I had a related idea a while back for a business pitch I call “The Dad Garage”.
Basically, you have a bunch of aging urban Millennials who are too housing-crunched to really have space for all their hobbies, right? We’re all living in apartments, and don’t have garages or basements, let alone the real freedom to fully customize our spaces for certain applications.
Enter “The Dad Garage”. Buy up spaces in urban markets — especially former restaurants, which are already set up for safely handling a lot of hazards — where these guys can go on the weekends and have their hobbies. Rent them onsite storage. Have a modular business setup — maybe in CT there’s a lot of guys who wanna do wood fired pizza making, while in AZ they’ll want a kiln for pottery or whatever.
Membership fees will include a la carte insurance fees based on activity. Customers can also over time become instructors. Teach hobby classes, etc.
Maybe you even have a play area for kids — dad can take the kids out to The Dad Garage on Saturday and hang out all day, giving mom time to her damn self. And as Patrick Wyman’s podcast “The Pursuit Of Dadliness” noted, dadly moms are perfectly welcome too!
Every location will have a janky old CRT TV airing the local football game — assembling it from salvaged parts can be the core hurdle of the franchise application.
This is legitimately a great idea - love the idea of creating new third places. It’s like a makerspace for a broader market. I’ve seen some specialized hobby spaces doing e.g. glassblowing but this feels way more welcoming to newbies.
Exactly! It was inspired by makerspaces, but of course the core problem with those is that they’re always located in industrial areas because they have a hard requirement for various manufacturing purposes.
For the Dad Garage, you just limit the scope. Okay, guess we can’t have a welding class because the sissies at the zoning board won’t let us. Totally fine, we’re still zoned for the pizza oven and we can operate however many damned 3d printers we want!
You lower the dramatically market-limiting friction of physically getting to the makerspace, by accepting some friction and limitations on the makerspace’s flexibility. And in turn, you get enough business flexibility to run a franchise operation suited to local needs and infrastructure.
I had a related idea a while back for a business pitch I call “The Dad Garage”.
Basically, you have a bunch of aging urban Millennials who are too housing-crunched to really have space for all their hobbies, right? We’re all living in apartments, and don’t have garages or basements, let alone the real freedom to fully customize our spaces for certain applications.
Enter “The Dad Garage”. Buy up spaces in urban markets — especially former restaurants, which are already set up for safely handling a lot of hazards — where these guys can go on the weekends and have their hobbies. Rent them onsite storage. Have a modular business setup — maybe in CT there’s a lot of guys who wanna do wood fired pizza making, while in AZ they’ll want a kiln for pottery or whatever.
Membership fees will include a la carte insurance fees based on activity. Customers can also over time become instructors. Teach hobby classes, etc.
Maybe you even have a play area for kids — dad can take the kids out to The Dad Garage on Saturday and hang out all day, giving mom time to her damn self. And as Patrick Wyman’s podcast “The Pursuit Of Dadliness” noted, dadly moms are perfectly welcome too!
Every location will have a janky old CRT TV airing the local football game — assembling it from salvaged parts can be the core hurdle of the franchise application.
This is legitimately a great idea - love the idea of creating new third places. It’s like a makerspace for a broader market. I’ve seen some specialized hobby spaces doing e.g. glassblowing but this feels way more welcoming to newbies.
Get this into a pitch deck!
Exactly! It was inspired by makerspaces, but of course the core problem with those is that they’re always located in industrial areas because they have a hard requirement for various manufacturing purposes.
For the Dad Garage, you just limit the scope. Okay, guess we can’t have a welding class because the sissies at the zoning board won’t let us. Totally fine, we’re still zoned for the pizza oven and we can operate however many damned 3d printers we want!
You lower the dramatically market-limiting friction of physically getting to the makerspace, by accepting some friction and limitations on the makerspace’s flexibility. And in turn, you get enough business flexibility to run a franchise operation suited to local needs and infrastructure.