Coliving and coworking businesses should not be only limited to renting out beds and spaces.
This is how we monetize our space:
The most popular model of monetization of one coliving space is renting out beds and coworking spaces.
Last year we (Sende) started to play with this model, and we switched to donations (following this Patreon culture) and it works well. Our idea is to reach the moment where our space will become free of charge while monetizing it through other channels.
Why not charge for accommodation?
Because of this, we get to bring incredible talent from all over the world while removing the barrier of having the coliving space open only to people who can afford it.
This can be done only after some years of working as a coliving space. New spaces however should charge for the stay until you get enough traction and options to start playing with different models.
We do events like Bosquexo and Bitsommar, and now planning to insert another type of event. These are quite cheap events, but we still make a profit, and they help us do what we love and open Sende to creatives. We charge around 500€ per ticket for a 7 days event, where around 40 people can enter.
Events are great models to bring future clients to your space. People can pay to taste your space for a week during the event and opt-in to stay for longer.
Also, it’s easier to get sponsorship for an event than for a coliving business.
Coliving, especially in a remote area, can be great for obtaining grants.
For example, we are active in the Erasmus plus program for already 10 years. Because we are educators, and we love to teach and organize international events.
The European Union has billions of euros separated to build better roads, to protect forests, etc. They also have millions for youth mobility programs. And their biggest program (i think) is Erasmus plus.
They have to spend 26 billion EUR1 between 2021 and 2027. The budget for the previous 7 years was 14 billion.
If you like education, where you can build let’s say, 8 days even exploring local fishermen's activity and technology, or photography, or human rights, where you can provide accommodation, food, training, and ensure safe arrival and departure of participants then you may join this program.
It is usually for NGOs, or social companies, where you need to fill out one big application with your idea, and in 3 months you get results and money to develop the activity. You can anywhere between 15000€ and 60000€ per event. For example, we are organizing 5 of these events this year. This is a good model for coliving spaces because they can provide accommodation and food, and in our case, we provide education too where we work with our own pool of professional trainers (educators) and we are one of them too.
So, what is the catch (I believe this is a bit sensitive topic to share it here).
If you want to enter this program or a similar one, you can compete with others and be super successful.
But, please enter only if you care about education, about organizing these events for the benefit of others. There is a lot of misuse, and I would say stealing in this program through organizing unprofessional events.
So, if you can build a team of educators, then you can do wonderful projects with young people while hosting them in your space.
This is not only for the students, any age can be involved. There are long-term programs and short-term ones.
We organize projects on conflict transformation, peacebuilding, and social entrepreneurship. These are the topics where we specialized.
Links for Erasmus plus:
Basic info about Erasmus Programmer guide - A bible for Erasmus plus Application forms and process
We charge for speaking at conferences 1000€ and 1500€ for one hour's talk. We don’t charge to schools and universities and we have special discounts for NGOs (400€ to 500€).
The conference industry is huge. If you want to enter this world, please consider the following:
Different types of conferences:
Ones sponsored by the bigger companies, and startups in order to do marketing for themselves (like Adobe) or ones made by old companies who want to become “cool” so they invite interesting speakers - These are often free of charge, but they pay speakers
Professional conferences like TNW in Amsterdam - They charge high tickets and they pay speakers
Small or new (online) conferences where they often sell tickets for cheap (like 50€), but they don’t pay for speakers. Or they don’t sell tickets (it’s free of charge) but their business model is to do a few conferences and a few thousand of emails of attendees and then they get sponsorship because they have a list of 10000 emails.
I don’t want to mention any event, but you are seeing these conferences all the time. Usually, they offer fake exposure to the speakers in exchange for a talk. For the same reason, speakers are not usually good, neither professional but boring.
We tend to reject 95% of similar conferences.