I decided to try out a completely different concept, the Startup House.
As remote worker, I'm used to go on working sessions alone or with maximum 1-2 other workers. But I got the opportunity to attend a Startup House and live with 15 startuppers.
What's a Startup House?
A Startup House is a big flat or house shared with startupers where everyone is working and living there. We call it co-living.
So the idea is to join a house with our own startup project and use this exceptional environment to be focused on our project, push a ton of features and launch it.
Budapest, the experiment
Last December, I landed in Budapest for a first try of a house full of entrepreneurs. This was a 1 month ephemeral project.
The house, in a few numbers:
- 200 m2 with 4 bedrooms & 1 living room
- 15 people
- 6 nationalities coming from UK, The Netherlands, France, Turkey, Belgium, Croatia
- 5+ different skills from web developer to Turkish jewellery manufacturer including CTO, marketing consultant, coaches, etc.
A great journey
Besides, working and living in the flat, we had many more activities:
- Talks organized by and for each other
- Speakers coming from local startups such as EDMdesigner and Ustream
- Gym & therms sessions (a lot!)
- Coworking spaces visits
- and Budapest, its history, districts and night life
For sure, we also hang out a lot! For more details about Budapest, have a look at my previous post.
Paris, the long-term house
The experiment in Budapest was a massive success. We met up amazing people, had some hardcore startup work and talks. In a word we had such a great experience that organizers decided to launch a new Startup House. This new one would be a long-term house in Paris.
So I crashed in this new house for a few days!
Some facts again:
- both coliving and coworking house
- 100 m2 with 3 bedrooms & 1 living room
- 10 people
- 5+ different skills with brand founder, graphist, developer, bootcamp student, business intelligence consultant, etc.
- weekly events
The concept is totally different. It looks more like a room sharing apartment than a startup retreat apartment but still for startupers.
Will I join a startup house for a living?
I'm not convinced that it's a good idea to spend all our time in the same place. Spending 24 hours a day in the same house, all together, I don't think it's sustainable.
I like the idea of living in a startup house and meeting people there but working from somewhere else and also meeting people from other places.
A new family
What I can say is that I joined a new family, the Startup House family. And this one is becoming bigger every day. I'm really happy to have been part of the first edition and can't wait to visit the next ones.
What a delight to have 5+ startup house roommates per city!
Have a look at the Startup House Coalition project. They're currently launching more cities.