Cohere Fort Collins
Cohere is a small coworking space in Fort Collins, Colorado, built around friendship and intentional community. Founded in 2010, the space has stayed boutique on purpose, with dedicated and flex desks and no private offices. Cobot handles their member management, billing, and bookings, giving founder Angel Kwiatkowski time to focus on what Cohere does best: building a tight-knit community.
Favorite Cobot Features
How a Small Coworking Space Came to Life in Fort Collins
Cohere started as a weekly coworking meetup in a borrowed reception area in late 2009. Angel Kwiatkowski had just been let go from an HR job at a local startup and wanted a place where remote workers could gather and actually get things done together. Within five weeks, the group outgrew the room.
Angel signed a lease on a 1,000 sq ft (93 sq mt) loft in Old Town Fort Collins, drove eight hours to the nearest IKEA in Utah for furniture, and opened Cohere on March 15, 2010. Fort Collins' first coworking space had 12 workstations, a couch, and a clear idea of what it wanted to be.
Sixteen years and two moves later, Cohere is still in Old Town, now in a building it owns. The space has stayed small on purpose. There are no private offices, just dedicated and flex desks, and membership is capped to protect the community feel. That's not an accident; it's the whole point.
"We are a friendship-based, deliberately boutique coworking community." — Angel Kwiatkowski, Founder
Coworking Software Challenges for Small Spaces
By 2013, Cohere had around 40 members and Angel was still managing everything in spreadsheets. Invoicing was manual and error-prone, and organizing events meant juggling separate tools with no easy way for non-members to book or attend.
The bigger structural problem: most coworking software on the market is built for spaces with hundreds of members across multiple locations. That means small coworking spaces end up paying enterprise rates for features they will never use, plus onboarding fees just to get started.
For a boutique coworking community running on a part-time team, that math doesn't work. Angel needed something affordable, easy to set up, and simple enough to run without training fees or dedicated IT support.
"By 2013, we had around 40 members, and I was still managing everything in spreadsheets. Manually invoicing was clunky and inaccurate. That's when I knew we needed something better."
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How Cohere Uses Cobot to Stay Small and Keep the Community Close
Cohere has been using Cobot, coworking space management software based in Berlin, since 2013. Cobot's tiered pricing scales with space size, so a boutique operation like Cohere pays from $63/month rather than enterprise rates. The platform is intuitive enough that a small team can get memberships, day passes, and room bookings running within a day, without outside help.
Automated Invoicing and Payments removed the most time-consuming part of the job. Once billing ran on its own, Angel stopped spending hours chasing payments and fixing errors. For a three-person part-time team, that time goes straight back into the community.
The bigger gain came later with External Bookings. Before Cobot, there was no clean way for non-members to book the space or attend events. Now Cohere opens events and rooms to anyone, without extra back-and-forth. Event management moved into the same platform, replacing the patchwork of separate tools that had made running events a chore. That opened a new revenue channel and made it easier to run community events without a separate system.
"External Bookings has been the greatest gift, along with Event management and allowing non-members to book and attend events." — Angel Kwiatkowski, Founder
Cobot handles what would otherwise take up real chunks of the week. For a space that runs lean by design, that's what keeps the focus on people, not processes.
Results with Cobot:
- Invoicing automated since 2013, removing manual billing errors
- External Bookings opened the space and events to non-members
- Event management consolidated into one platform
- Small team runs operations without enterprise-level software costs
Advice for Other Spaces Considering Cobot
"There will come a point where you simply can't manage a community with hacked-together free tools. You'll end up wasting a lot of time that you could be hanging out with your members drinking coffee instead of letting your coworking software help you."
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