Business Bricks

Coworking in Birmingham, Brighton, Cardiff, London, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Copenhagen, Munich, Paris, Cologne, Barcelona, Brussels, Milan

Matt Weston — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 14:30:05 +0000

Link to “Where the Coffee Shop Meets the Cubicle,” by Kerry Miller in BusinessWeek yesterday. Excerpt: “Over the past few years, co-working facilities�both grassroots, co-op-like versions and for-profit models�have started popping up across the country and the world, from Seattle to Copenhagen. A co-working wiki hosts pages for dozens of other cities with co-working initiatives in progress. And while the concept of shared office space is nothing new to entrepreneurs, an increasing number of them are signing on and finding that the community-building and networking benefits outweigh even the virtues of a shared fax machine. […] In a recent report on the future of small business, the Silicon-Valley based Institute for the Future pegged co-working as a trend to watch over the next decade (see BusinessWeek.com, 1/31/07, “The Face of Entrepreneurship“). After co-working first took off with clusters of free-agent programmers and writers, its flexibility and low cost have also proven a good match for startups unwilling to sign a long-term lease. Because many of these facilities operate on a gym-membership model that doesn’t assign workers to specific desks, co-working is cheaper than most subleasing arrangements. And unlike traditional business incubators, co-working isn’t just for startups with high-growth potential.”

A CoworkingBrighton has been one of my several uncurrent nonprojects since we transplanted down here last year, but we’re at step 5 of Chris Messina’s tiny five step strategy for getting started:
1. join coworking@googlegroups.com yup, link
2. add your location to the wiki link goes to a stub on the wiki where you can add your interest if you’re in Brighton
3. blog about it yup
4. start hunting for others doing the same thing outside the coworking community yup
5. and if you find no one, bootstrap a location like a library or cafe until you build up enough interest to pay for your own space 13 Brunswick Sq., see twywdioyhtmtfohycdia

Other coworking groups in Europe:
CoworkingBirmingham, UK
CoworkingCardiffBridgend, UK
CoworkingLondon, UK
CoworkingEdinburgh, UK
CoworkingSheffield, UK
CoworkingCopenhagen, Denmark
CoworkingMunich, Germany
CoworkingParis, France
CoworkingCologne, Germany
CoworkingBarcelona, Spain
CoworkingBrussels, Belgium
CoworkingMilan, Italy

How to Make a Decision Without Making a Decision

Matt Weston — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 11:13:58 +0000

by Tom.

How to make an idea doable

Matt Weston — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 21:13:43 +0000

The secret to making anything doable is to lower your bar. Say it’s done before it’s done. Say it’ll do and take another look in the morning. The following post is throwaway. But it’s done. And, as many editors know, the most appealing quality of a piece of work you’re waiting for from a writer is doneness, not goodness.

A Technique for Producing Ideas
by James Webb Young
* producing ideas is as definite a process as the production of Fords. you run an assembly line for ideas
* gather raw material on 3″ by 5″ ruled cards
* masticate
* seek relationships between your cards
* get bored of the process
* get a second wind
* make absolutely no effort to work on it, and put it out of your mind
* constantly think about it
* out of nowhere your idea will appear!
* put the idea to work on the cold, grey dawn of the morning after
* recognise that a good idea has self-expanding qualities

A Technique for Reducing Ideas
by Charlie Davies and Matt Weston
* reducing ideas is as definite a process as the production of Fords. you run a disassembly line for ideas
* think what you would do if only you had the money
* lower your bar
* keep lowering
* until you can lower no more
* cut your idea in half
* keep cutting
* until your idea is uncuttable, like an atom
* do your atom

How to start a meetup

Matt Weston — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 15:35:32 +0000

Or Matt’s tiny strategy for starting meetups
1. choose somewhere you don’t mind sitting on your own
2. decide at the beginning you don’t even mind if it’s just you by yourself (you can always take a book/ a paper/ some work)
3. have no agenda (then it can emerge and people can turn it into what they want/ need it to be)
4. be a bad host
5. list it on upcoming.org
and add it to the business bricks group there
or mail me, and i’ll add it for you
matt at businessbricks dot co dot uk
6. tell anyone you know
7. keep it simple and commit to doing it for a set amount of time (i’d always be in the mad hatter, 10am, friday, wearing one of two tshirts (allowing for laundry emergencies) and i’d be there every week till xmas)
8. let it change. (it became 9am not ten.) let go of it. so you don’t even have to turn up

How to sit

Matt Weston — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 11:31:22 +0000

1-6
7-16

Think what you would do if only you had the money then figure out how you can do it anyway

Matt Weston — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 10:41:00 +0000

is a workshop Charlie Davies and Matt Weston are
putting on next Tuesday 16 Jan., upstairs at The
Farm, Farm Rd., Hove, 7-9pm, �2.↩

More detail:

1. In December, we spent a week trying to write
a book, a manual with

Think what you would do if only
you had the money then figure out
how you can do it anyway

as the title.
Inspired partly by this essay↩

2. We wanted to figure out the intersection between the
sets of ideas in, say,
A. How To Have a Number One The Easy Way↩
B. Bootstrapper’s Bible↩
C. Getting Real↩
D. A Technique for Producing Ideas↩
E. The Seven Day Weekend↩
F. Go↩

3. We had ideas pouring out of our ears. But
then it struck us, after a week of working on the manual,
that a manual isn’t Really a manual unless you’ve tested
it out on hundreds of people or things, like they did
with A, B, C, D, E, F above. Until then our
twywdioyhtmtfohycdia manual is only a novel, one that
begins with a man throwing handfulls of $100 bills from a
speeding car and ends who gives a shit how.

4. So, to test out some of the ideas,
we’re putting on a �2 workshop.↩

5. It’ll be extremely ad lib, extremely ad hoc. At the
least, we’ll talk for a bit, and then hand out the stream
of conch. notes we typed up at the end of our week of
nonstop work on the book, and then split into groups (if
there are enough of us). You can either bring a twywdio
or just bring yourself. Your twywdio can be anything: a
startup, a green project, a toy, a web app, a school.

6. That’s about all the detail we have.

Dorothy: “Fuck it, I’ll stay here”

Matt Weston — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 16:10:51 +0000

I like short copy. Always have. If you give people less words to play with, they write better. Like a review of 2 Fast 2 Furious: “Two fine performances, both by cars.” Or www.fwfr.com. Or 6 word sci-fi from 33 writers, 5 designers - inspired by that Hemingway once wrote a story in six words (”For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) and is said to have called it his best work.

A beginner’s guide to freelancing

Matt Weston — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:01:59 +0000

by Phil.

Paul Graham lists the 18 mistakes that kill startups

Matt Weston — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 16:18:10 +0000

Paul Graham lists the 18 mistakes that kill startups. “#1 Single Founder. What’s wrong with having one founder? To start with, it’s a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn’t talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. That’s pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best.”

How to run a diehard record shop

Matt Weston — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 12:01:47 +0000

Laura Barton made a good pick of Britain’s best 20 independent record shops in yesterday’s Guardian. I’ve shopped at seven out of 20: Rough Trade, Rounder Records, Selectadisc, Ray’s Jazz, Haggle Vinyl, Fopp, and Piccadilly Records. Edit out the descriptive stuff, and there are some really useful how-tos here - not only for indie record shops, but for indie retailers of any stripe. I made this quick list:

Start an album club. Customers sign-up to receive three, four, five or 10 CDs a month. - Rough Trade

Only hire people who can name at least 18 artists from 20 album titles. - Rounder Records

Call regulars with recommendations. - Disque

Introduce people to something they might not have heard. - Monorail Music

Offer a section for local artists, and a large noticeboard where you can advertise for a bassist. - Selectadisc

Offer mail order, because people have forgotten how to walk out of their houses. - Action Records

Love what you sell. - Clerkenwell Music

Do a maths degree. - Avalanche

Be like a delicatessen. - Reveal Records

Let shoppers haggle over price. - Haggle Vinyl

Be the opposite of a download. - Crash Records

Play your music very loud, so people can hear your shop before they get to it. - 3 Beat

Split your shop down the middle to form not one, but two shops. - Stand Out/ Minus Zero

Be a collector. Be sad when you sell a record. - Vox Pop