Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Cat Johnson – Coworking Marketing Maven
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Andrea Pirrotti-Dranchak – Competitive Advantage
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
Jeremy Fennema – Tech Innovation Alchemist
Raaly is a coworking app that helps people find ‘hot-deals’ of coworking spaces. Co-founders Justin Block and Gary Riger discuss Raaly’s plans for the future and how they plan to evolve their technology offering.
In the short-span of a month, Raaly has been able to grow into 6 new markets: Australia, Germany, Toronto, Austin, Chicago, and San Francisco, by forming new partnerships with local coworking operators. Though the app appears to be well-received and growing, both Block and Riger have bigger plans for their tech startup than simply discounted coworking space.
“In the future, we will be offering a new technology that we believe will become the bulk of our revenue.”
As to how they plan to do this, Riger is the founder of mobile and web development company, BKLYN, which gives Raaly the opportunity to update their technology as much as is needed, depending on the needs of the coworking market. As such, this gives both Block and Riger the opportunity to develop and rigorously test new technologies as they are released to market.
Among the many services Raaly wants to offer workspace operators is a web-based platform for inventory and marketing. “We want to build a platform for coworking spaces on the inside and connect all the dots–from inventory, to booking, to marketing.”
“We’re still in the design phase of this. The web platform is being built out at the moment and will be launched April 1st. The idea behind the web platform is fully based on the user experience standpoint; we want to make the process of finding a booking space (conference rooms, hot-desks, private offices) more fun and easy for everyone involved.”
Simply put, “Raaly will bring in the leads, and the inventory system will help operators manage the space.”
But that’s not all. They’re also hoping to bring students into coworking spaces. “We want to create a pass or something inexpensive for students. We’re planning on reaching out to Universities and partner with them so that students have more options as to where they can do their schoolwork.”
On the same note of coworking passes, Raaly is also looking into developing city, metro, country, and global passes. In NYC, Boston, Washington DC, and San Francisco Raaly will find some competition, Croissant. However, Raaly plans on diving into the coworking passes with a different approach. “We want to offer these passes for one price depending on the package people choose; we want users to be able to travel from city to city, country to country and always have a place to work from.”
This is still in the works, as Block and Riger need to figure out some of the numbers, including the prices of each different membership pass and the percentage that would go to each coworking operator. They also need to work on how to keep tabs on users. “We’re thinking about doing check-in, check-out automatically, either through geofencing or beacons.”
Clearly, Raaly has big plans for the future…and if they keep on growing, they will continue to gather incredible amounts of data that can be useful for workspace operators globally. Like how private offices have been selling more than dedicated monthly desk space–or why day passes are the best-sellers on the app so far.
In any case, we’ll keep you updated on what Raaly is up to, and we’ll let you know once they officially start offering meeting and conference rooms for booking on demand.
