The post seems slightly melodramatic and certainly doesn't mirror my experience finding an office for our company in the same area.<p>I'll agree that trying to find an office in London <i>online</i> is pretty futile - the best thing to do is leave the desk and take a walk.<p>Allocate an afternoon or two to pound pavement and start calling all the letting agencies with signs on the outside of buildings.<p>In one afternoon I managed to get two viewings sorted for the same day and several for the following days. Most of the agents would email us a daily summary of new properties they'd get in which met our requirements (1500sq ft, Old Street area etc.)<p>We had our new office sorted within two to three weeks. 6 month rolling lease.<p>Only fly in the ointment is that I'm still getting emails!
This may not apply anywhere else (though I suspect it does), but in the Netherlands the office space market is deliberately kept obscure due to the much higher supply than demand. Many thousands of square meters of office space are currently vacant, and real estate investors are terrified of the paper value of that office space collapsing.<p>As a result, cost and availability are deliberately kept obscure. Cheap small office space is abundant, but usually not offered publicly. You have to ask, and then you get things like "sure, we can split this huge space into smaller units", or "we'll throw in x-months free rent" (so they can officially keep the rent, and therefor the value, high).
Feedback on the actual app:<p>Make the pictures click-able in the search view. In fact, why not make the whole search result click-able...<p>Also the -/+ and the </> buttons are just a bit of a strange UX feature and have too small a hit area for such an important feature.<p>I was a bit confused as to what the '£500' actually meant, turns out it's pppm. I now notice you have a hover state, but hmmmm.<p>Also the font looks <i>horrible</i> on Win 7 Chrome. I know, I know, it's Chrome's fault, but it still looks horrible.<p>Overall, nice app, looks good.
This post really underlines my own experience of trying to find an office space for a startup in London. There are so many sharks out there, and everyone tries to get you to sign a 3 year (or more!) lease. We might not be around in 6 months! But co-working spaces are sometimes just as bad, especially the ones which are basically just feeder funnels for landlords who want you to upgrade to one of their serviced offices / large units (looking at you, ClubWorkspace). I think what Spacious is doing is really cool therefore - and I'll definitely be trying out the service when our current office space expires at the end of March :)
Personally I think this would have worked better for me if it were a 'Show HN:' type post rather than a blogvertisement.<p>That said, look at www.42Floors.com, clean, crisp, right to the point. Better yet hope they don't open a London branch :-). As an exemplar for an online experience tailored to a particular demographic (small space seekers, ie startups) they hit a lot of the right pain points. Sort by neighborhood? check, space constraints? Check, it goes on but I'm not here to advertise them, I'm just comparing notes.<p>If you're catering to startups, and it looks like you are, then the 'office space' problem is probably the CEO or VP Ops' "other" job. Their needs change from seed, to series A, to series B+. How do you transition them into 'bigger' space and hand over the reigns to dedicated facilities person in the company? Do you co-ordinate other services? Janitorial, snacks services, 'fix it' type services? How about vetting/rating landlords, another useful service for the startup founder. If you want to be the "AppStore of Space" you need to consider that the person using your service really doesn't want to make it their life's work, and at the same time doesn't want to look stupid for picking "this space."
I have literally all the problems you outlined in the blog and so I checked out the app. It looks cool but why on earth do I have to signup for an account after browsing for a bit? I understand that at some point you want people to login for the enquiry but it makes browsing a new application very very irritating.<p>Additionally, my biggest annoyance with the commercial real estate is the "MANY OFFICES UP TO Xsqft/FROM £Y". I was hoping this would be something where the lettor had to list offices as opposed to just a general space that can be broken up.
When we started our project Peer.im (<a href="http://peer.im" rel="nofollow">http://peer.im</a>), we were very lucky to find an office in Santa Clara for merely $500 a month. The space is large enough for 6 people. If anyone is interested, here is the address. 3200 Coronado Drive, Santa Clara.