1. How has your journey evolved following your time in the Plus Eight Program?
It’s been a crazy ride - we didn’t finish up from Plus Eight and travel down a freeway…. We left and travelled down a looooong and windy road…. One that had lots of potholes, sheep roadblocks and flooding! Oh, and we are still travelling on that road… the good news is that we have survived the worst (we think, and we hope) and driving conditions are fair. Despite the bumps, the team is still here and SpacetoCo is growing into something pretty special for communities.
Post-demo night, we had consolidated that our business stood for community space hire - whilst we always believed that it had, it’s probably better understood and as a result has led us to focus on and to work even more closely with the Local Government sector. SpacetoCo has always handled regular ad-hoc casual bookings by the hour, but specifically we wanted to make it easier for community groups and councils to handle regular bookings by clubs and groups e.g. the local karate club… and we have now achieved that. It’s been a massive milestone for our business. All the while, the number of small business listings has continued to climb and so have the non-council casual bookings.
2. What are you working on at the moment?
We are working on many different areas of the business. The primary focus is business development, but like many tech startups, our ability to sell is intertwined closely with our website software. Early in the year we found ourselves at a crossroads with our database. To build for the community groups, it would be better to move to a new database structure. It was a massive decision as database changes come with complexity. Nevertheless we committed to building version 2 of SpacetoCo which is code-named ‘Big Bang’ (it’s a space thing). For those of you in the tech space, you likely understand what a big deal it is to mess around with this structure. For those of you who don’t - it’s a big deal! So, in answer to this question, it’s all about the ‘Big Bang’ as everything we will do next relates to this. Once fully completed, SpacetoCo will offer a customer experience that we are confident will be the new standard for booking community spaces. Feedback on the first rollout with the City of Melville and City of Vincent is really promising
3. What do you love about being a part of the Spacecubed community?
We have been invited back to heaps of things - we think you guys might actually like us... It’s cool, we like you too. We’re often asked about coworking and we refer back to how well it’s done at Riff and FLUX. We stay in touch with some of our Perth2 cohort and overall we definitely feel we are still very much a part of it all.
4. Can you share with us one of your favourite success stories?
There has been a number of favourite success stories - we launched in New Zealand and now have spaces in Auckland! We had our first three year council contract signed. Thanks to Matt Dunstan, who gave us the tip, we wrote our first pillar page on the topic of Space Sharing. We had our first marketing intern through ECU and she was wonderful - so much so that we will be providing her some paid work. We collaborated with Sofar Sounds and the City of Perth to do 5 pop-up and secret gigs in the month of May - it was fun and we did it on a shoestring budget!
However probably one particular success story does stand out - and that was onboarding and supporting both the City of Vincent and the City of Melville as we launched our Regular Bookings feature. This feature enables us to lock in three years worth of bookings in a matter of minutes. The bookings teams at these particular councils have been brilliant to work with and it’s this success which has been exciting.
5. What do you hope to achieve in the remainder of 2019?
We hope to complete as much of ‘Big Bang’ as we can - the development timeline is always a juggle but we are getting better at managing this. As new features rollout we will take our business development further afield into other Australian states and grow beyond Auckland in NZ. Essentially. we hope to onboard more local government partners and make SpacetoCo the community space sharing platform.
Are you looking to expand your business and grow nationally and internationally? Apply for our Plus Eight Academy Programs today. With the option between a one day bootcamp, and six week pre-accelerator program, we'll help your business succeed.
