I Did Not Think Coworking Was for Me. Then I Tried LOFT.

Sameer Kulkarni has run a 3D visualisation studio in Nagpur for four years. For all four of those years, he worked from a home studio in Ramdaspeth.

He had genuinely good reasons to be sceptical about coworking spaces.

"My work requires silence. I use heavy rendering software. I need a fast desktop, not a hot desk. I assumed coworking was for people who type on laptops in cafes. It was not for me."

A friend who was a member at LOFT disagreed. He did not argue the point. He just said: try it for one week. If you hate it, I will never bring it up again.

Sameer spent one week at LOFT on a monthly individual seat at LOFT 2 in Abhyankar Nagar, using his laptop for meetings and lighter work while leaving rendering to his home machine overnight.

What He Did Not Expect

"I expected to feel out of place. I did not expect to feel energised."

What surprised Sameer most was how the environment changed the quality of his non-rendering work. Strategy. Client briefs. Proposals. Business development work he had been avoiding for months at home.

"When I am at home, the rendering machine in the corner is always calling me back to production work. At LOFT, there was just the work I had been putting off, and enough clarity to finally do it."

He renewed his membership the following month. And the month after that.

The Client He Did Not Expect

Six months into his LOFT membership, Sameer was introduced to an architecture firm through a member at an adjacent desk. That firm is now his largest client.

"I thought I did not need a community because I was not a startup founder. I was wrong. Every business needs a community. I just found mine at a coworking space in Nagpur."

His advice for sceptics: "Do not decide from the outside. Spend one week and let the environment answer the question.