Coffice City

Inter-galactic city guide for the top 10 best coffices

2 followers

Inter-galactic city guide for the top 10 best coffices (cafe-as-an-office) to get real shit done. For digital nomads & remote workers

Launch tags:

Productivity•Global Nomad

Launch Team

Jason Leow » plugins.carrd.co

Coffice City

Maker

Hi Product Hunters! Some back story first: I’m tired of myself talking about making products but never actually doing it. It’s always been my dream to make products, especially ones that serve the public good and create positive social impact. It’s my passion and purpose to create a personally meaningful body of work at the intersection of design, social/public issues and entrepreneurship. So I’m committing to make 1 minimum viable product per month, starting Feb 2018. I’ll keep going till I run out of ideas or money, or something takes off in a huge way that requires all my time, or exhaustion kicks in. Whichever comes first. #1mvp1month For my 6th MVP, I made a list called Coffice City that shows the top 10 best cafes (aka cafe-as-an-office or ‘coffices’) for working in major cities around the world (and the galaxy too) – places for digital nomads and people who need to do serious work but have no need for co-working spaces. I’m really picky about which cafes count as work-friendly, and these are the ones I would go back to again and again. After all, I don’t need to know 100 cafes available out there which are work-friendly but sub-par for serious remote work. All I wanted was just a handful that I want to keep going back to. All the cafes listed are/have 📡hi-speed wifi, 😍work-friendly, ☕️coffee, 🚾toilet nearby, 🔌sockets, 🚶standing desks, 🔇mostly quiet. Read more about why I made this 👉here. These city guides for coffices are a 🚧work-in-progress🚧, and need folks who frequent coffices to contribute! I hope this can eventually be extended to other major cities around the world, perhaps through crowdsourcing via other digital nomads. One cafe or two, nothing is too little. Please suggest a cafe/city 👉here👈. This is also my first experiment that’s focused on creating for an audience of one, for myself, for fun (read my previous post on my too-serious *ahem boring* projects and about making ‘useless’ things for fun). Coffice City was made entirely from a Google Sheet using Sheet2Site. Kudos to @AndreyAzimov for making Sheet2Site.

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7yr ago

Abadesi

Hustle Crew Academy

@andreyazimov @jasonleowsg nice! would be great to have a clearer call to action for suggesting cafes on the site, when I clicked Europe to find some in London there's only one listing in Sofia. Would be nice if there was a big button right there asking me to suggest some 😊

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7yr ago

Jason Leow » plugins.carrd.co

Coffice City

Maker

@abadesi thanks for the feedback. Yeah, London city guide is not built yet because I'd never worked at cafes there, so will need help from other nomads. Hmmm🤔 there's a "Add a cafe" button right in the middle of the page when you first arrive, and at the bottom there's a blank entry (where a city/cafe should be) that says "Add a place"... I'm guessing those were not obvious to you...where should I have placed the button instead?

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7yr ago

Youssef KH

CryptoTajines

@andreyazimov @jasonleowsg I'm tired too of myself... What should I do?

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7yr ago

Jason Leow » plugins.carrd.co

Coffice City

Maker

@ucefkh don't over-think it...just ship! 😊👍

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7yr ago

Michael Gangnath

Cool idea - but very niche and hasn't developed the traction necessary for it to actually serve the purpose for which is was created. Personal recommendation - maintain the minimalist and convenient UX, but do away with the emojis and block text right in the center of the site.

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7yr ago

Jason Leow » plugins.carrd.co

Coffice City

Maker

@michaelgangnath appreciate the feedback. Yes, it's very much still a MVP, a work in progress. Hoping the nomads here can help flesh it out as it's a community resource more than a for-profit project. 😊 Curious to hear more about your comment regarding emojis and block text in center of site though...how is that affecting your experience of using the site, and any idea on how to make it better?

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7yr ago

Michael Gangnath

@jasonleowsg There's a lot going on there, and because of the spacing especially regarding the text, the attention of the reader can get distracted. The UX is minimalist, so the text habitat should be the same. Additionally; Emojis are symbols and convey information - having them in addition to text, makes an overflow of information and tends to be an eye sore; in my view emojis tend to crowd and conflict with UX design flow. Try to say more with less and spacing out the padding for the text - it makes everything a lot less of a jumble to read. Highly recommended this as a resource for the development of pages heavy in text: https://material.io/design/ Overall guys, great work - looking forward to seeing how this product grows. Happy Hunting, Michael.

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7yr ago

aaron jack

IMO this is a great idea. It reminds me of a Google doc that was passed around our coding bootcamp of the best places to cafes study in SF. As someone else said I'd totally remove the block of text. Also the emojis + card UI makes it feel like a nomad list knock off. The main challenge seems like it would be collecting enough data for this to be useful I would love to see this take off though! What determines whether you build this up more or move to the next project?

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7yr ago

Jason Leow » plugins.carrd.co

Coffice City

Maker

@air_on_web oh nice, do you want to add some of those cafes in SF into the list? 😉 Yes collecting data is the hard part, and I can't do it alone neither can I scrape because this requires human curation in a way. Not all cafes are created equal for remote work unfortunately... Tell me more about the block of text...is it too long? Too much explanation? I feel like I need to explain what it's about because it's for quite a niche purpose, yet folks are saying drop it, so trying to figure out what's the sweet spot... I kinda like the emoji though. It was fun using it and increasingly I find more and more sites adopting it as a visual language. It was directly inspired from nomadlist so I don't mind coming across as a knock-off, if that helps to give credit to the original inspiration! 😊 Like they say, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." Haha I'll keep building it as suggestions come in, at least for the next few months. Will have to course-correct as I go...not sure how this will pan out. Tbh I didn't even expect it to get featured on PH!

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7yr ago

aaron jack

@jasonleowsg Yeah I think the amount of upvotes you got is definitely validation of the idea. That's the go-ahead that it will probably be worth your time to keep building! Ok, this is just my $0.02 as a FE engineer: Re-text: you have an shorter window of time than you think to capture users and the block of text is noise. The 2 most important things seeing the list of coffee shops, seeing the ratings (best wifi/ best coffee) somehow both of these take multiple clicks to get to, and I couldn't find the ratings breakdowns (not sure you've built that yet) Also in the spirit of efficiency / UX, I think also featuring coffee shops by continent is cute, but it's not useful. The best thing you could possibly do is geo-identify where the user is and just point them at coffee shops in their city. It's not really like nomad list where you'd browse coffee shops in other cities before you go. Data collection: I say just totally open it up like the wild west and clean it up later. Let people add whatever. I'd happily add those SF coffee shops if there was a way to add a LOT of coffee shops FAST but new tabs keep opening, and I'd keep having to hit submit, re-navigate, etc. Design: I think the design is good for an MVP. All the best designs I think are inspired by something else then evolve over time. Keep iterating though There's really so much you can do with this: upvotes, downvotes, comments, game-ifying it in different ways. I'm excited for you and will be following, stick with it!

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7yr ago

Jason Leow » plugins.carrd.co

Coffice City

Maker

@air_on_web oh wow thanks for all the ideas! Good points on the text, geolocation and upvotes etc. Will keep in view in backlog!😊 Re: ratings: Yes, i left out the details because ALL the listed cafes have them: 📡hi-speed wifi, 😍work-friendly, ☕️coffee, 🚾toilet nearby, 🔌sockets, 🚶some standing desks, 🔇mostly quiet. This is a bit of a different kind of list unlike Yelp/Tripadvisor, where you see different ratings for different criteria. Instead all cafes have to pass the test of fulfiling all/most of the key criteria before it's posted. That's why there's only at most 10 cafes listed. There's many cafes out there but not all good for serious work. To get on the list, I always ask contributors if it fulfills all the criteria, and if it's a place they had personally worked at before for 4h or more. In sum, it's already a strictly curated list, so all the work of deciding and selecting is done for the user, and the user only needs to choose the location. Re: data collection - I'm allowing entries now but concerned about opening it up completely because it's the tight curation that makes this list useful. I wanna use a cafe that other nomads had worked at before and like working at. But you're right too, in sense that if it's not opened up, it'll be hard to scale. I'm already finding it challenging manually keying in all the suggestions! 😅

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7yr ago