Product Owner · Hivo · Dec 2025 – Mar 2026
Coworking marketplace connecting remote workers with bookable spaces, launched in Canada and MENA Region
Hivo is a two-sided marketplace for flexible workspace. On one side are venues that list their available capacity. On the other are remote workers looking for somewhere to work that is not their apartment, who browse listings and book through the app. Spaces are listed by the hour, the day, or the month, and are booked for focused work, study sessions, and meetings.
What separates Hivo from a standard coworking directory is what counts as a listing. Alongside traditional coworking operators, Hivo lists coffee shops and remote-worker shops that cordon off a good table and let an individual reserve it. That turns latent capacity sitting in every neighbourhood into bookable inventory, and it means the supply pool is not limited to purpose-built coworking real estate.
Hivo takes a percentage of what each space lists for, so platform revenue scales with listed inventory and booking volume rather than with subscriptions or advertising.
I joined as Product Owner during the pre-launch and early launch period, when the company was raising a seed round and had no live marketplace on either side. The company launched in Canada and the MENA Region.
Hivo is a marketplace with the classic chicken-and-egg constraint. Remote workers will not open an app that shows them four coworking spaces, and coworking spaces will not list on a platform that sends them no bookings. Neither side is worth much without the other, and a launch that gets the sequence wrong burns runway proving nothing.
The business model settled the argument. Hivo monetizes as a percentage of what each space lists for, which means revenue is a function of listed inventory. No supply, no take rate, regardless of how good the consumer experience is.
So the real question at launch was not "what should we build." It was "which side of the marketplace do we build for first, and what do we consciously leave broken while we do it."
Three inputs, in ascending order of how much they changed my mind.
Sales outreach to prospective hosts. We ran a direct outreach campaign to spaces that might list with us and used those conversations as discovery rather than pure selling. The consistent theme was that operators were not looking for a coworking platform. They were looking for another revenue stream layered on top of a business they already ran. That reframed the host pitch from "join a marketplace" to "monetize capacity you are already paying for," which is a materially easier conversation to have with a coffee shop owner.