Shared Office Spaces for Startups; Mantra Provides an Option inBangalore

Space crisis. Cash crunch. Acquiring suitable human resource. Chaos. All these situations can be associated to most of the young startups. Aware of these difficulties, Subodh Vichurkar, a startup enthusiast himself, provides a shared office space with Mantra Business Centre in Bangalore.

"During my initial startup phase, when I was working from home, I felt a strong need to go out and work from a professional office location. Nevertheless, there were problems, business centers were too expensive and creating own office space meant spending most of the time on things that are not relevant to idea development." Says Subodh.

Key Features about the Mantra Business Centre:

• Workstations are available at Rs 5000 a month including facilities like air conditioning, internet, meeting and conference rooms with LCD projectors and a shared cafeteria
• Paid photo copying and printing
• Has 50 workstations currently
• Service not extended to call-centers
• Conducive environment for technology Startups

Working in a shared office space. What do the experienced folks have to say?

I believe start-ups are ruled by roadblocks, small teams, lot more work and undying enthusiasm. Sharing synergies in one office is a good idea as the energies can flow, you will never be short of ideas, and you have users sitting next to you for beta testing of products.

And on a lighter side, you can drink their coffee and can always look for an alternate job in the next team!

- Kamna Hazrati from VouchersMate on her experience of having worked in a shared office before

This concept hasn't yet caught up in places like Indore where the startup buzz is yet to catch on but still there are occasional instances wherein you find companies sharing office space mutually. I personally have a doubt regarding efficiency but looking at the motivation within a startup, nothing should deter them.

- Subrat Kar, Indore based entrepreneur

Being based out of Bangalore, Mantra sees huge demand. “I meet on an average one start-up founder everyday and being an entrepreneur that is an additional incentive you get for running such a service." says Subodh.“However, we are still at early days for shared office commercial rental business model in India. Though it is the fastet growing business segment in property business worldwide, jury is still out on its effectiveness in India. If we see promising results over next three months, we plan to expand in more areas in and beyond Bangalore,” adds Subodh on being asked about expansion plans.

More about Mantra Business Center on their site and in case you're fascinated by the idea, here's something to show how long this concept has been around.