A Peerspace co-founder explains how the company started from spotting two problems: commercial real estate sitting empty and creative professionals struggling to find inspiring workspaces. The early strategy focused on sourcing unique venues, attracting entrepreneurial hosts, and copying Airbnb's consumer-focused design for a B2B marketplace.
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What was the founding story for Peerspace and what were the first steps that you took to start it as a marketplace at the time?
Yeah. So my co-founder and I came to Peerspace from 2 different angles. There was one angle, which is that commercial space is plentiful but underutilized. And this is, I think, key to a lot of marketplaces today. But for us at the time, it felt fairly novel. The second part of that is access to creative and inspiring spaces. is difficult to find. Thinking back to my time at EA, we had an awesome campus. It was built for making creative software. And when I left that experience, I realized that that's a rarity. You know, not, not everybody has access to spaces where they can do their best work. And so that was where I really came at it. And, you know, you put those 2 things together in PureSpace, exists. It's a marketplace where, you know, we can solve both of those problems. We can provide extra utilization and revenue to our supply, our hosts, while we allow our guests to have memorable events, memorable moments. And so, you know, we learned there was an opportunity over time to disrupt events. And specifically, we needed to do so. We needed to rely on what I think of like 4 primary areas. So we needed new types of supply, and these were creative, unique event venues, not necessarily the standard event venue or the hotel conference room or ballroom. We needed enterprising venue owners or supply that really was also entrepreneurial and wanted to do things in different ways than the ways they had traditionally been done. We needed transparent and non-discriminatory pricing. So something that we could post publicly and say, hey, this is what you're getting, this is what it includes, and it's really easy to book. And then I guess that leads into the last one, which is a frictionless customer experience really through the transaction funnel on the demand side. And those things allowed us to be disruptive in the space and to create a new wedge in events. And of course, you know, we were inspired by marketplace at the time. This was 2013 when we originally launched. So we were inspired by Airbnb, particularly their consumer-focused design approach. I think that's what we wanted to take into events, which we knew were going to be B2B and B2B2C, but we wanted to have this prosumer angle and we wanted it to be a delightful experience. And so, so yeah, so that's kind of how we started PeerSpace together. We came together to solve this problem, did a lot of things, and I can, I can talk more about them, but did a lot of things in those early days that don't scale that you have to do. And I think if we didn't do those things, then we wouldn't be where we are today. And maybe just one more item on that is, you know, is the right time in our careers to take on that business and that challenge. You know, you, it involves a full bet on yourself when you're starting an early stage company. You're gonna be working nights and weekends. You're gonna be juggling investor pitches along with customer research and offshore product design meetings to bring this thing to life. And so you have to create your, the early inertia yourself. And that's what we did. So yeah.
