Coworking fun with founders in London

I just came back from two days of fun coworking with other founders in London! Me and my girlfriend were in nearby Cambridge for a few nights so it made sense to come to London as well while I was down this way. London has a lot more going on in terms of coworking sessions and founder events than my home city of Edinburgh so I should really head down more often! Here's what I got up to:

Tuesday

On the train down from Edinburgh I started re-designed my High Signal website. It's a newsletter for founders and keeps you up to date with all the latest acquisitions, MRR milestones, marketing tips and bootstrapper news. I love sending it twice a week! Here's a pic of me on the train to London with the old homepage:

The previous homepage had an email form at the top and then blog posts but crucially, no social proof! This had to change. I had a dedicated /newsletter/ page with testimonials from readers but a) I wasn't very happy with how it looked and b) I wanted a homepage dedicated to newsletter signups.

Wednesday

I met up with Charlie Ward and some other guys from his Ramen Club community for founders. I had only got 4 hours sleep as the room in Cambridge we were staying in was really hot. So I was basically running on fumes that day! We stood up and each of us took it in turns to talk about what we were working on. So I talked about the newsletter page and I was also hoping to start on a Chrome extension as well.

After an hour or so and a couple of problems with routing in Ghost, I had changed my High Signal newsletter homepage. There are still some things I need to fix like changing the weight of the text in some places but done is better than perfect.

Testimonials are a great way to increase trust in your business. I get a lot of great comments from readers so now I have a better way of presenting this. I actually didn't use a testimonial tool for this, preferring to just use some plain HTML and CSS. (I got some help from ChatGPT). I've been meaning to change this since December! It's great what a bit of accountability can do for your productivity.

(I started doing a bit of work on a Chrome Extension but this kept on breaking for no clear reason and then the day was up.)

It was great to meet some new founders (one of them was actually a High Signal subscriber already which was cool!). I definitely get more down when I have the accountability of being in the same room as someone else.

Sadly, I couldn't make it to the Indie Beers meetup that evening in the East End but I've been to one and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone living in London or passing through!

Thursday

I got a bit more sleep and made it back on the train to London the next day. This time I was headed to Hackaditch, a new coworking session co-organised by one of my IRL founder friends, James Potter. Unfortunately, James couldn't make it that day.

The sessions are aimed at re-creating the vibe of a Hackagu coworking session in Bali, where James has spent a lot of time living and working. It was nice that I was able to talk to the Hackaditch co-organiser Tobias, who knows another friend of mine, Andrew Kamphey from BetterSheets.

This day I had to do some Twitter ghost writing so it was less of a project-based day. Still, I was able to show the room of founders my newsletter homepage design from the day before and I got some valuable feedback and criticism from them. My friends Amar and Ramy also made it up from Brighton for the coworking session so it was great to see them as well.

Us three actually went on to a Dynamite Circle meetup after Hackaditch so we could watch the England football game. I was starting to feel pretty unwell at this point (a combination of lack of sleep and hay fever) so after meeting a couple of people and unexpectedly pitching someone my LinkedIn ghost writing services, I made my excuses and got the train back to Cambridge.

Closing thoughts

I'm always really energised when I come to London and work here. There's a great scene of founders and meetups which is sadly lacking in Edinburgh, where I live. I'm not sure what the answer to this is. Obviously, London has about 10-20x the population of Edinburgh and a huge tech sector, which inevitably leads to a healthier startup ecosystem.

I guess I'll need to organise some more meetups in Edinburgh. It would also be great to do some coworking with other founders as I like working around other people. It's more sociable and I get a lot more done. Unfortunately, some of the coworking places I've been to in Edinburgh seem to be more geared around 9-5 employees and not entrepreneurs. If anyone in Edinburgh (or even Glasgow) wants to organise a coworking session, get in touch: pete@nocsdegree.com