Weekend Club founder Charlie Ward reflects on virtual pivot, hitting $2K MRR

COVID-19 supercharged remote work while simultaneously shuttering 900 indie coworking spaces just in the U.S. alone.

Weekend Club’s physical space was one of those casualties — but you won’t hear founder Charlie Ward complaining.

Since closing his physical London coworking space, Ward’s been busy. His virtual community has attracted bootstrappers from around the world, opened Americas and GMT time zones, and tripled the company’s MRR to nearly $2,000. Weekend Club also launched on Product Hunt in March.

With a few months of 0 percent churn, Ward is confident his remote coworking community will grow beyond the pandemic surge and into a platform that virtual workers seek out to create valuable relationships.

I caught up with Ward — @charlierward on Indie Hackers — to discuss Weekend Club's success, COVID-19’s effects, and the future of coworking.

What’s Weekend Club

We're the Weekend coworking club for bootstrappers, giving founders the support network to build a profitable internet business and escape their day job.

It's organized around weekly, remote Saturday co-working sessions over Slack and Zoom. We run 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. (Americas and European time) sprints, with a standup, office hours, and retrospective. Our members pay $49/month for access to the events, an active community of experienced founders — running companies like VEED, Simple Poll, and Marketing Examples — and new ones, plus over 100+ discounts on products like Stripe, AWS, and Airtable.

Churn has been at 0% for 3 months so I take that as a sign we're onto something — plus based on our testimonials. We are also about to hit $2,000 MRR.

What's the response been to it during COVID-19?

Before COVID-19 we were in-person, running twice a month in an east London co-working space. If it wasn't for the pandemic, we may never have gone remote.

I still think the IRL version has legs, and we'll relaunch it eventually, but I'm grateful we decided to try the new version. We've welcomed so many amazing members from around the world.

Naturally, people have been seeking out connection while locked inside, and I think Weekend Club was well placed to help. It's been a positive response, we grew about 350 percent between March and December 2020.

What's driven your success?

Besides events beyond our control like COVID-19, I'd put it down to three main factors:

• The early community — The early Weekend Club crew was always tight, as we knew each other from the Indie London & IndieBeers meetups. This meant new joiners wanted to stick around, as it's always just been good vibes. Our members have different experience levels but are all smart, friendly, interesting, and helpful. I feel very lucky this is the case. Also, our two other hosts, James McKinven and Abhishek Kumar, are amazing and started out as community members. We couldn't do it without them.

• Focusing on creating connections — The whole experience is geared towards helping people make connections. From our standups where members are matched in a 3 - 4 person squad for the day, to our #coffee-club channel members are matched in for a catch-up, to channels where people have space to be more vulnerable and not only talk about their projects. All of these things matter in connecting your members.

• Owning 'weekend coworking' — We're the de facto place to go if you want to work on your side project on a weekend with other founders.

Lessons from the pivot

What works offline, rarely works online. You can't just dump an offline experience online, it needs rethinking from first principles. To replicate the social side of IRL meetups, we added randomly matched accountability buddies on the Saturday sessions, guided lunch conversations, and do DM intros each Wednesday on Slack.

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The future of coworking, post-pandemic

I think coworking has a bright future in most places, including the USA. These are a few things I expect to change though:

• Rise in hotdesking: Very few people I've spoken to expect to go back to 5 days a week in an office. Hybrid is the future for many, so I think for those who like coworking spaces, they'll increasingly prefer hotdesks to permanent desks from now on.

• Rise in digital nomad support: I don't see the digital nomad trend slowing down. In fact, it'll likely accelerate in a post COVID world. People tend to go to cheaper countries, but I suspect many will also go to the USA for at least a short period. These people have specific needs as they're more likely to hop between multiple spaces and need private booths for calls and Zooms.

• Rise in remote coworking: There are increasing numbers of companies and communities running remote coworking sessions. As some people have a taste for working from home now — plus not everyone can access a coworking space nearby — I expect this to increase in popularity as success stories are shared and lessons are learned.

Are you optimistic about coworking’s future?

I think so, but what we traditionally define as 'coworking' will fragment. In-person spaces will see a greater variety of formats due to hybrid working and digital nomads. Remote coworking is in its infancy still, but I expect some models to take off this decade. Maybe us included 😉

Any updates for readers?

We realized lately that 1/3 of our members are now full-time on their projects, so Saturdays are not always ideal for them. This means soon we'll finally launch something we've planned since the start: A weekday version of Weekend Club! So watch this space. There'll initially be a remote version, but possibly an in-person one as well. If people are interested, drop me a message at charlie@weekendclub.co