Coworksurf

So that's what we created today, at https://www.coworksurf.com/.

Our founding team with Joe and Nick didn't make it. Ultimately, it was too hard to make the business profitable.

But 6 months ago, Jonatan, Michele and Wijnand joined. The team is now stronger than it's ever been.

Three months ago, in November, we launched a first version of Coworksurf 2.0.

We're now finally making automated revenue, and are hitting the $1.5K monthly revenue mark. (It's not recurring, but it is growing.)

Our hosts have a million times more flexibility and ownership to run their business on our site.

It took 5 beautiful years, and this just the beginning.

And music.. Yes. I have kept singing and jamming since. Once Coworksurf gets to ~€10K monthly revenue, I'll be able to quit my side job, and replace it for making more music.

Maybe by then, we're also ready to start the same concept in a different niche, to create warm and amazing communities around the world, connected through interests, skills and hobbies.

I think that world is infinitely more exciting than the one I was presented at high school.

So, let's build it!

We had a hard time scaling our coliving space and community.

1. We couldn't get bookings from Airbnb or Booking, because mixing holiday guests with remote workers was horrible for the community.

2. No tools allowed us to create an amazing customer journey, and automate it, so we could focus more on spending time with the community, and add more properties to make more much-needed money.

3. Running a happy house and community is a giant task on its own. Adding marketing work on top of that was just too much.

4. It needed at least the three of us to make it work. Our running costs ate away all of our margins. We couldn't automate much, because there were no tools for it. None connected. The solutions that existed, like booking engines to embed into your website, had horrible designs and conversion rates.

5. Long stays are amazing for the community, and it's what people want, but the profit margins are low. You can make 2X to 5X more by hosting short term tourists. But we didn't want to.

That's the problem with coliving; it's 100X more valuable than short term destructive tourism, but the profit margins are bad.

We tried franchising and licencing the concept for a year, but failed.

The true product of coliving is the quality of the connection between the guests. No one cares more about their community than a founder, creating their own brand.

We made and coached many friends along the way who started the same concept as us, but in their own country.

So, we decided to add them to our site to send them bookings, with the vision of allowing hosts to automate EVERYTHING, except just being present with their guests.

This would allow hosts to have minimum running costs, and their marketing is taken care of.

Customers love it, because they want to live in surfers' houses around the world, and see what options they have in one place.

We became great friends and dreamt big. I dropped my own startup to join the founding team, and we rented a villa in Bali for a year.

Guests loved it, and wanted to live in Coworksurfs in other countries like the Phillippines, South Africa, Morrocco and Spain.

We made $150K in revenue in the first 18 months (Portugal and Bali combined), and bigger dreams felt possible.

I loved surfing and wanted to spend a whole summer working on my startup, while getting better at surfing.

That summer, I met Joe and Nick.

Joe worked in surf camps as a surf instructor while doing freelance marketing work. Although he loved the vibe, he wasn't able to get his work done. Nick managed hostels. So the both of them created a surf camp for people who work remotely - Coworksurf.

They tested it small by renting an Airbnb in Sagres, Portugal. I was one of the first guests :)

We had a life-changing summer with an amazing community of entrepreneurs, freelancers and creatives.

Some became friends for life. People started businesses together. People fell in love. The value of amazing people living in the same space is just incredible. It needs to exist, and we absolutely loved hosting it all.

So..

While working on my first startup, I discovered NomadList, and how people combined travelling and working; so-called 'digital nomads'. Some lived in shared houses, called 'Coliving spaces'.

I tried coliving in Barcelona, and saw the potential, but the community wasn't well managed.

One night in Singapore, I had that father-son chat in front of the house. I was 19, and we decided that it was ok that I would quit high school and just work my way up.

The bottle of whiskey that smoothened our chat was finished, and even though we'd already drunk enough, we walked bare feet to the Italian restaurant for one last wine to finish the night.

The restaurant was about to close but served us a last red wine at a high table on the warm front terrace.

A french man sitting next to us asked for a cigarette - even though he had quit - and we talked.

He offered me an internship at his events company.

During the internship, he showed me that you can also create your own job. It clicked. This is what I was going to do. I wrote on Facebook 'the dream job doesn't exist, you have to create it yourself.'

That's when my road of entrepreneurship started.

Like you, I love thinking and dreaming big. Non-linear. No rules, no borders, no limits. Explore what's possible. Prove I can create a different life than the known path.

I finally found a liberating direction to pour my energy in.

I finished my high school, got the diploma, and studied Innovation & Social Entrepreneurship while building startups and making music.

Problem: The future of a traditional career and life is not exciting enough.

I was 15 and in high school. I love making music - singing specifically. I play guitar, piano and sing.

The list of careers and lives that my high school wanted me to choose from felt incredibly unexciting and uninspiring.

I wanted to make music, but the advice was to keep music as a hobby.