There are three (or four) key pieces that make up what coworking is, and this is regardless of your tech choices. I will tell you what I used
That's kind of obvious, no matter what, you need a place where people can digitally gather. I used Zoom when I used to run coworking.
Note: This was recorded prior to Zoom's Terms of Use and wild privacy violations in 2023. I'm currently using Butter (aff) for the things I used to use Zoom for, including hosting coworking, and I love it. It even has a timer built in.To be able to send everybody reminders and access links.
There are lots of ways to do this, but I really think using a tag or segment in your regular email newsletter software is the best way to go – you already have it, you want them on your list anyway, and you’re also training them to look for emails from you. Plus, you won’t need a third party form builder
👉 Free: I used the free tier of Mailerlite (aff) for like 6 years in my business and it was great. For a free option, it’s pretty robust
👉 Paid: Convertkit (aff) all the way, baby!
One of the key pieces of this strategy is that it's free, but it is exclusive. People can't just like tune in for free on like a YouTube live. That's a very different type of strategy.
👉 If you're using your email service provider for the private communication, just create a form that automatically tags them for coworking, and that's an easy way to do that.
I also recommend creating a landing page and embedding the opt-in form on it. This gives you a place to explain what coworking is (since not everyone knows), the positioning of the sessions, and how it works, and it's all in one easy place that you can send people to.You don’t strictly need a landing page to start out, I didn’t have one for the first couple months of hosting coworking, but it’s a good thing to have.
👉 This is as simple as just a page on your website, with your opt-in form embedded in it.
👉 Some email newsletter tools let you build landing pages inside the tool with the optin form in it, so that’s technically an option too. Personally I prefer building it on my site because it gives more design control and I like the URL being my own website, but either one is fine.
(I don't recommend just using your phone timer. I did this in the beginning and it was a terrible idea because I'm very good at ignoring my phone timer, and so we lost track of time a lot in the early days 😬)
👉 Butter (aff) has a timer tool built in 👍
👉 Zoom allows you to add third party apps (this wasn’t the case back in 2020, so I had to use a browser based tool), but not all of them are free. Since I don’t use Zoom anymore, I don’t have any recommendations, but if you go to Apps in Zoom and search timer, you should be able to find something.
👉 If you need or want to use something browser based, I used MarinaraTimer (free). I liked it because I could control it on my end, and I could give a special link to attendees so they could view the same timer in their own browsers without me having to screenshare it or anything. I’m sure there are others; if you google “pomodoro timer”, you’ll get loads of options.