Julia Vidal, co-founder of Badge, began with a simple problem: remote workers often roam the city searching for a workplace that won’t shoo them away.
As coffee shops and cafés are increasingly adopting no-laptop policies, she envisioned a startup.
What if partnered cafés allowed the reservation of a laptop spot, but just with a minimum spend, so everybody is happy? Basically, AirBnB, for café-based workspaces with proper WiFi.
Quick prototype validates demand on the consumer side
To test whether more people shared that pain, she made a simple prototype using a Google Maps layer with hand-curated laptop-friendly places.
Julia handcrafted this map with verified laptop policy per space. It kept getting traction, to her surprise.
Just some icons, but quite rapidly, people kept using the map without much advertising. She tells me on the phone: “I was actually a bit surprised and still am, we are still getting visits on that thing”.
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Disappointing traction on the café side
She knew most tables at restaurants or cafés were empty after the lunch peak. She imagined a win-win. Backed by the promising prototype data, she marched into nearly fifty cafés, with a simple pitch:
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