How To Hub: Being a (part-time) tour guide or putting your co-working office to good use

“This floor is all about innovation with hardware!” As soon as some of the habitués of the 4th floor at Impact Hub Zurich Colab hear this phrase, they know what’s coming. A guided tour has just arrived at the makerZpace and I’m now explaining what all these 3D printers and oscilloscopes are doing in the corner of the building.

Naturally my day job isn’t being a tour guide (like this one!) but running an early stage startup. But I noticed something early on: people are very interested in seeing a co-working space, which is located centrally, has a great community and a vibe unknown to most more traditional companies. So why not put this to good use?

After some thinking the solution was pretty straight-forward: I’ll offer a tour through the Impact Hub, its history, show off the building, throw in a couple of jokes and anecdotes to any potential business associate. And to my own surprise this actually works! Not everyone might be directly interested in what our startup has to offer, but throw in Zurich’s best walking tour and suddenly people are coming to visit us! (And we’ve gotten very interesting meetings as a followup.)

Our underground, non-official, invite-only, walkabout catered to the select few only is a smash-hit and potential clients simply love it! “Inspiring”, “Dazzling”, “Eye-opening” are some of the anonymized feedbacks found in our guest book. So the lesson here is pretty simple – use your surroundings to your advantage! Contact me for the underground walking tour of Zurich’s heart of the startup scene 😉

Or even better, start running your own tour and disrupt the incumbent!

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