When Trevor Hickey began his startup in his home town of St. John’s last year, he often wished he had remained in Vancouver, or another city where there was a structured startup community and shared office facilities.

But now he’s found that such a Newfoundland-based community does exist, if only in its infancy, and there will soon be a shared office facility called Common Ground, where which startups can work in the downtown core.

“I came home and found that there wasn’t that infrastructure,” said Hickey, whose company FundUni is developing a crowdfunding site for university tuitions. “I thought maybe I should go where that infrastructure does exist. Finding that it is here has changed everything.”

Hickey has joined StartupNL, a group that began in St. John’s in December as a meeting place for the province’s rapidly growing startup community.

He’s also interested in becoming a tenant at Common Ground, a shared office space that will soon open in downtown St. John’s to provide a working space and communal environment for the creative and tech communities in the city.

StartupNL was started late last year by a group of founders and programmers who wanted to get together regularly and share advice and support, and just have some fun. It has held three meetings and in extremely short order come up with about 100 members.  The meetings have been the customary blend of social get-togethers with special speakers focusing on a specific subject. The great importance of these meetings is they give people a chance to understand who is doing what in the community and to discuss common problems.

“The supposed hurdle for startups in an area like Newfoundland is community –knowing who is out there,” said Steve Piccott, one of the founders of the group. “If I’m a backend programmer and need to find someone who’s an expert in the frontend, how do we bring them together?”

As another co-founder, Roger Power, points out, this is not a new idea. Indeed such groups exist in several cities across the region. What’s interesting about the Newfoundland group is that it drew so many members so quickly, obviously meeting a pent-up need.

The group will evolve, and one thing that they want to bring into their meetings is quick pitches by new startups at each meeting to help find talent or co-founders interested in developing an idea. Newfoundland has yet to host a startup weekend, and the members of StartupNL look forward to hosting one before too long.

But what the community is really looking forward to is the establishment of Common Ground, a shared office space that will house not only startups but also creative and manufacturing people. Founder Chris Gardner has signed a lease for a space on Waterford Bridge Road – a real coup given the tight market for commercial space in booming St. John’s.

The non-profit organization will take over its lease on April 1 and will then renovate the space, so it will likely be ready for tenancy in May or June. The space is large enough not just to handle tech startups but also artists working on larger products, or small companies doing light manufacturing. “There could be upward of 50 people at the max,” said Gardner in a phone interview from El Salvador, where he was vacationing.

What this adds up to is a changing startup scene on the rock. The Genesis Centre, Memorial University’s commercialization agency, has long served as the focal point of developing young companies in the city. It will continue to be an integral part of the community but a more nuanced community is developing very quickly, and it’s being led by entrepreneurs and techies. It’s a healthy development for the whole region.