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Show HN: Workfrom – The best coffee shops and cafes to work from
- darrenbuckner 12y agoHello HN! Workfrom was developed to help people find the best places to get work done. We look at WiFi, access to power, background noise, food options and more. We're expanding to new cities (US and international) and we rely on our community to help hunt down and source places we list. Anyone can add a location via our site. We'd love help finding places and please provide feedback about how we can make this better!
- hadoukenio 12y agoError establishing a database connection. This was always an idea in the back of mind to do. I'm glad someone else did it for me :) Best of luck.
- darrenbuckner 12y agosorry about the database connection. looks like the traffic is hitting us pretty hard. we'll work out those kinks. thanks!
- mayneack 12y agoIt's down right now, but is this like the hotel wifi rating (http://www.hotelwifitest.com/ http://www.hotelwifitest.com/) that was posted recently? I hope so, I've wasted quite a lot of time in coffee shops with terrible wifi.
- darrenbuckner 12y agoSorry! We're working to get things back up. We help find the best coffee shops and cafes based on WiFi, access to power, background noise and more.
- nXqd 12y agoError establishing a database connection. I find that an easy setup can handle this kind of traffic, plz fix it :D Nice idea !
- darrenbuckner 12y agoWe're working on it! Something unexpected is happening. Thanks for hanging in there with us. Please check back!
- groundhog 12y agoThis looks really useful! This isn't meant to be a criticism, but I was wondering how your website will overcome the issue of people not wanting to publicize their favorite work spot to prevent overcrowding? Also, from your experiences so far, are cafes happy to have people sit in their shop for extended periods? My impressions are that while some places (cough, nice people in Portland) encourage such behavior, others may not take to campers so nicely.
- darrenbuckner 12y agoThanks! We've found that people are very willing to share their favorite places in an effort to promote the business. Business owners have welcomed our showcase of their businesses. Most coffee shops and cafes have long periods of slow traffic. Having people come to stay for awhile helps to keep a place busy. We've been told over and over that a "busy shop" is a "good shop".
- jakejake 12y agoI would think that places who have wait staff would not appreciate people taking up tables without ordering since it would directly affect their pay. But a coffee shop that does mostly take-out business may not mind so much having the appearance of a busy, popular cafe. I do think it's good to be mindful that you are utilizing a business's space and facilities, and they are able to provide these to you by selling food and drinks. So you should try to be a courteous customer and support their business.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoI tend to pick low periods in which to work out of my favorite cafe (mornings in China, because no one drinks coffee before noon here; also pervasive take out is an American thing), and I'm a reliable 52 RMB a day, so I'm pretty welcome.
- darrenbuckner 12y agoWe've gotten a lot of feedback from business owners that the average patron staying to get some work done is a good steward of their space and spends money often. We hear stories of people staying for hours and hours, not buying anything - but we've found this is just not the norm. With that said, we do encourage our community to support businesses with their evangelism AND money.
- danvayn 12y agoWhen's Chicago coming?
- darrenbuckner 12y agoWe are eager to find a home in Chicago. We need to hunt down some great places there first. We rely heavily on recommendations from the community. Once we have enough places to be useful, we make them visible on the site.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- canterburry 12y agoI would suggest you don't force people to sign up to add a location. I just didn't add Coffee Bar in the mission district because I simply can't be bothered to sign up.
- icelancer 12y agoLikewise. Wanted to add hackerspace Metrix:Create Space in Capitol Hill (WA) but even if I used a throwaway it wants me to validate my address. I can't possibly see the reason for this.
- daniel_sim 12y agoSome interesting panorama effects on that Heart Coffee photo.
- matthewwiese 12y agoRegistered and sent in a suggestion for a city. Just visited a local coffee shop that would fit perfectly on a site like this.
- darrenbuckner 12y agoThank you!
- _pmf_ 12y ago"Coffee shop owners hate him."
- eps 12y agoExactly. My first thought would be if he allows easy delisting or if it would require some form of legal arm twisting. I'm sure that busier places will not be happy with being on the list.
- icedog 12y agoAm I the only one who prefers to work in public libraries? The San Mateo library has plenty of seating/power outlets, a respectable cafe, and free underground parking.
- icelancer 12y agoI did this for some time while unemployed but the public libraries here (Seattle) have absolutely awful Internet access. Probably due to the large number of transient people watching... videos.
- k__ 12y agoI like libs more too. The "Landesbibliothek" in Stuttgart has real office desks with outlets and wifi. And since I'm a student, I get it all for free. It's also a nicer atmosphere than in coffee shops. Way less foot traffic and most of the people are silent. Also, noone expects me to buy anything...
- manirelli 12y agoAs someone who works from home this looks like it will become an invaluable tool.
- simzen85 12y agosimilar project http://coworfing.com/ http://coworfing.com/
- Udo 12y agoThere are two flavors of coworking spaces, one where have a community office that allows you to work there on short notice without a lot of commitment, and the other one is basically a shared rented office space. It may be cultural, but coworfing.com results for my country (Germany) yield only permanently shared office space. They're not places where you can just pop in every once in a while.
- Udo 12y agoAdding new sites should be easier. I get that this is a tradeoff between rapid engagement and trust, but since the project is so new it's vastly more likely that a visitor will want to add something as opposed to successfully looking it up. Maybe the focus on cities, while great for the lookup scenario, should not play such a big role when adding data points. My suggestion: just open it up, have a form where any member can add a coffee shop, at any location (Google Maps-powered). As site admins you could review the submissions later and sort it out. For example, I was initially motivated to add some places near me. That's in Germany, so no cities there yet. This means I've got to jump through the hoop of adding a city, at which point any user who was previously excited about adding stuff to the database becomes stranded and loses interest. I would like to add sites in different cities, so technically I would have to open up requests for 3 cities - in a sparsely populated area like Germany that's not feasible. I'm more interested in how far away a location is than what city it is in. Also, you should make use of the browser Geo API.
- nqzero 12y agocould you just your favorites here ? i was in germany in 2007 and 2010 for a total of 5 weeks and didn't find a single coffee shop that was conducive to working. thinking it's time to go visit friends again ...
- Udo 12y agoThat depends on what you're looking for, locally. Starbucks is always a pretty good option in Germany, but of course shops have varying levels of noise and connectivity. The Starbucks in Frankfurt near the old stock exchange is pretty good if you can get a place at the big table it's even office-like, and generally shared by people doing the same thing. The Starbucks in Heidelberg works for me, but it's relatively small. There are also several non-chained coffee shops in these cities where you can feel right at home. Also, if you're ever in Austria, Vienna is absolutely beautiful for coffee shop work. The secret to finding these things in Germany is to know they come in clusters. For example, Berlin, Frankfurt and Heidelberg are pretty decent and you can find several nice coffee shops there. Find cities that are somewhat cosmopolitan, because size is a bad predictor for coffee shop density here. In between there are vast stretches of absolutely nothing, but then again distances in Germany are generally ridiculously small even though Germans don't think so.
- collyw 12y agoI find my workplace distracting enough when trying to concentrate (thank god for August, most people go away for a month where I am). Do people actually find it productive to work in a coffee shop? There will be even more distractions and noise than my office.
- blowski 12y agoDepends on the work I'm doing. It helps for creative work, but it's more challenging to do basic admin. Also, the distractions in an office are difficult to block because they all seem relevant to me, which puts me in a constant state of being alert to them. In a coffee shop, I know that the noise is completely irrelevant to me, so it just moves into the background.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- PedroCandeias 12y agoI do. Alone, I get distracted easily. Around people, I'm less likely to browse away from work because I don't want to be seen as a slacker. At home or the office, I get no sense of urgency. At a coffee shop, there's all sorts of time limits: from the draining battery to the feeling that after a few hours my welcome will be overstayed. So stuff needs to get done... rapidly. When I'm near familiar people, my mind focuses a lot on their voices. When around strangers, it doesn't care; their voices and other sounds blur together into background noise. I guess you could say that working from coffee shops is one way I "hack" myself into being productive. So I'm not surprised to see others enjoy working there too. But probably not for the exact same reasons. People's motives and preferences vary greatly.
- daniel_iversen 12y agoI do indeed, its (in part) the ambient noise that makes it so productive. I've even resorted an "ambient noise" mp3 file that I occasionally play in the background when I'm not at a cafe ;)
- crdoconnor 12y agoI find it better because while it is louder, I can just tune it out, whereas I can't tune out people I know. If they stand behind me I get the nagging feeling that they might want something even if they don't, and that's way more distracting than a cafe. Even if they're quiet. Also, the lack of wifi helps aid concentration.
- codecondo 12y agoWhat about Bristol, UK? Anyone has got any recommendations?
- webjames 12y agoSmall St. espresso is worth a look, although I'm not sure it would be that good for working from for a long time - but it depends on what you are working on.
- codecondo 12y agoThank you. The work is related to writing, so most of the time I'd only be taking up the space for my laptop, and perhaps a notebook or two to keep notes. I'd probably need at least 4-5 solid hours, during the working days of the week. Any other place you know of, please let me know. I'm trying out a few places, but I've found nothing of significance yet.
- dustintran 12y agoI'm not sure how useful this would be. Do people willfully drive from work to a coffee shop in order to get work done, and not simply walk to their favorite coffee shop within walking distance? It seems like distance is more the contributing feature than anything else.
- aaronem 12y agoIt doesn't have to be about professional day-job work alone; for example, I often bike to a coffee shop on weekends to work on my side projects, because it gets me out of my apartment and away from all the distractions therein.
- maknz 12y agoIt's a great idea. Only suggestion would be to make it easier to add cities and places and let the community report bad places, instead of what seems to be a review-first approach. I'd rather more content (and the ability to add content for my locals right away) than have to go through a "beta" phase to get the city up and running.
- drivingmenuts 12y agoI don't think I could do work from a coffee shop. They make their money on churn and my camping out in a chair for hours kind of prevents that. I really have to wonder how the owners feel about all the other people doing exactly the same thing.
- dhimes 12y agoWhen I want to work outside the office, I prefer the public library for exactly this reason.
- aaronem 12y agoDoes the public library sell coffee? (There's an Enoch Pratt branch directly across from my favored coffee place in Roland Park, which would be just dandy if it didn't have the weirdest opening hours known to man. Closed on Thursdays and Sundays? Who does that?)
- dhimes 12y agoNo, mine does not.
- bluedino 12y agoI would love to as well - it's quiet and you can take a break to read a book whenever you want. The problem with our library is that even though they have a 100mb internet connection, they filter everything. You can't use Git or SSH for example, so it does me no good as a place to work.
- general_failure 12y agomy public library does not allow coffee inside :(
- antihero 12y agoI prefer the pub, but there are obvious drawbacks. As long as you can stick to slightly less than two drinks it's okay though.
- peteretep 12y agoYou've got to find a more representative photo of London
- tedchs 12y agoNice job guys. I appreciate the optionality of having a password. I was also able to successfully use your site with only my phone, which some sites have issues with. One suggestion, although it's helpful to have Wi-Fi passwords listed, I think your team should confirm with the business before posting it. They might want to be picky about who they give it to. I feel like me asking a coffee shop person for the password is an implicit question of whether it's OK for me to hang out with the laptop for a couple hours, and also gives them the chance to tell me if it's down right now.
- ratsbane 12y agoSeconded. I was confused by the no password thing at first until I found the link on this page https://workfrom.co/worker https://workfrom.co/worker that described it. Now I like it.
- Phogo 12y agoNice looking site, not really for me but looks useful to others. You should look at disabling directory indexing, https://workfrom.co/siteadmin/wp-content/uploads/ https://workfrom.co/siteadmin/wp-content/uploads/
- srom 12y agoThat's great! However, I would like to be able to add places without the need to be on site at the time of writing (e.g using a geocoding service like Google Maps API) I suppose it is a way to avoid spam though.
- greggman 12y agoA few things come to mind: Price: For example at some places I might recommend there's a "per hour" charge. Examples: The Workshop Cafe in SF is $2 a hour. The Epicenter Cafe in SF gives you passwords that are only valid for 1-2 hours depending on what you buy. The Terminal in Tokyo is $3 per half/hour or $22 max for the whole day but if you buy a $20 yearly membership it's $12 max for the day. They include unlimited soft drinks (soda, coffee, tea). I didn't see how I would list that stuff on your site. Another is I'd like to be able to vote or rate, comment. Maybe like Yelp? I just got to LA, one place that was recommended was "Paper or Plastik Cafe" but I didn't find it very friendly to working. At least half the cafe is marked as "No notebooks allowed" and the area where they are allowed is very dark and uninviting. Maybe it used to be more friendly to workers which is why it was recommended a couple of years ago but I wouldn't recommend it now.
- jmhobbs 12y agoI can not sign up for the life of me. I get my login link, follow it, and I'm not logged in.
- jmhobbs 12y agoHmmm, looks like I did log in, but the header UI didn't change. I went to https://workfrom.co/worker https://workfrom.co/worker and it showed my account as logged in. Aggressive caching issue maybe?
- egypturnash 12y agoBookmarked for the next time I'm traveling and looking for a place to spend a few hours with my laptop. I might add a few places in Seattle, though my regular place is already there.
- diggan 12y agoSeems like a cool idea and excellent UI. Would love to be able to contribute to a list about Barcelona though!
- AnonJ 12y agoHow's that so different from Foursquare and stuffs anyways.