Maker Nights: We Turned our Apartment Into a Coworking Space and invited our Friends

We turned our apartment into a coworking space and invited our friends.

What is a Maker Night

Maker night is a night for people to work on their side projects, share what they’re working on with others and hang out with others.

What can I work on at Maker Nights

It’s up to you. We recommend working on a passion project. Aka something you enjoy doing voluntarily and not something you have to do for school or work. But if you want to work on school or work stuff that’s fine as well.

Some ideas of things people work on at maker nights:

1. Nnena: Worked on her UI/UX course
2. Chinelo: Produced some music
3. Tomiwa: Wrote some code for Atlas, an AI-powered search engine for Youtube
4. Uchi: Worked on his investor deck for his fund raise

How Maker Nights Started

I was going for a walk and ran into my friend Nick and we started talking about different side projects we were working on. He mentioned that we should work together to keep each other motivated, and accountable and share ideas. I liked the idea so much I created a grop chat and invited some of my other friends to join us (David Ferriss, Muhammed Saho, Bankole Adebajo).

We had some interesting conversations and for example, I showed Nick how to refactor a piece of code using ChatGPT. This was such a good idea that we decided to extend it to even more people and invited 20 people.

Why Maker Nights are Useful

Maker Nights was created with 3 goals:

1. Provide community
2. Provide accountability

After graduating from university and with the rise of remote work, most people don’t have a chance to interact with their friends. Often, socializing is delegated to the weekend. However, if we tied in being productive with fun, it could be a chance to get work done while also having fun.

How to Do a Maker Night

Invite the Right People

The most important part of Maker Nights is the people. The maker night with 5 and 20 people were both equally valuable because I made sure to invite people I felt like making things. The idea of inviting friends to your house to “work” on side projects during their free time will sound exciting to some of your friends and other friends will find the idea very strange.

A good litmus test is how excited they are when you tell them about the plan. To me, the idea of a maker night is such a self-evidently good idea that the person should see the value in it immediately. If they’re skeptical or you have to convince them, they’ll likely flake so it’s better to find people that genuinely want to come. Some people might need a bit of convincing which is fine but you should optimize for people that are coming because THEY want to come not because they feel like they’re doing you a favor.

How we Pitched It

Setting up the Space

The easiest way to get started is by using your own apartment or home. We live in a small 2-bedroom apartment and was able to host a 20-person coworking space. So you can definitely do the same. The key is having desks and spaces for people to work.

Renovating your Aparment

If you decide to host a maker night in your aparment you’ll need a couple things.

Getting Furniture

You’ll likely need to get additional furniture to host people. Fortunately, you don’t need to spend a lot of money for this. We got 2 chairs from Facebook marketplace and 2 chairs from our neighbors. For the desks, we took the desks in our rooms and brought them out to the main space.

1. Extension Cables:
   
    
2. Internet: Make sure you have fast wifi. Nick showed us a cool trick to create a QR code to share your Wifi without having to answer “what’s the wifi password” ad nauseum.

Having Focus Spaces

While I liked having a maker space in my apartment, because our apartment is just one giant room, it was difficult to have a mix of quiet spaces and collaborative spaces. Ideally, you’d want to have a space where people can go to have quiet deep work and then another space where people can talk and collaborate.

My apartment is small so if 1 person is talking and everyone else is talking it doesn’t work. I recommend picking a space where people can go and do some deep work, but people can also have collaborative conversations.

Getting an External Space

Another idea that we’re exploring is seeing if we can find people willing to host us for a maker night. Some of us work for tech companies and we’re considering asking if we could use the office space after hours. We're also thinking of all agreeing to rent a co-working space on the same day and work there together.

What to Do During a Maker Night

I originally was pretty worried that it would be awkward given the size of my apartment and people would be unsure what to do. Fortunately, Muhammed broke the ice by saying, “so can everyone just say their names and where they’re from”. That broke the ice and created conversation. Then the big group conversation was dragging on for a bit. I recommend having a large group thing at the beginning so people can meet each other. But after that, allow people to break into smaller groups. Otherwise, it can be awkward just having 1 large group conversation and some people feel more comfortable talking in smaller group settings or 1-1.

Share with Others

The beauty of maker night is that you’re surrounded by builders which are some of the best people to be around. You might have friends of yours that would love something like this but just don’t know about it.

Makers

Here is a list of some of the people at maker night and what they are making.