|
1) Love the idea of repurposing residential garages, but are these spaces as available (with all the criteria for your needs, like bathroom access) / convertable as you think they'll be? 2) Is the plan for home owners to clear their space, renovate it in the hope you'll accept it, then list their space in an AirBnB-type model? Or is someone on your team seeking them out, signing a long-term rental agreement, and converting them yourselves? With a cut to the homeowner, cost of renovations, cost of cleaning after every use, cost of supplies & refills, how much utilization do you need for a space to cover setup costs and then maintain a profit? 3) Beyond the community, a lot of artists who use creative studios do so because they're working on projects that won't get completed within a day or two. How do you address needs for storage of things like wet paintings, clay sculpture, large print templates, etc.? Right now your booking system doesn't seem to support needs like "3 hours today, 3 hours tomorrow, 3 hours after the weekend" without multiple bookings / risking getting out-booked and kept away from stored items. 4) Do you see your target market being more artists currently in a studio (or that have used them in the past), or artists that have never yet joined one (primarily worked from home)? |
(1) I chose residential garages for two reasons: (a) they represent a strong differentiator, and (b) their abundance and flexibility when repurposing the space. I do have certain criteria when it comes to location, but generally speaking, garage spaces are simpler to design and repurpose because they aren't meant to be living spaces. If you look at our first nest, the only substantial changes we made to it were building the wooden accent wall (costs less than $200 to do), built out the back window, added lighting and some furniture (we built the desks ourselves), and installed new doors. We learned that bathrooms cannot be built inside the garage itself due to regulatory concerns, so we had a nice one built in the backyard instead (it was quite affordable too). I think that garages are a vast, untapped resource that sits idly for many house owners, and this represents a great opportunity to maximize it and earn space owners some money in the process.
(2) CreatorsNest will not be an Airbnb type of marketplace. Since art-making is such an emotional, tailored endeavor, we want to be in direct control of the user experience and build spaces that fit an inspirational aesthetic that we want to maintain. If we open it up for anyone to list, the quality of these spaces will be highly questionable, especially since empty garages do not warrant a “creative space”. We are seeking each one out by submission (http://creatorsnest.com/build-a-nest.html) or referrals/suggestions from users, and either signing a rental agreement or using a revenue-sharing program for x number of months/years. I’ve calculated that if each nest can bring in about 240-250 recurring users with an average booking of 1.5 hours, then building that space would be worthwhile. It won’t take a critical mass of folks to make money off of each space.
(3) Great question. Our take on the space is for it to be used on an on-demand basis, and not as a creative studio that you are using day-in and day-out. Storage is a very craft-specific thing that a tailored studio would have to provide, as there is no real one-size-fits-all mechanism for all artforms. If you happen to be a painter that is using the space, the expectation is that you are in an awesome environment to work on your project for a given length of time, and to take that project back home with you after your reservation. I can see this potentially changing as more nests are opened up and each one becomes more specialized for certain artforms, but as of now, the spaces are meant to be more temporal in nature.
(4) My target market are folks that have never joined a studio, value privacy, but don’t know where to go when they want to escape the staleness of their home. From speaking with users, I’ve found that there is an abundance of these types of artists who can’t find an affordable solution to this problem. In Los Angeles, artist co-working spaces are flourishing, but there are two chief complaints: (1) they are over-crowded and often distracting, and (2) the monthly membership model is expensive, and they end up not going as much as they’d like to (a la gym membership). I think that in the process, we may end up bringing over some people that are already using studios, but CreatorsNest may have some limitations that they are not used to having (for example, the issue of storage space). I believe that going the on-demand route makes CreatorsNest a more accessible solution for the general, work-from-home artist.
If you have any other things you're curious about, please feel free to shoot them over!