Jamie Russo delivers a masterclass on lead sources on her Everything Coworking podcast, exploring what platforms like Deskpass, LiquidSpace, Gable, Peerspace, Flexspace.ai, Google Maps and Syncaroo do – and why they may matter to your coworking business.

In this host-only episode of Flex Uncensored, Jamie Russo and Giovanni Palavicini catch up on what’s happening across the flex space landscape – from emerging product types to the mystery of Peerspace algorithms, industry mergers, the rise of co-warehousing, and why your meeting room pricing strategy might be off.

Jamie Russo and Amy Toman highlight that some operators are seeing unauthorized booking links on their Google Maps listings from platforms (in this case Peerspace).

I don’t usually do deep dives. but this one peed me off a little.

Now, it’s only a matter of time before Google Business Profile listings feature a ‘book space’ button that lets searchers pick dates and book on-demand space (much like you can do via opentable/resy/tock/etc for restaurants), but… there’s two major obstacles.

1. Operators should be able to opt-in (not opt-out) to allowing these booking links from specific platforms. As SEO/word-of-mouth drives a huge proportion of the best flex space leads, unauthorized booking buttons could eat into profits and long-term sustainability.

2. These platforms need to be deeply and tightly integrated with the management systems, meeting room, access control, KYC/AML, IT provisioning systems too. Workspace operate very differently from restaurants, and it only takes 1 bad experience to turn a whole business away from flex workspaces, for ever.

Craig Baute ran a recent poll on LinkedIn asking operators which lead-generators were most helpful in driving up revenue. The 15 responses put the order as LiquidSpace (60%), Deskpass (33%), Upflex (7%) and then Peerspace (0%). A tiny number of responses, but still insightful.

Katharine Chestnut shared a post on LinkedIn asking platforms like LiquidSpace, Upsuite, Deskpass, Peerspace and others about their plans to better support busy operators like herself.

After having to disappoint a potential customer due to having more apps and places to update than time, the point was made that there’s tech like Syncaroo that helps avoid these kinds of situations, if only platforms would let operators choose for themselves how to manage and automate their listings.

The comments are fascinating and other operators seem to agree, with Christy Alexander saying that the "juggling act gets heavy" and Taylor Sherbine noting that having "too much to update" was one of the reasons they decided not to use some platforms.