The neighborhood reporting concept has potential. Why? In our neighborhood in the north of Leipzig we have a whole string of solopreneurs who are trying to establish a gastronomic venue combined with culture, above all on the main street – namely Georg-Schumann-Straße. Among them IL MAGO (No. 51), Tamer, who launched recently, and now also Silka Lutz with her book café Leafs (No. 110, opening in December 2026). And there are surely plenty of other people who, much like these two, are trying to get something creative off the ground.
And I believe that for all of these people, the big challenge is to survive economically. Because the neighborhood is fiercely contested, and people no longer have money burning a hole in their pockets. And a concept like a book café doesn't live on its café sales alone, and it has no high-priced range of goods either, no high-priced services. That means there has to be one more element that guarantees economic survival – or better still, economic success.
A second challenge I see is that IL MAGO and the Leafs café, for example, sit pretty close to each other and compete with other small cafés. But the market and the purchasing power are limited, because nobody is going to drive across the city to come to the Leafs café – people from other parts of town like Connewitz, the Eisenbahnstraße quarter, Plagwitz, Lindenau and so on won't set out for Gohlis-Süd just to swap a book and have a coffee at Silka Lutz's.
And now comes the exciting question: what could the solution be? One idea would be to say: your cafés, the ones you're trying to get up and running right now – that's only one aspect of your life. It's the phase you're in right now. And when people come to you, they mainly see the café. But they don't see the whole journey behind it:
All of that is worth its weight in gold if you're willing to open up. And it's worth its weight in gold for other audiences outside the café – because other people, who maybe won't necessarily walk into your café, can still benefit from your story, learn from your experiences, learn something from your decisions and your solutions.
That's why my offer would be: we sit down together – maybe one-on-one at first, but then in smaller groups too – and first of all you tell me your story. I put that story into writing and share it, so it becomes available to a whole new audience. And that's also an audience that may have been searching for solutions that have nothing directly to do with a café right now.
That way we also flip this principle from push to pull: because right now you're running on a push principle – meaning you have to post on Instagram again and again, you have to actively advertise again and again. When we put your thoughts, your story, your ideas into writing, people find you without you having to advertise, without you having to push – and then they come on purpose to our small exchange circles, to events, or to get to know the person behind the story face to face.
On top of that, we can then develop the principle of co-creating, so that maybe a kind of coaching economy, a coaching system, a coaching community grows – but not in the classic sense: following the mycelium principle instead, where we complement each other like puzzle pieces and the whole becomes more than the sum of all its parts.
Many people ask: how does a single person turn conversations and thoughts like these into a networked Zettelkasten in four languages – German, English, Russian, Ukrainian – almost in real time? For uno.team we built a simple small-web toolkit for exactly that: nothing but static pages, with no database and no server maintenance.
This is exactly the toolkit we offer our neighbors in the neighborhood mycelium: you bring your real story and your heart and soul – and together we turn it into visible, shareable knowledge for the whole quarter and far beyond.
Who would you like to talk to about this thought?
Thank you. Every answer fits – take it with you into your day. Would you like to share something yourself?
