-book the available space because people will only use it part of the time, then I can offer the space for quite a bit less and depending on how many times I can rent out the same seat, I could turn quite the profit.

After a bit of discussion with a very limited number of people (ie, certainly not the market research that I actually need to do to get anything resembling realistic numbers) I have been starting to lean towards the dedicated space thing. Not just because I think that that’s what people would be more interested in paying money for, but because I think it’s more in line with the notion that Rob’s Dream Company (a notional corporation) is an incubator.

See, by offering dedicated space, I would need to make money on the services offered to the members. There are some simple businessy type things like a phone system and a printer that wouldn’t be too profitable, but offering some server space and reliable backups and a bit of web development and maybe some technical suggestions or other consulting type services. Renting a conference room, perhaps.

It lines up with the incubator aspect in that ideally all the businessy type problems get taken care of, and if there’s a good mix of professions who are renting space, then you start getting some small network effect happening and members start working with members to create better offerings of whatever it is members are offering.

So I think that’s where I should focus whatever brief mental time I am giving to Second Space these days. There is some demand for this sort of thing in the area as is demonstrated by the soon-to-be-opening University of Waterloo Accelerator Centre (about which there is drastically little information available online).