Business Model

Possible Expenses

• Rent
• Building Maintenance
• Property Tax
• Insurance
• Utilities
  • EWEB
  • NWN Gas
  • Trash pickup
  • Internet
• Accountant / CPA
• Teachers
• Cleaning/Janitorial
• Tooling consumables
• Cleaning consumables
• New Tools!

Possible Income

• Classes
• Meeting room space
• Office space
• Personal shop space with power.
• Shop Storage space.
• Bins on shelves (Standard sized, or by Cuft?)
• Shelving (8-12 square feet per shelf unit) if you can.
• Pallet-based storage?; one pallet takes up 13 square feet.
• Other higher levels of membership
• Gallery/Display Area; Display member work, or advertise your services? Keep in mind how much space that might take up.
• Offer flexible studio space without walls, and charge by the day and by the square foot to use it for time-sensitive projects.
• Donations
• Fund Raisers
• Grants
• Sponsorships

Customer Segments

• Those who need a shop and tools
  • and who might need some extra storage too
• Those who want to learn
• Those who want to teach
• Those who want to hang out with geeks
• Those who need a place to meet.
  • and who might need fast internet
  • or a kitchenette
• Those who need an office to launch their projects

Notes

If we have less than 8000 sqft we probably cant support an employee unless we get a grant.

Take 25-35% of your floor area and devote it to to-code fire lanes.

Seated people need a minimum of 15-40 square feet per person.

Spaces all over the world have found that quiet, noise-isolated classroom areas are invaluable if you’re offering educational programs, and require about 20-50 square feet per seated person.

Good tool to plan your shop space: http://www.grizzly.com/workshopplanner

Studios: 50 square feet is the minimum size of a studio, and offer up to 250 square feet

A word of caution, though – don’t skimp on your building choice in order to pay a lower rent. Fixing broken buildings costs much, much more, over time, than renting good ones, to the point of shutting down maker-spaces that don’t acknowledge this fact. Redoing the roof of an industrial space (which usually happens once every 10-20 years) can cost upwards of $5-10 per square foot; installing a sprinkler system because the fire marshal caught you woodworking without sprinklers and threatened you with closure costs $10-15 per square foot; and repairing or replacing a broken or ineffective air conditioner with a new industrial-grade air conditioner can easily run $5,000 to $15,000 – just to name a few common building-scale maintenance expenses.

Typical membership rates vary anywhere from $40 per month for a ‘starving hacker’ membership at Noisebridge, to $175 per month at TechShop.

Treat your Hackerspace like a business, but it should not feel like a business to the members. Members want to just drop in, hack, teach, and learn. The administrators should strive to make this as easy as possible.

Eugene per-capita income: $23,869 $42,923 or is it $37,339? (Bob says median household income in 2010 was $41,326 in 2010. Source: http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/community_facts.xhtml which has many other stats.)

Articles

Here is a wealth of information.

• creating-a-business-model: http://makezine.com/2013/06/04/making-makerspaces-creating-a-business-model/
• Founding a Hackerspace: Founding_a_Hackerspace-1.pdf
• Sustainable Hackerspaces: http://elplatt.com/sustainable-hackerspaces-ftw
• Notes from a Hackerspace Panel: http://makehacklearn.org/2012/07/28/notes-from-a-hackerspace-panel/
• The Makerspace Chasm: http://makezine.com/2013/09/22/the-makerspace-chasm

Links

• Meeting Rooms and prices: http://www.heliosnetwork.org/infosheet_eventlocations.htm

-- Main.ClifCox - 20 Oct 2013