Overview

Odyssey is a coworking space and a bookshop in Vadodara, GJ. It has been live for 3 years and more than 600 paid customers have taken paid spaces at Odyssey.

As a brand Odyssey is loved and respected. Positive sentiment in the market is known via strong word of mouth. Community first coworking space has also housed a Film Club, A readers club, A board game club, numerous art workshops on weekends, leading to an overall positive sentiment.

Core Proposition

Community first coworking space and bookstore.

Odyssey provides 3 space options:

• 2 Cabins(16,500/mo)
• 8 Individual Workspaces (5500/mo)
• 16 Flex seats (3250/mo).
• Book and merch sales have only been noteworthy when selling in event spaces like farmers nests.
• Misc revenue comes from hosting events at the workshop.

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Pre-GTM

Step 1. Define the Problem and context

Even after 3 years of being live, Odyssey is plagued with the following problems:

❌ Revenue / month has plateaued at 1.1 Lakh/month.

❌ Highest AOV is cabin customers but there are only 2 of them, which have been filled for 33 out of 36 months.

❌ There more number of flex users who end up paying less but create higher operational burden.

❌ # of users (footfall) who know about the brand and walk in remains low

❌ $/sq ft as a metric is super low

Solution

Odyssey decided to take 3 actions:

👊🏼 Move to a new central location with a natural locational advantage leading to higher footfall.

👊🏼 Double capacity and increase AOV together. 4x cabin capacity, 2x Individual capacity, remove flex.

👊🏼 Introduce a food & beverage segment for casual users and convert them into core users. Get a specialty coffee segment going with a single drip Capaccino machine and partner with IG home bakers to get their food to Odyssey's tables.

👊🏼 Remove flex options and give a combined coffee+seat option

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Step 2. Define the Goal

Define the goal in X, Y and Z framework. X metric in Y time with Z constraints

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1. Increase revenue from 1.1L to 3L within 6 months of launch with food & beverage customers contributing 1L and coworking spaces contributing 2L to the revenue/month
2. 900 cups of coffee/mo and 500 pieces of snack items/mo sold within 6 months of launch while ensuring average order value > 300rs
3. Increase unique footfall to Odyssey from 12/day to 50/day within 6 months while ensuring 50-50 split between floater crowd coming for f&b and regular coworking customers

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Step 3. List down all input levers

New Users - Discovery​

Every customer that walks in the door at Odyssey is asked how did they find us. This is a breakdown of over 500 customers and how they discovered us:

Following are some of the ways customers discover us.

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Universe Users (competition)

A lot of churned users and potential ICPs end up spending time at Curators Coffee, a cafe which is popular for coworking within Vadodrara. We spoke to 20 potential ICPs at these cafe joints across the city and found the following insights:

• I work out of Curators these days is a status signal.
• Coffee is an aspirational drink. Paying 250/- for a specialty coffee and a seat at a shared table is much more acceptable to the 20-30yr ICP than just a seat.
• Having other people of same age hanging around creates a much better experience for coworking than a quiet room even while the latter is better for productivity.
• Food / Snack addition allows me to have fuel to continue for 6 hours instead of 2. Will pay for it.

Existing Users

Odyssey's footfall trends over the past couple of months (since we started tracking meticulously)

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On talking to existing users in a PMF style survey we found the following:

• ~40% of our existing users will be very disappointed if Odyssey closes because they've created their lifestyle around our brand.
• A wealth management firm - Capital Mind - has 2 remote employees who occupy one of the two cabins for 30 out of the 36 months we've been live. They will even offer to give new customers guided tours and volunteer to do book inventory exercises if we are short staffed.

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• Core customers, even casual ones who come to Odyssey only once or twice, have sworn that they had the most productive day in that month.
• Peaceful and quiet atmosphere differentiates Odyssey as other coworking spaces are either too corporatey or too noisy. Odyssey feels personal.

• Power users have tried at least 1-2 other competitors and found Odyssey the cheapest

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Churned Users

• Core users churned after a couple months as they could not sustain the travel from home to Odyssey

• Friends hanging out at a cafe makes it acceptable

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Age Group Division

Clearly 20-35 consists 80% of our customers

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Free Trials

Odyssey provides all incoming users a one day FREE trial. Spend one day at Odyssey for free and then choose a membership. We track conversions of free trials. In the last 6 months, conversions has been sitting at < 20%. At the end of every month, we call up people who did not continue to take a membership:

• Most have moved away to a new city or were in the city temporarily
• Felt Odyssey was too far
• Had a pleasant time at Odyssey but chose to work from home instead of working from a coworking space.

Step 4 & 5: Users & Segmentation

ICP Prioritization

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Power + Core + Casual

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Step 6: Channel and Distribution Documents

Pre-Launch Bookings

Over the last 3 years, we have built a wait-list of cabins. We call them and ask them to reconsider Odyssey's new space as we have added capacity of 8 cabins.

SEO

Instagram Activation

LinkedIn Outbound

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LinkedIn InMail / e-mail outreach from Founders to leverage founder brand

75K/mo (25% of GTM goal)

Remote software developers, Entrepreneurs, Creative Freelancers

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MyGate Ads

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Advertise in gated communities where most ICPs now live!

75K/mo (25% of GTM goal)

Remote managers in IT, BFSI, Pharma and People services, Entrepreneurs running small teams

sweet disturbances tanking your OKRs? Let your productivity skyrocket at Odyssey!

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1 Lakh

SM agency

Community Events

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Advertise in gated communities where most ICPs now live!

75K/mo (25% of GTM goal)

Remote managers in IT, BFSI, Pharma and People services, Entrepreneurs running small teams

sweet disturbances tanking your OKRs? Let your productivity skyrocket at Odyssey!

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1 Lakh

SM agency

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Step 7 & 8: Project Planning and Functional Alignment

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• Founder & Co-founder take care of Pre-Launch sales booking. 3/8 are already done since we have verbal confirmation
• Hire a creative agency - ad.social to generate creatives for other distributions.
• Create a LinkedIn Outbound campaign list of 300 remote workers in Vadodara
• Join ~100 LinkedIn groups
• MyGate advertisements

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During GTM

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Step1: Milestones

Soft Launch (15 September)

• 50% of the present clientelle must shift with us to Odyssey 2.0 leading to 50k/mo in revenue (15% of GTM goal) is saved

Public Launch (1st October)

• All 8 cabins must be pre-booked by 1st October leading to 1.6Lakh/mo in revenue is pre-booked (50% of GTM goal)

Diwali

Revenue: 2L/mo

• By Diwali, Odyssey 2.0, must have Diwali special F&B push.

December Holiday season

Revenue cross: 2.5L/mo

• December is the best weather month for Vadodara, GJ
• Holiday season must lead to F&B vertical reaching it's maximum goal of 1L/mo in revenue

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February 2025

Revenue cross: 3L/mo​

GTM Close

Step 2: Metrics & Team Communicate

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Metrics to continually track:

• # of Cabin months booked (Goal: 6 months for 8 cabins = 48 months)
• Daily footfall (8 --> 40)
• Coworking space users (Cabins and Individual Workspaces)
• # of coffee cups / day
• # of bakes sold / day

Post GTM

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Step 1: User Calls

• Odyssey gives 1 day free trials to users. At the end of the month, free trials that do not convert to memberships get a call from our team to check for experience. Continue this practice
• Every week ask a sample set of F&B users about their experience with coffee and bakes
• September and October - bring in 50 people from our network to come and test out the experience. This includes past employees, friends and family, past customers who developed good relations

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Step 2: Data

• Continue tracking Footfalls
• Sales of F&B
• Sign up sheets to add couple of other options of ads and performance marketing campaigns we are undertaking

Step 3: Debrief

• Update the GTM strategy after March 2025.
• Wind down manual efforts and focus on free ones like Organic SEO, IG and Google promotions
• Continue developing community events as a positive word of mouth