Why Coworking Bansko is building a members-only community
tl:dr “To ensure that all participants at any event inside or outside the coworking space share the same values and are bound by these rules, please do not invite strangers to events. But of course bring your friends to the space to make them part of our community.” — from our membership terms
Coworking Bansko is a curated & paid community in a small rural town in Bulgaria. Contrary to a lot of other locations around the world, the digital nomad community here exists solely because of us, there were no nomads here before and there is zero local demand for coworking. But over the last 2.5 years we had about 500 people coming through the space with currently 75 members here at the moment. About 30 or so have made Bansko their base, bought apartments, registered businesses, found love or took out long term leases.
Everything is going great, and glowing reviews, returning members and members changing their travel plans to stay longer are a good indicator that members enjoy what we are building. But one question that was recently raised by one of our Elders — an advisory group of long-term members — is:
“Why was an event announcement deleted from our public group that aimed to pierce the vail between members and non-members?”
The short answer is that we have a private group for members, but the reason for this seperation is the curated and paid aspect of our community. Here is why:
What does Curated Community mean for us?
Even though it could seem from the outside that people just show up on our door and we accept everyone as members to create an amazing group, there is significant amount work involved to make this happen.
Attract the right people to our community: We have a very solid value system and code of conduct that is at the core of what we do. In addition the idea of working together in the same physical space allows members to build trust and a lot of serendipitous connections to happen over coffee or lunch. So we want members that are looking for our mix of working together, making personal and business connection and have fun in Bansko together.
Protect members: In the past we had incidents with people that didn’t subscribe to our values, ranging from misogyny and racist slurs through holocaust denial up until sexual assault and physical violence. A lot of this happened either when alcohol was involved or if lines where blurred between a Coworking Bansko event and a social public event where the majority are members but also some non-members got invited.
One of the reasons why we changed from hosting a lot of public events in our first year to members-only events now is that we cannot create our desired culture for the community if we have people that do not share our values, come only for events and feel unconstrained by our code of conduct. And in the past often decissions to stay away from people that are not members turned out to be correct when their drama unfolded outside our community — yes, it’s a small village here and the worldwide nomad bubble is not very big either.
Create the magic: Our community is built on generousity. The founders put in the initial investment to start the community and are running the space as a philanthropic hobby without any payment for their significant contribution of time. This created a culture of generousity among members that is uncommon for a lot of coworking space around the world. Most members do not see themselves as customers of Coworking Bansko that just pay a usage fee, but co-create our community through sharing their skills, acting as ambassadors and donating to causes like building a garden, buying things for the space like slackline/smoker/games or just keeping their memebrship active even when away from Bansko.
It is impossible to create this magic with people that are looking to get it for free but easy when everyone pays it forward.
Why does it need to be a paid community?
Even though the founders of the coworking space didn’t built this community to make a profit, money is required for a lot of activites — and even they do not want to constantly put more time and money in forever, so the “business” of Coworking Bansko needs to be sustainable.
Destination Marketing & Building an Ecosystem: In a place with no local demand for coworking and without an existing population of digital nomads, a lot of effort goes into marketing & promotion the of the destination as well as unlocking the whole Bansko experience.
While some other places around the world provide budgets or have organizations for destination marketing to digital nomads, Bansko does not. There is a lot of economic activity generated by our members for the local economy, but the coworking space only gets paid through memberships.
Paying the bills: Running a coworking community has a lot of fixed costs for facilities, staff, utilities, supplies etc. Currently we can only operate because the founders contribute their time for free. However to make it sustainable without relying on their generousity indefinitly it will require to hire more staff. We tried to involve more members instead of hiring more staff, but our initiative to turn the space into a co-op failed; which is also a good indicator that generally members prefer to pay for services than to provide free services, at least when it comes to activities that need to be done consistently and are more considered like a job.
Recognizing the value: We have intentionally set the membership fees to a level that is one of the most affordable worldwide compared with other coworking, coliving or workations that aim to provide a similiar experience as we do in Bansko. Actually a common complaints by members is that it is hard to find another community worldwide at the same cost.
When people tell us they find our fees to high and then try to find a way to engage with our community for free we feel undervalued and cheated. And these people do not only undervalue and cheat us, but it’s more of a mindset issue. So better to attract people that compete in generousity than in cheapness.
So this is why we are a curated and members-only community. And why we seperate our channels in a public group and a members group on Facebook.
However we have also recognized some challenges with this approach and here are some things that we do to mitigate them.
- We have less contact with the Bulgarian people and regional ecosystems than we would like. We have only very few Bulgarian members and we are not part of any Bulgarian initiatives that happen in Sofia or on a national level.
We organize some events that are attractive for Bulgarians like our weekend events and the DIGIT hackathon that we partner with.
We do also offer a reduced membership fee to Bulgarians that do not have the same income as our international members, but it is not only a money issues but also the inability to work location independent. - For some early stage nomads even our low membership fees are a drain on their dwindeling savings before they find success.
We offer one nomad in residence slot per month where we barter about 1 hour of their time per day for a month of coworking and accomodation. Sometimes we have two at the same time. - Members want to bring their (visiting) friends into our community, often friends that are in Bansko for a vacation.
Everyone has a free trial day, and for visiting friends we often don’t mind if one trial day turns into two or three. If it is a longer visit then we offer a bring a friend ticket for €15 per week to our community, long-term members can bring some friends for free before they have to pay.
This is an evolving topic for us, so feedback and ideas always appreciated.
