Before Soil Spaces, I spent years building Daily Dose Coffee Roasters across Egypt. Most people would not see the connection between specialty coffee and workspace design. I see almost nothing else.
Specialty coffee is, at its core, an education business. You are not just selling a product. You are inviting someone to expand their understanding of what a category they thought they knew can actually be.
Before specialty, coffee was coffee — a functional commodity. After the third wave, coffee became terroir, process, craft, and community. The same brown liquid, radically reframed.
The workspace industry is undergoing exactly the same shift — on exactly the same timeline, running years behind the coffee wave, but following an identical pattern.
The three waves
The first wave of co-working was functional. A desk, WiFi, and a shared printer. The category was defined by its lowest common denominator.
The second wave added design, community, and brand. It made co-working culturally aspirational: not just a cheap alternative to a traditional office, but a statement about how a company saw itself and its people.
The third wave, which is what Soil Spaces is part of, adds technology, intentionality, and a genuine obsession with the human experience. It stops asking “is this a nice place to work?” and starts asking something harder: does this space make you perform differently? Think differently? Connect differently?
The parallel is precise
In specialty coffee, good enough was never the goal. The goal was optimal. The goal was to take something people consumed daily, often mindlessly, and make it a deliberately excellent experience.
That is what we are trying to do at Soil Spaces with work — the thing most of us spend more waking hours on than anything else in our lives.
The category has been defined by its floor for too long. Desks per sqm. Monthly invoices. Spaces that prioritise occupancy over experience because occupancy is easier to measure.
But once you have worked in a space that was genuinely designed for you, that has good light and real coffee and a community of people worth knowing, you understand what has been missing everywhere else.
If you are genuinely serious about quality, people notice. And once they have experienced it, they cannot go back.
— Mohamed Samy, Founder & CEOWhat coffee taught me
Running Daily Dose taught me that people know quality when they experience it, even when they cannot articulate exactly what makes it different. They just know they want to come back.
That instinct drives everything we build at Soil Spaces. Not the features. Not the app, the meeting rooms, or the event calendar — though all of those matter. The instinct to build something that earns the habit of return.
That is the only lesson that carried over from coffee to workspace. It turned out to be the only one I needed.