There are a lot of coworking spaces popping up in Pittsburgh, and that’s great, but what’s not so great is me trying to explain what makes Catapult different. People come to the space and see a bunch of chairs and desks scattered about, a cheap printer, some not so cheap speakers, on a block that has equal parts base-heads, crusty punks, artists, and small businesses getting scrappy. They go “shopping” for a coworking space that suits their needs. Does this one have a conference room? Does that one have parking? I was talking to very positive and active member of Garfield the other day, and he said he was unsure of how I was going to sell Catapult to people, especially at 150 dollars a month. I told him it’s not about the money or the space, it’s about the community, that he was thinking about it all wrong. And his response was “Well, at least you know what you sell”.
There are two issues with that statement, and I’d like to address both.
The first incorrect part of that statement is that I am selling something. You can’t sell a community. A community is a group of people who enjoy working with each, enjoy standing around the water cooler making indecent jokes together, and who actually feel amazing in the morning because they get to wake up and work side by side with people they respect. That’s a coworking community, and I am not selling it to anybody. When starting Catapult, I spoke with several investors and they all told me I hadn’t figured it out. That I hadn’t cracked the coworking business model. That I hadn’t successfully market-ized or monetized the coworking concept. I didn’t think they understood what I was trying to do. I was not, and am not an entrepreneur. I couldn’t have done it without the amazing people I sit next to each day, and if those people didn’t enjoy working next to each other, this community wouldn’t exist. It may seem like 150 dollars is steep for the location of Catapult or in comparison to other “coworking” spaces. But that 150 dollars goes to supporting a space/a community that stands independent of any outside forces. Catapult, after being open for less than two months, will be completely in the black and beholden to no one outside of the community. I am not selling a community. If you want to be a part of Catapult, it costs 150 dollars to support its existence. If 5139 burned to the ground, we would pick and start again at 5141.
The second implied meaning of the statement is that a community is a differentiating factor of Catapult. As if a feature list of coworking spaces would have printer, wifi, coffee, community, and somehow you could just check the “community” box for Catapult, like “Yup, they’ve got one of those”. I would say that if I walked into a space where a bunch of self employed folks worked and they didn’t know each other, didn’t go out to lunch with each other, didn’t know what each other did for a living, then that wouldn’t be a coworking space. It would be a shared office. I’m pretty sure there are plenty of people who want a shared office. I’m sure there is a business and a market for that sort of thing. But for me, I wanted to be able to make a joke about Hoefler typefaces to someone other than my plant. I wanted to get honest opinions about the things I made in real time from someone I trusted. I wanted to stop making business calls in noisy coffee shops next to people who had a day off on a weekday and decided to spend it on facebook next to their latte. I wanted to spend my days next to people who were building something for themselves, for the world, and where passionate and ambitious enough to make a living while doing it.
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