Co404’s Story
Why We Started Co404
Co404 was created by three people just like you: ambitious, travel-mad, actively unplugging from The Matrix.
We’ve always believed that travel could be a long-term lifestyle, not just a break from reality. Our lives have been shaped by deep conversations with strangers in hostel common rooms, and an uncanny ability to say “f*** it, yes”. Those same strangers became our co-founders, life partners and travel companions.
When our first location opened in San Cristóbal in 2021, we had one goal: to build a life you didn’t need to escape from. For people who wanted to work well, travel slow, and never eat alone.
Our Founders
Laurens · Belgium
Addicted to travel in his 20s, Laurens was letting his engineering degree collect dust. Picking fruit Down Under and selling “honesty box” eggs in Tulum meant he rarely had more than $1000 to his name. At some point he thought, “Surely it doesn’t have to be like this? Isn’t there some way to travel that uses my brain and leaves me with money to spare?” Now, he’s the one who drives Co404 to grow.
Jocelyn “Joss” · Mexico
After graduating top of her class, Joss took a job paying far less than she was worth. Why? It came with four months unpaid leave per year. She gritted her teeth doing work she hated, all in the name of travel. When she met Laurens, she decided to quit and build something new. Without her, Laurens and David admit, Co404 would be a plain white box. Her designs are the reason you feel at home from day one.
David · U.S.A.
A corporate worker with itchy feet, never content to stay in one place. Joss and Laurens say they don’t know anyone who doesn’t like David. He’s the connector, the community builder — three beers in, he’ll be the one dancing. He heard the pitch for Co404 and threw all his chips on the table, with very little convincing. Counter-intuitively, he’s also the one who understood how to finance a business.
How It All Happened
The three of us became friends in Tulum in 2017, volunteering at a top-rated hostel. The manager, Gabby, deserves a lot of credit for how we run Co404 today. She taught us how to create community, how to run activities that people actually attend, and how to make our staff happy (and by extension, our guests).
Over the course of several months volunteering together, Joss and Laurens fell in love. The two of them went to visit Joss’s family in Tabasco, then headed to San Cristóbal for a short holiday. Joss, inspired by a friend who was earning money from managing AirBnb’s, wanted to do the same. Laurens — who doesn’t believe in the universe — felt there were a million signs to take the risk and start one for themselves, right there in San Cris.
Joss quit her job. They maxed out their savings (or in Laurens’s case, his credit card) to renovate a four bedroom apartment. Using nothing but Laurens’s forgotten engineering degree, Joss’s eye for design, and a $3 swiss army knife, stretched to its limits.
Plot Twist
The AirBnb opened on March 1st, 2020. You can probably see where this is going…
For the first two months, all three rooms were fully booked by tourists who were biding their time, waiting to see how the pandemic played out. Later, they were filled by remote workers. People like David, who couldn’t stand being locked down in the U.S., and flocked to Mexico — one of the only countries who hadn’t closed their borders. Joss and Laurens had scored remote jobs organising Zoom conferences, earning more than they’d ever been paid before.
With rent prices dropping in San Cris and lots of property going up for sale — including a hostel — the three of us started to see an opportunity: remote workers needed to connect to stable WiFi and to (arguably) slightly unstable people, who were choosing to travel during a global pandemic. While hordes of hostels closed down, we went all in: investing our money into an abandoned hostel, converting it into a co-working and co-living space. Everyone told us we were crazy — except Laurens’s dad, who flew from Belgium to help us renovate.
The Birth of Co404
And so, Co404 in San Cristóbal opened on March 27th, 2021. In fact, we were forced to open two months earlier than planned, because remote workers were physically knocking on our door, begging for a place to stay with steady WiFi. They didn’t care that the place was half built and the construction would continue around them — they just needed a bed and a desk and they needed it right now.
That first year, San Cris was fully booked by digital nomads, escaping lockdown in their home countries. And so, we began scoping out new locations. Oaxaca’s design was mapped out on sheets and sheets of loose paper, sprawled out across a bartop at a hostel up the street, while guests partied around us. The doors opened in August, 2022. Medellín followed in November, 2024.
Five years, three cities and thousands of guests later — it turns out the desire for community outlasts recessions, pandemics and everything in between.
Does This Sound Like You?
If you’ve made it this far, we’re willing to bet you recognise something of yourself in this story. That same instinct that made Joss take unpaid leave for four months each year, that made Laurens choose mango-picking over engineering, that made David follow his feet south… You have the same urge.
Co404 exists for people who might not know where they’ll be living in six months’ time, but who know they’ll be building something meaningful along the way. It exists for you to meet people who are on the same path, or figuring out how to start.
If that sounds like you, your people are waiting in Oaxaca, San Cristóbal and Medellín.