How we use a collection of tools to run our coworking space

Software/Technology
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Hi Guys. Just thought I’d share a few details since I’ve been seeing so many responses to a coworking software that people want to implement. We’ve been running Ministry of New, a premium coworking space based in Mumbai for almost 4 years now (www.ministryofnew.in) Please do check out all our social media handles.

We had boiled down to Nexudus 4 years back since we just had so many features to play with and customize. I’m not sure the others were upto it at that point of time.

Yes. Yes. Yes. It is frustrating to setup but I feel once done right you are coasting after that. Apart from some small bugs of course. In any case, what I have personally learned is that one solution does not really take care of requirements of a coworking space i.e. you just have to use different solutions and that really depends on what you or the community prefers.

List of software/websites we use:

  1. Nexudus for core coworking concepts
  2. FB group for members
  3. Activecampaign for our CRM
  4. Tally software to maintain our book of accounts
  5. Zoho forms for truly customized forms
  6. Zoho Analytics as I don’t like how some reports are presented in Nexudus

All of these integrated via Zapier, which is just such an awesome tool to connect solutions.
It’s taken us time, yes, sometimes frustrating too, but we’ve developed integrations which suit our coworking specific need or audience need.

Just an example for you guys. Simple integration for Nexudus access token to send out wifi details. We give out a lot of trial days to walk-ins and others. Also for guests of members for the meeting rooms. A person just fills up this form -https://zfrmz.com/r8fSOA0qvETgWbQ2nJgN for walk-ins or meeting room guests – details go to nexudus and zapier sends an sms to the person that wants the wifi details, and also gets sent to our CRM for tracking for future marketing outreach emails depending on the lead stages.

Try it out, and send an SMS to yourself! You’ll even get customized outreach emails from me as Activecampaign allows you to send drip emails in case you choose ‘trial day’ option,

This turned out to be a LONG post, but my idea was to just give everyone that whichever solution you choose, make sure your core aspects are taken care of and use other specialized solutions for other aspects. Please do get in touch with me if you’d like some customized solutions to setup too. Bye!

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Zapier is so powerful. It feels like it does at least 10 hours of work each week just for our small community.

I’m going to look into sms zaps. That could be great!

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Thanks so much for sharing this, I’m also inspired to think about SMS as an option for some of our workflows too.

Your overall approach is similar to ours, too. Rather than try to get one tool to “kitchen sink” everything (and generally not do any of it particularly well), we picked the easiest tool to configure as the source of truth about membership and billing, and then wire everything else into it with Zapier.

A couple of other tools that we use to fill in the gaps include:

  • Roomzilla for login-free room booking/reservations
  • Front for email support/shared inbox
  • Airtable for a totally custom member relationship manager
  • ConvertKit for automated email onboarding & follow ups
  • Google Data Studio for analytics/dashboards built on top of the raw CSV exports from various tools

One of my favorite “advanced” things I’ve built with Zapier + Airtable is a tool to notify members by email that they have mail or packages to pick up. We batch process mail once a week and it just takes a few minutes, and it’s made a HUGE difference (plus members love it)!

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