When Natalie Hoke landed in Los Angeles this August, she didn’t start her new life by scouting coffee shops for her favorite neighborhood. Instead, she upgraded her Industrious membership.
Fresh from a move from Atlanta to LA in August, the solo product marketing consultant decided that rather than guessing where she might feel at home in an enormous, neighborhood-driven city, she would work her way through it—one coworking space at a time. Global Access at Industrious became her compass.
“I decided to upgrade to global access at least for the first few months of being here,” said Hoke. “One, it’s an amazing way to get to know the city and try out different neighborhoods. Two, it’s a great way to meet people.”
For someone running a one-woman consulting business in B2B SaaS and health tech, the decision wasn’t just about logistics. It was about avoiding isolation, building a community from scratch, and creating a sense of continuity in the middle of a major life change.
From lonely home office to daily ritual
Her relationship with Industrious started about a year earlier in Atlanta, where she first joined around last November. At the time, she had already experienced working from home and knew it didn’t work for her.
“I’m just not inspired at home,” she said. “I’ll take a quick call from home, or I’ll do late-night stuff at home here and there. But otherwise I am not motivated at home.”
The problem wasn’t just productivity. She hosts a podcast about loneliness and mental health and thinks a lot about the loneliness crisis. For her, the work-from-home era has only intensified it.
“Working from home is extremely isolating. And we humans were not built to just be in a box all day,” she said.
In Atlanta, she went to her location almost every day, sometimes even on weekends. As a solo consultant in the early stages of building a business, her work hours were long and consuming. Having a consistent, beautiful place to go, especially where she could separate “home” from “work,” see familiar faces, and be surrounded by other people doing their own thing, made an intangible difference.
She also discovered something else: the quiet power of proximity. She made friends. She met other solo founders. A few of those relationships even led to sales calls and referrals.
“The best networking is authentic. It’s not cheesy. It doesn’t feel salesy, or ‘what can I get from you?’” she said. “It’s ‘oh, I met this really interesting person. This is their business. I like them as a person, and we want to help each other out.’”
So when she finally decided it was time to try Los Angeles, she already knew that wherever she lived, Industrious would be part of the plan.
Mapping a city through workspaces
Los Angeles, as she puts it, is “such a neighborhood-dependent city.” People organize their lives around where they live, work, and how much time they’re willing to spend in traffic. Rather than committing too early to one corner of the city, she chose to use Industrious locations as a low-stakes way to test-drive different areas.
In just a few weeks, she has worked from nearly every Industrious in the greater LA area: Century City, Playa District, Marina del Rey, Beverly Hills, Westwood, both West Hollywood locations, Burbank, Glendale, and Santa Monica. Earlier in August, while back home in Chicago, she slipped in a visit to the Evanston location as well.
Each location gives her a feel not just for the space, but for the neighborhood around it, like the traffic patterns, the parking situation, the energy inside the building and the people she meets in the kitchen or café area. She drives through new pockets of LA on her way to work, or, in the case of Indy by Industrious, hops on the train for a quick, no-parking-required commute.
“I can take the train there, which is so easy, and then I don’t have to deal with parking,” she said. “It’s $1.75 each way on the train, and it takes me probably like 15 minutes total to get there.”
Slowly, a picture is forming of what kind of daily life she might want to build here.
A familiar thread in unfamiliar places
What makes this experiment viable is the consistent through-line she feels every time she walks into an Industrious. Across cities and locations, some elements repeat: the café-style common area, a thoughtful coffee setup, snacks waiting in the kitchen.
In Los Angeles in particular, the spaces come with another perk: the views. Many of the locations look out over mountains, skylines, or the coast, a novelty that hasn’t worn off for her yet.
“That’s one of the things that’s really still blown me away in being here,” she said. “If you’re from here… you’re like, ‘oh yeah, no big deal, just the mountains, just this ocean, whatever.’ But I’m still in awe of it.”
That mix of familiarity and the unknown is what has allowed Industrious to double as both her office and her informal city guide.
Her current favorite is the Playa District location, particularly because of what she describes as exceptionally warm staff and friendly members. The fact that it sits in a calmer part of town, away from the densest urban pressure, adds to its appeal for Hoke.
“People are so craving small talk. It’s not even funny,” she said. “If you just strike up a conversation with someone in the kitchen and talk about who knows what, it’s just so appreciated nowadays.”
For her, Industrious has become an antidote to the extremes of modern work: total isolation on one side, and impersonal, noisy coffee shops on the other. She tried the café circuit when she first moved to Atlanta, but found the lack of reliable Wi-Fi, outlets, and privacy for calls unsustainable, especially for sales calls or sensitive conversations.
Looking ahead
She talks openly about wanting to one day move from coworking to a private office, especially as her business grows.
But for now, coworking gives her what she needs most: structure, community, and a flexible way to explore a new city. She brings her laptop and a portable monitor, stays nimble, and keeps testing out neighborhoods.
In a city where choosing a neighborhood can feel like choosing a life, she’s found an unconventional strategy: start with the constant. For now, Industrious is that constant as she figures out what she wants the rest of her life in Los Angeles to take shape as.