My leg's broke, but Ramen Space isn't. Here's how I'm running a $15k/month London co-working space/online community at 90% capacity, from home with a broken leg. 🦵📈 8 things: 1. Hire from your community 🤝 I hired one of our most active community members (Solomon) to run the day-to-day at the space. Sol is awesome, a great community leader, knows everyone, and just keeps things ticking over beautifully. From opening and closing, to hosting the morning standup, welcoming new starters, hosting events and much more. Thank you Solomon! 2. Keep an eye on stock 👁️ Our cleaner and facilities manager Renatinho keeps things spotless, and monitors all inventory needed - ordering new stock via a Capital on Tap credit card he can access, then sending me receipts after to upload to Novabook. Main inventory is stuff like soap, hand towels, toilet paper, incense, milk, biscuits etc. Always order slightly more than you think you need. Margin of safety innit. 3. Free event space to drive awareness 📈 We currently allow relevant events and meetups to use Ramen Space for free. This drives top of funnel awareness from them promoting the event (and us) on social, plus drives new leads from people attending (we have a short presentation about Ramen Space at the start). Events are managed on the day by the promoters and sometimes also someone from Ramen Space (like Solomon). We've seen some awesome new events put on already, like About Product, About AI, Feminist AI, Shipaton w/ RevenueCat, a Zapier AI Agent workshop and many more. 4. Drive leads with your own events 🍻 We also promote Ramen Space through our own free monthly event: @IndieBeers, which has been running for 6 years in Shoreditch and tends to get 80-100 attendees per month in our target audience. In my absence, attendees like Che and Elston have stepped up to be hosts in my absence 💓 The main focus is asking people to join for a free trial day when welcoming them and giving them their IndieBeers sticker (which we offer instead of name tags, I don't love name tags). 5. Focus on free trial days ❗ After a bit of experimenting (7-day free trial with credit card, money-back guarantees etc), we have found that a short application for a free-trial day (no credit card required) clearly works best for our funnel. We allow people to book any weekday, but highly recommend in the signup flow to choose a Tuesday, as it's when we have the most people in, and also events like educational workshops. So it's the best possible first day experience. 6. Pick a 'main day' 📍 Choose a 'main day' when everyone, including free trialists, should try to come in each week. For us, it's Tuesdays. In the early days of a co-working space, especially when most people are not full-time members, there is naturally indecision on the 'best' day to come in each week. So you can easily reduce cognitive load by simply telling people, on our website, during onboarding, in-person etc that day is 'Tuesday'. It means you always have a day each week where things are really busy, which drives word of mouth, and means you'll also have some great pics to share. 6. Offer flexible membership options 🫂 Accept most members (especially in founder communities) only want to come in 1-2 times per week. For me, the days of full-time co-working memberships are over. Our target audience want to work flexibly... at home, travel abroad, in coffee shops, in one or two (or three) communities, at friends houses etc. I'd estimate 80% of our members come in 1-2x per week. So build your pricing plans accordingly. We have a range of subscription options here, plus PAYG. 8. Automation is your friend 🤖 For our 500 person online community, luckily I can run this myself and host remote events, like an upcoming collab with Milly at Generalist World. I also use a Slack plugin I made (@cosycommunities) to help me run the day to day. Automating parts of our onboarding flow, introducing members, a Slack-native member directory, surfacing our most engaging posts for the monthly newsletter, finding unreplied messages I can follow-up on, plus flagging any spam/abusive messages instantly. Final thoughts from my sofa 🧠 🗺️ There's more detail than this - the map is not the territory. But hopefully a useful primer for anyone opening/running a co-working space or online community. 🦿 The leg is healing well - probably 2.5 months till I'm walking again, but I'm very lucky to still have a source of income I can mostly manage from home. After currency conversion, costs and taxes (plus living in London) are removed, it's not as glamorous as it seems. But it's something. 🙏 For an unlucky situation, I've actually been very lucky. The day I was discharged from hospital coincided with my girlfriend moving in with me! Which had been planned for months. I have no idea how I'd handle this on my own. Thank you for reading. Any questions? Let me know, chat!