Building Cococo – #9 – Saplings

Teaching for the first time, Cococo's first hire, starting our food & beverages game, and welcoming new trees to our land.

Construction

As per usual, let's start with the sexy stuff - a construction update.

Mostly plastering, to be fair. All those exposed blocks have to get their cover, and in these three-floor buildings, there are many blocks.

Since trees are taking their time to grow, we planted some on the property line. They will replace a concrete wall that was supposed to be built across the property area and will mark our borders in a greener way.

I'm addicted to tropical fruits, so obviously, we planted some: bananas, dwarf coconuts, mangos, rambutan, calamansi, lanzones, and some other juicy things.

Just like it sounds, finally, both bottom floors are connected. Next week, we'll start the spiral staircase that goes to the roof!

Digital Nomad Skills Course

I've been on the island for 1.5 years now, and my contribution to the community/environment can be summed up in one big zero.

This month, I finally did something about it, and together with a local NGO called Lokal we created a course for the local community about digital nomad skills (see poster below). Since I have been working remotely for a few years and am still hiring remote workers from time to time in my online businesses, this is something I believe I can teach.

The idea was to help people from the island find relatively high-paying jobs abroad without needing to leave their families, which is very common in the Philippines. The course was paid to make sure we are attracting only those who "take it seriously", while all profits are donated to Lokal.

During last month, we met 3 times for a 1.5-hour lesson in Lokal's classroom in Siargao. The teaching experience felt great, and I hope the participants felt the same. I am still in touch with some of them and trying to help them find their online job.

As you can guess, we also made a few mistakes in planning and promoting the course. The price was too high for some, the time of the day didn't work for those who have full-time jobs, and some people who signed up thought that this was an online course.

We are still planning our next steps to improving the course, but this was definitely not the last one.

New Community Manager

Community management is one of the things that take my time and, more importantly, my energy. From organizing our weekly lunch/dinner to being asked a few times daily: "How's the internet in Siargao?" and sometimes even helping just listening to random complaints.

It's about time to get help. This was not a very easy decision, considering I'm not making any money from the community, and a community manager will be a paid position, of course. I do find the community an important asset for Cococo's future business, and that's why I decided to go for it.

Letting go

As a Solopreneur, I always find it hard to let go of some part of my business and leave it in the hands of someone else. I always liked the "Automate, Eliminate, or Delegate" approach, but honestly, I rarely found myself delegating.

This time, it's different. This is a big physical space and not my online environment anymore. Not gonna lie, my first thought was creating a "Community bot" that will handle most of the community-related tasks, but good thing I sobered up about this one. The heart of the community is the human connection.

The hiring process

I'm pretty sure that's the first time I have hired offline. Pretty exciting. I posted the position on our new careers page and on the community group chats (another added value from managing the community) and got 20+ applications.

I won't go into depth with the process itself, but I eventually interviewed only a few. There were some good options to choose from, and I picked one of them. He is starting next week!

While I got a few applications from foreigners who live in Siargao, some of them with rich experience in this type of job, I have to stay loyal to Cococo's values. I also added some of those values to the "Our Impact" page on our website so it's more public and official.

Planning the Cafe

Here's a nice quote:

I don't want to ever own or work in a restaurant again

These are my words. I literally promised that I wouldn't step into this industry again after running a shadow kitchen in Sydney selling my homemade Hummus a few years back, trying to survive Australia's living cost.

Regardless of my old promise, I can't bring people all the way to my place and not offer anything to eat. Not to mention not offering coffee for all those laptop and caffeine addicts. That would be a tragedy.

So the main focus of this month was planning the "Cococo Cafe" (not the final name lol), which is inside the main workspace and supposed to keep the users happy, alive, and productive.

Structure

Good thing my food consultant, who I've hired to make the menu, is also a little bit of an architect. She has experience in running and designing a small Cafe, so she took care of that as well.

One nice thing about building in the Philippines is how this plan became concrete in less than 2 days.

Menu planning

That's the fun part. I won't go into details, so it can still be a nice surprise when you come, but after 2 tasting days, I think we did a good job.

Besides the flavors (a lot of coconut products, yes), I wanted to keep a few things as the main focus in the menu design process, making sure the Cafe won't become the headache I'm worried it might become:

• Ingredients efficiency: We have a small storage space, and I don't want to chase suppliers all day. We try to use the same ingredients across a few dishes.
• Modularity: Since the space is a bit remote, I assume that rainy days will be very slow. I wanted to use ingredients that don't go off easily and an easy way to adjust quantities based on a prediction of how many people will arrive.
• Nomad-friendly items: Design items that can be consumed easily while working. Something that you can have next to your laptop and won't get your hands sticky and dirty.  

I will not know for sure until we're operating, but based on the tables and friends' reactions on the tasting day, it looks like we ticked all the boxes.

And Also These

• I met a representative of Hacker Paradise who came to scout the island for future retreat partners. We had lunch, and she helped to plan our operations in a way that would make it easy for retreats to come and use the space.
• I'm Checking out Threads for Cococo and for my personal account. I hope that might be a nice public way to talk about Cococo outside my Twitter, where I mostly share my journey of building my online products.
• Working on the website's SEO, I posted a new Siargao guide that is suited more for digital nomads. Talking about how to visit Siargao without the crowd.

What's next month about?

• My interior designer finally arrived, and we're about to get into detail about the space's look & feel.
• I'll go to the big city to look for furniture and appliances
• Making sure the community manager has a smooth start

Long issue today, I think it took me like 5 hours. Hope that means we got a lot done. Probably because the waves this month weren't great...
Thanks for reading :)