Engelnest: Running a Small Coworking Space in Berlin
Engelnest is a family-owned coworking space in Berlin Schöneberg, built for small businesses, freelancers, and local teams. With a team of four, they cut admin by 80% using Cobot to keep their focus on the community.
Favorite Cobot Features:
The Story Behind Engelnest
In 2019, Ferhat Engel founded Engelnest with a concrete idea: a workspace that is fair, safe, and genuinely community-oriented. To bring that vision to life, Ferhat transformed his family's 36-year-old pallet store (the place he grew up around) into a coworking space that balances the warmth of home with the practical needs of a modern workspace.
Pallets still shape the character of the place: some of the furniture is built from them, and stacks of them divide parts of the outdoor area, where they double as the backdrop for Engelnest's spring party – a yearly tradition in the neighborhood.
"We are a local coworking space with local values," says Irmak Dalgün, Marketing and Business Development Manager at Engelnest. Those values show up in the details. Engelnest keeps membership accessible through flexible, customized pricing, with different rates for different groups. For Engelnest, "community-driven" isn't a marketing line. It's the underlying reason the space looks, costs, and runs the way it does.
Admin and Booking Challenges for Small Coworking Spaces
Starting a small coworking space means running everything yourself at first. For Ferhat, that meant spreadsheets and manual work.
Invoicing alone became the biggest drain: every member, every month, written and sent by hand. As membership grew, the time that should have gone toward the community went toward admin instead.
Meeting room management was a separate problem. Without a booking system, handling reservations for members and external customers was ad hoc and hard to scale. Engelnest wanted to open the space to outside bookings, but they didn't have the system to manage them.
"I had to write every single invoice each month. It was manageable at first, but it became clear that we needed automation. The introduction of Cobot brought immediate relief by automating invoicing, bookings, and other essential tasks. Our admin work dropped by 80% almost overnight, allowing us to focus more on our community and less on administrative burdens."
How Engelnest Uses Cobot to Run Lean and Focus on Community
In Cobot, a coworking software based in Berlin, the team found a tool built by people who understand the local market. For their members, it was also very helpful that Cobot's platform was fully available in German.
Cobot’s Automated Invoicing replaced the monthly manual process. The Booking Calendar made meeting room management simple for both members and external customers.
Another reason to choose Cobot was the pricing. The small team had to stay lean with finances at the start. Cobot's tiered pricing model, which scales with the size of the space, worked in Engelnest's favor early on – their costs stayed low while they grew their community.
The result is a 39-member coworking space, a team of four, no operations hire, and admin work cut by 80%. Eight years after Ferhat opened the door of his family's old pallet store, Engelnest is still doing what it set out to do – only easier now.
Results with Cobot:
- Admin work cut by 80%
- Meeting room bookings open to external customers
- 39-member space running with a team of four, no operations hire
- Flexible, customized pricing managed within a single platform
Advice for Other Spaces Considering Cobot
“Take the time to learn all the features and stay updated with the team. Cobot has a lot to offer. You will be surprised how much it can do for you!”
