I cold-emailed 300+ coworking spaces across 9 countries. Here's what actually happened.

I run a small coworking space in Burgas, Bulgaria. Been doing it since early 2025.

When I went looking for desk booking software, I found two types: enterprise tools (Nexudus, OfficeRnD) at $150+/month with more features than I'll ever need, and nothing that really fit a small independent space with 10–30 desks.

So I built one. First as a tiny GitHub Pages thing — just for myself, just to solve my own problem at Codeburg. I kept polishing it while I used it day after day. Every morning I'd open it, see something I didn't like, and fix it that evening. I spent a lot of nights writing down improvement ideas in a notebook before bed.

I honestly never looked at competitors. I didn't care. My thinking was simple: if it works well for me, it should work for others too.

At some point I showed it to friends and to guests who dropped by the space. More than a few said "wow, that's actually nice." One woman came to meet me because she wanted to use it for her private offices — a totally different use case than I designed for, but the tool flexed. That's when I decided to turn it into a real product: OhMyDesk.

I use it every day at Codeburg. Works well. I genuinely love it.

Then came the hard part: selling it.

The outreach experiment

I spent 6 weeks cold-emailing coworking spaces across Eastern Europe. Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Lithuania.

Here's the breakdown:

• Emails sent: 230+
• Countries: 9
• Reply rate Bulgaria + Romania: ~5–9%
• Reply rate Poland + everywhere else: 0%
• Paying users: 0
• Warm leads: 3 (one met me in person, one enabled public booking and found a bug I fixed same day, one is a developer who said it was cool)

The 0% in Poland surprised me. I expected lower response — different market, colder outreach — but complete silence was a new experience.

What I think went wrong (and right)

What worked: Bulgaria and Romania replied because I'm closer — geographically, culturally. My own coworking gives me credibility. When I say "I built this for myself," it's true and it shows.

What didn't work: Sending 15 emails/day to spaces I'd never interact with, hoping they'd sign up for a 3-month free trial of a tool they've never heard of from a stranger. Even if the email was good, there was nothing pulling people toward the product. 1–2 visitors per day on the landing page. Zero inbound.

What surprised me: People who actually tried the app went quiet. Not "this doesn't work" — just silence. That's the signal I'm still trying to interpret.

Where I am now

Still 0 MRR. But I have one thing most SaaS founders don't: I'm my own customer, using the product in a real business every day. Every feature I ship gets tested on real bookings at Codeburg before anything else.

I'm now shifting strategy — less spray-and-pray email, more showing up in communities like this one and being honest about what's working and what isn't.

Pricing: free 3-month trial, then $18/month. No credit card required.

Landing page: ohmydesk.app

The thing I'm figuring out

Distribution is clearly the problem, not the product. But "distribution" is vague. What I'm actually asking is:

If you've successfully gone from 0 to first paying users in a niche B2B tool — what was the actual moment something clicked? Was it a community? A specific post? A conversation that led somewhere?

I'm not looking for tactics. I'm looking for that turning point story.