Four years old!
Birthday Breakfast
February 2024 marks the fourth birthday of yolk. We celebrated the occasion with a members breakfast in the ClubHouse with all kinds of tasty treats, glasses of bubbly (non-alcoholic 😉 ) and birthday cupcakes.
Celebrate together
Community breakfast is nothing new at yolk, food is always a great way to bring people together. But this one had a special meaning as it marked almost precisely to the day that we first opened the doors to our coworking space.
Pre-Pandemic
It has felt like a long four years – much has happened! We signed up our first members at the start of February 2020 and no less than 6 weeks later, we had to close down due to the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Some people would think this was a terrible time to open a shared workspace business, and for a few weeks it felt like that too. However, we quickly discovered that it actually presented an interesting opportunity.
It’s all about community
We originally opened the coworking space as a place that would ‘inspire people to work’ – but we soon realised that it had to and could be so much more than that. Our few members didn’t desert us – they wanted to connect and communicate through the lockdowns. We knew that the power of the community was about to be the fundamental cornerstone of what yolk was about.
We came out of lockdown stronger and with a single minded focus on helping people connect with each other.
Growth and change
It clearly worked and within weeks of ‘re-opening’ we were full and needed additional space. At this stage, it would be great if we just kept growing, but guess what – there were two more lockdowns to deal with, each with a ‘boom and bust’ effect on the business.
We kept our focus and believed that what we were doing didn’t just make business sense, but also performed an important role in the local community. Luckily we had enough positive feedback and great Google reviews to back this up.
One thing after another
After navigating the perils of COVID we soon had another notable event and the fallout to deal with. When Russia invaded Ukraine there was an influx of Ukrainian (and Belarusian) people to Krakow and yolk was in the perfect position to help. The people forced from their homeland were in desperate need of some stability and a community to help them come to terms with what had happened – we tried our hardest to provide this and the fact that many of them are still here as members is a testament to that.
Past and the future
Our members’ breakfast was the perfect opportunity to reflect on what we have accomplished so far in four years. Reminiscing on how far we have come while looking at photographs of our location before we took it over.
2023 was a big year for yolk with the opening of our cafe but we also feel that 2024 will be a big step in the development of our concept. As we grow slowly in our location we try to develop new ideas about the kinds of spaces our members need to get their work done in the best way possible. We look forward to sharing our ideas soon.
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Our commitment to the Yolk community goes further than booking out meeting rooms. For example, once a month we collect all the interesting internet content our members have found and send out the Hatchlinks Newsletter.