Business Model Ideas

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