The Beginner's Guide to Building a Studio
May 17, 2024
Hey! Welcome to This Week at 535 — a weekly recap of what’s happening in and around Studio 535.
🎟️ Upcoming Events
Applications for Show & Tell 002 — Applications for presenting are now open here. We’ll limit it to 10 participants. If selected to demo, we’ll reach out to you. The event itself will be in early June and tickets for attendees will be available in next week’s newsletter.
🎞️ Replay: This Week at 535
1️⃣ Robleh, Vin, and Fahd were finally spotted together in the same room. They sat on a panel for Toronto Tech Week sharing their personal journeys and vision for Toronto. Unsure if this is the end of the ongoing East v West beef or just a brief intermission…
Never a dull moment with @fahdananta@robjama@internetvin
Couldn't ask them all my questions so I'm cooking up the sequel right now 😉
2️⃣ Jean Amiouny from Shakepay joined us at the studio for this week’s Off The Record session. This one was a fan favorite and one of our best sessions yet. We love it when these go from just asking the speaker to a lively discussion with the audience.
Enlightenment era salon vibes, but for builders
@535Toronto@kerooke@aiouy
3️⃣ In other less exciting news, we had a power outage in the area on Wednesday and we negotiated with our landlord for a new fridge. Bring your startup stickers to decorate it next week.
4️⃣ This evening we’ll also have our first Open Studio session with Shomik Ghosh who’s visiting us from SF. If this format works, we’ll do more of these soon as way for people to come hang out, work together, and have office hour slots with a few of us.
📓 The Playbook to Build Studio 535
We officially started the lease to move into Studio 535 on April 1, 2024 (6 weeks ago from when I wrote this).
Since then, we’ve seen so much activity that it’s been hard to keep up. Many people have reached out asking if we’re going to expand 535 to other cities like Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Boston, New York, and so on. The truth is, sometimes good things aren’t meant to scale. Each time you replicate it, it loses a bit of its original essence.
It’s an excellent idea for people to build co-working studios in their city and local communities. When you get a group of people who are independently working on creating something from scratch in the same place, there are several benefits:
More fun and friendships
Learn and grow from each other
Organically share feedback and ideas, leading to everyone leveling up
Run experiments together
Help each other with sales, engineering, design, fundraising, intros, etc.
Emotional support because startups are hard
So, while there will only be one Studio 535, many studios should have the same vibe and principles. Below, we’re openly sharing the structure and decisions we’ve used to open this studio.
The Playbook
Step 1 - Gather Requirements
Before you begin, ask yourself, “Am I willing to do this for at least one year?” You (and maybe a friend) will sign the lease. Regardless of how things play out, you’ll be the one accountable for everything (rent, safety, bad actors, etc).
Then think about and decide on these factors:
Location: Consider commute, parking, convenience
Size of the space: How many people do you want to fit
Layout: Open space, rooms (for meetings), ease of entry, etc.
Price range
Setup expenses: How do you want to furnish it, how much will it cost
Must haves: Do you need a shower? Full kitchen? Natural light?
Lease terms: Length of lease, deposits, option to renew
As an example, for 535 we knew we wanted:
A place with a full bathroom, including shower
Ground floor unit, so easy access for events (got lucky with an extra backdoor entrance)
A flexible and easygoing landlord
Enough space to fit 4-8 desks
Space to put an indoor sauna and cold tub
Once you have all this information, you should have a good idea of the type and range of places that would be appropriate.
Step 2 - Search
We used CBRE, Kijiji, and HouseSigma to find places ourselves that generally fit the criteria. You’ll have to find the local commercial lease listing site that works best for you.
If you don’t find the right spot, give yourself some time. We ended up working with an agent, Shayla from CBRE, who helped us find this place. Feel free to reach out to her directly if you need an agent.
Step 3 - Finances
Our goal at 535 is to run the studio at breakeven with some breathing room for incidentals and supplies. Any extra is used to run events, introduce new benefits for all members, or if we’re left with a huge balance at the end it will be distributed evenly.
Now, you’ve narrowed down your potential place but have not signed a lease yet. The main things you want to consider here are:
Monthly costs, including rent, utilities, internet, taxes, insurance
How many desks can fit comfortably
Setup expenses (mainly furniture)
The monthly charge per desk for each member
How many members
Put these together in a spreadsheet and see if it makes sense. If it seems like the costs are too high per member or you might not be able to get that many members, then it might not make sense, and you’ll need to reassess.
Here are our approximate numbers for 535:
Rent, internet, and all other incidentals: $4900/mo
We can fit 12 desks comfortably
The cost to support each member would be $408, but we wanted a bit of flexibility for supplies, so decided to go with $500/mo for each member.
Directly from our finance spreadsheet
There’s a lot of other things to consider here. For example, this doesn’t account for cashflow (rent comes out on the 1st) or how you put down the deposits. We put the deposit upfront (~$10K) and then paid for all the furniture (~$12K).
Step 4 - Members
We have 12 desks and aside from the 3 of us (Robleh, Fahd, Matt) we have 9 desks to rent out.
One of our friends, Presh, joined us as a member to rent a desk and run the sauna/cold tub (Hotspot). For the remaining 8 desks, we reached out to a few friends we knew who wanted a desk. Then, we marketed it a bit along with a lightweight application to make sure everyone fit the vibe and we all were working on building something. That resulted in ~30 applicants that we went through and found the right mix for the remaining members.
- an experimental studio where anything goes. Like the MIT Media Lab, not a co-working space
- BBQs in the summer in the back
- right by the DVP and on Queen and King streetcars
- ample street parking
- $500/mo
- All revenue the space makes is a dividend to each member
We wanted to keep things as simple as possible, so we explained the vision and ensured everyone was aligned. Every member had to sign up from the start (April 2024) and commit to a 1-year lease.
We put together a simple membership agreement to ensure that all our bases were covered. Here’s the agreement we use.
Once members signed and sent their deposits (the first and last at $500/mo), they were in.
Step 5 - Lease
In practice, Steps 4 and 5 happen in tandem. We communicated with the landlord through our agent.
The negotiation covered:
Price
Getting access sooner for move-in and cleaning
What needs to be fixed by the landlord
Modifications we’re allowed to make
Noise levels and hours we can host events
Number of keys
Lease length and renewal conditions
Lastly, we had a video call with the landlord to let him know we were legit. Then Matt signed the lease and sent the deposit, and we had the keys in hand.
Step 6 - Moving In
Once we were in, we decided on the floorplan arrangement that seemed to make the most sense. Here’s the list of large furniture we ordered:
12 desks (IKEA)
12 chairs (IKEA)
3 whiteboards (IKEA)
Rug (IKEA)
2 bar stools (IKEA)
4 regular height stools (Amazon)
2 laptop tray tables (IKEA)
Modular couch (FB Marketplace)
Coffee table (FB Marketplace)
We used TaskRabbit to get everything assembled and the boxes removed. All the other little things were ordered from Amazon. Decor was a mix of members bringing in pieces and us purchasing some. A friend of ours hooked us up with plants.
Presh took care of setting up the Hotspot (sauna) room. He also set up our main entry door with a smart lock and pinpad from August, so each member has a code for entry; no keys are required.
Step 7 - Operating the Studio
This will depend on your vision, the number of members you have, and what your space allows you to try.
For us, we did a few main things that helped make it very smooth:
We came up with a set of housekeeping rules (ex., no shoes, how/when guests are allowed, 24/7 member access, and so on)
We had Turja volunteer to join us as a studio coordinator
The studio coordinator onboards every member, reviews the house rules with them, and sets them up with their own access code.
The studio coordinator also takes care of restocking supplies and any member issues/requests.
Lastly, with any group of people you’ll always encounter issues that were previously never considered. Just make sure you leave some flexibility for that.
That’s it! Everything else we came up with after we got the co-working portion of the studio running. It gave us room to try things like our Off The Record events and a handful of other experiments.
Once it was all set up
Here’s a video of @tchowd_ and @melkuo making sure our logo is perfectly aligned on the new mirror
We hope to see many of these across Canada. The only thing we ask in return is for an invite to visit when it’s up and running.
💼 Now Hiring
If you want to get in front of the most talented people in the country, fill out this form, and I’ll feature it in next week’s newsletter.
We’re here to support Canadian excellence, so we’ll only feature roles and companies that believe in the same.
📸 Spotted at the Studio
should be a model for events.
I always get bored at big networking events with panels, but I was so locked in listening to @aiouy defend his hot takes. It was probably the patty. Or that fire couch. Or the socks policy
U guys are onto smtg @thematt_ross@fahdananta
Appreciate it Tehseen. We’re just trying to keep it as authentic as possible.
went to my first @535Toronto event today, been wanting to check it out
@thematt_ross and gang are building something special.
I love small intimate events like this. @aiouy riffed (off the record) and the group asked genuine tough questions. could never happen in a big crowd.
❤️ TY Arsham
@535Toronto Plan today? Paper the core. 😈
Stickers!
🫡 @535Toronto
Thanks for having me @robjama@fahdananta
TY Omar for visiting us from Calgary 🫡
That’s all we have for this week for folks. Thanks for reading! Forward this newsletter to a friend and make sure they subscribe.
Fahd Ananta