Shoutout to the tiny Tuesday morning crew at the Mesa library, you beat the fancy coworking spot | Coworking and Community - Freelance Forum - The Community for Independent Professionals
Shoutout to the tiny Tuesday morning crew at the Mesa library, you beat the fancy coworking spot
Two years back I was paying $289 a month for a desk at one of those slick coworking spots in downtown Phoenix, the kind with the free cold brew and the phone booths and the neon sign for photos. Nobody ever talked to each other. Everyone had headphones on and it felt like a quiet competition to look the busiest. Then the place hiked my rate and I quit, and a buddy dragged me to a free meetup at the Mesa library on a Tuesday morning. Six of us show up in a study room, all freelancers, a copywriter and two web guys and a bookkeeper and a lady who edits podcasts. No cold brew, no neon, just a whiteboard and people who actually ask what you're stuck on. The bookkeeper there fixed a late payment problem for me in ten minutes that I'd been chewing on for weeks. That little room did more for my work in one morning than a year of the fancy spot ever did. So what's the move near you, is it a library thing or a coffee shop thing or do the paid spots actually pay off for anybody?
Wait, 289 a month? That's insane. I paid 200 for a spot in Tempe for like six months and thought I was getting a deal, but at least I bailed before they jacked it up. The part that gets me is you had a real problem sitting there for weeks and some retired bookkeeper at a library fixed it in ten minutes for free. That says way more about those fancy spots than any neon sign ever could. The good ones I've seen are coffee shops where the regulars actually know each other, but a library room full of freelancers sounds like it beats that too.