Problem
Remote and hybrid work created demand for places to work outside a fixed office or home, while hospitality venues had underused space during quieter periods.
The product challenge was to make the proposition useful to both sides: a worker needed a credible place to work, while a venue needed a commercial reason to participate rather than simply providing free space.
My role
Founder & Chief Product Officer. Wocal was a SaaS platform connecting remote workers with participating venues and flexible places to work. I founded the business and led product from 2020 to 2025, scaling the platform to 300+ venues with a reported £2.7M pre-money valuation.
Key decision
The important product decision was narrowing the proposition enough that venues and workers could understand the same product in different ways: useful workspace for the user and commercially worthwhile utilisation for the venue.
That experience reinforced that marketplace products cannot be designed for one side in isolation. The value exchange has to make sense for supply and demand at the same time.
Evidence
- The platform scaled to 300+ participating venues according to the site's existing career and product evidence.
- The site records a reported £2.7M pre-money valuation for Wocal.
- Andrew Crossley founded Wocal and served as Founder & Chief Product Officer from 2020 to 2025.
What I learned
- Building a product from concept through several years of operation rather than only producing a prototype.
- Balancing the needs of two sides of a marketplace-style product.
- Connecting product decisions to customer acquisition, venue participation and commercial positioning.
- Learning where operational complexity appears once a product moves beyond an early demo.
Next validation
- For any future version of the local-workspace concept, validate willingness to pay on both the venue and worker side before expanding the feature set.
- Measure repeat workspace usage and venue retention rather than treating sign-ups alone as proof of product-market fit.
SUPPORTING DETAIL
How the product works
Who the customer is
Remote and hybrid workers looking for practical local workspaces, and hospitality venues looking to use quieter capacity more productively.
What users currently do instead
- Working from home even when the environment was not suitable.
- Traditional coworking memberships and fixed offices.
- Using a café informally without a clear workspace proposition for either the worker or the venue.
The core product journey
- A worker discovers a participating local venue and understands what the workspace includes.
- The venue presents a clear offer rather than relying on an informal expectation that someone can sit with a laptop.
- The product connects venue supply with local remote-work demand and creates a repeatable relationship between both sides.
What I deliberately did not build
- This case study does not reconstruct features or metrics that are not documented in the current source material.
- Later product ideas are deliberately excluded so the evidence here stays focused on what is already verifiable about Wocal's operating period.
Business model
Wocal was built as a commercial SaaS/platform business serving the remote-work and venue market.
The current public evidence on this site records growth to 300+ venues and a reported £2.7M pre-money valuation; this case study does not infer revenue from those figures.
Technology and AI approach
The most useful evidence from Wocal is product and marketplace operating experience rather than a claim about a particular modern AI stack.
The lessons now carry into AI products: reduce user friction, make the commercial exchange explicit, instrument the real journey and avoid confusing a feature list with a product strategy.
What still needs validation
- This case study does not claim current Wocal trading activity, current venue count, revenue or profitability.
- Historical figures beyond those already published on this site have not been added without supporting evidence.