I’m with Jon on this one. The all-in-one approach just doesn’t make sense to me.
Instead, we’ve assembled a toolchain of individual apps that let us incrementally improve and focus our efforts where we know it’ll get us the most results. This reddit comment I made about a year ago is slightly outdated, but includes a large part of our toolkit. https://www.reddit.com/r/CoWorking/comments/30ltlx/coworking_software_recommendations/cptm1og/
Case in point - I’ve been hunting for a tool to handle a collaborative community calendar for YEARS and finally found it!
One recent addition that’s missing from that comment is Teamup Calendar, which is the BEST calendar tool I’ve found by a longshot. Google Calendar is a common default, but it requires giving people permission to be able to add things to it and even then, there’s no audit trail of activity. Teamup is awesome because it doesn’t even require logins - it uses URLs for permissions e.g. admins get a special URL, members get a different special URL, and the pubic website gets yet another special URL.
As a result, members can add stuff to the calendar without needing to remember a login, meaning more stuff ends up on the calendar and more people actually LOOK at the calendar, too. We can embed the calendar in our member site, directly link to it, and people can still subscribe to the feeds in their iCal or Google Calendars. We have members across time zones who even remarked how awesome it is that Teamup automatically adjusts for time zones.
It’s so f’ing awesome. It’s so affordable. And we’d never get to use it if we relied on an all-in-one!
Ironically, the one thing missing from our kit right now is a membership manager that just does membership management. We’ve definitely outgrown our current solution, but every other option I look at is trying to do a dozen things at once and none of them especially well! 
And I can’t help but laugh every time a new app launches that promises “build more community” and then designs their entire app around managing desks. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
So much love for my software peeps - for real, it’s the world I came from before I started Indy Hall. But I’d looooove to see more single-serving apps that pick one problem and solve it REALLY well. There’s a lot of money to be made there.
-Alex
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On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 10:07 AM, Jonathan Markwell [email protected] wrote:
Swiss Army Knives look great and are extremely useful in an emergency. But how would you feel depending on one to solve the same series of problems every day? Switching to using another multitool might improve things a little but for how long?
Member communication, room bookings, CRM and billing are worlds apart. I can’t imagine any one provider being able to do a good job of all of them in one go.
Meshwork might be able to put together something that works well for a small number of spaces. But those spaces would have to work within a very strict set constraints. If they try to be all things for all coworking spaces you’ll have to put up with ever increasing complexity in the user experience.
I’m much happier using simple single purpose tools that do a really good job of solving one or two specific problems
Why not consider different providers for each of the problems you have?
On Tue, 25 Oct 2016 at 16:02, Stacy Kessler [email protected] wrote:
Hi All,
We are thinking of switching coworking software. We currently use Cobot, and while there are a lot of great things about that, there are still limitations. We have talked many times with product development and customer service. While they are open to feedback, there are still things we want out of our coworking software that have not come to fruition. For example communication with and between members (no need to use Slack), doing room bookings and invoicing for non-member revenue, some funky stuff with user experience, etc. Just got a Meshwork demo and it seemed pretty great. Some of these features aren’t live yet, but if they live up to their promises, seems they should have most everything we need with a few shortages in customization on a few items, but more of the items we are currently missing.
Anyone have any experience using Meshwork or any of the other new software providers? There was a thread on Nexudus about 3 years ago, but I think that was the most recent discussion on it. We want to be able to do all of our billing, member communication, CRM, have members be able to manage their own membership, etc. all in one place with the ability to customize how you want to bill and the limitations you want to be able to set for your members.
Thanks for your thoughts!
Stacy Kessler
Platform 53
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The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.
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