Our story building HolaRoost (Part I)
During the last few years, Rhys and I were debating on building something together as a side project. He is a developer and I am a designer. We realised we often end up exploring and talking about random ideas.
From the ideas we had, we were quite intrigued to deep into proptech. Renting is an industry that affects us quite closely so we came up with ideas related to that industry.
Overall we wanted to come up with a concept that was fair for landlords and tenants.
I remember the day everything started; Saturday morning in an empty pub near Hoxton square in London and both excited to come up with different concepts. Talking about how much renting industry needed improvement.
We both knew the world digital quite well, so then what could have been done wrong? Well, let me explain it to you.
This is where everything started for us with HolaRoost ❤️
Step 1. Research
Everyone can come up with an idea but to develop the concept you need a lot of research, primary and secondary research. Secondary research is quite easy and inexpensive to do so we decided to follow that route and collect all the information and documentation we could.
Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy and a lot of hours were spent on this process, but when you are focus you just keep going.
We built a survey so we could spam all landlord’s communities to find answers. And fair enough to say, I was banned as I wasn’t following their standards. I can see now that our strategy was pretty wrong: we should have first build a relationship with online users and then ask, instead of asking directly for a survey. Although even the struggle, some people were nice enough to give us answers. Nice people exist!
Our second plan was to list communities that weren’t related to proptech but that we could find landlords and tenants. We focus on one of my favourite online communities, Adas List. It’s a community for women where the main idea is to help each other for any subject/issue. It is a really supportive group and effective! From there I had the opportunity to ask deeper questions about their renting situations for tenants and their experiences for landlords.
Regarding secondary research, we mapped a plan of where we could find information and data around tenancy and landlords. We ended up with so much documentation (and data) that we thought that back up our strategy for future investment. Our research came from all these organizations:
Get living report, Tenant information Scottish government, OECD, Royal London policies, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, LSE London, Shelter, Citizen Advice, Rightmove, Institute for Public Policy Research, Homelet, Parliament uk, Bristol gov, Office for National Statistics (ONS) gov uk, Housing statistics europe.eu, Eurostat statistics, London Housing Market report — London Datastore, Open Data Institute and KPMG survey.
Step 2. Problem, solution and opportunity
To work on this stage it was really helpful to have read the book UX Strategy by Jaime Levy. This book covers a lot of great techniques and specific methods that helps to understand better how to build digital products.
First we asked the following questions:
- Who wants this product?
- Why do they want this product?
We found that we had two important targets:
Problem
We first thought tenants were our main drive but after a lot of discussing and investigation and having in mind how we wanted our business model to be, we agreed that landlords were our main target for the MVP.
Each target needed:
- Definition of our primary customer segment
- The biggest problem for our customer segment
- A hypothesis
This was our iteration while we were thinking about our main target:
The following text shows our main 2 customers and their biggest problems. All the documentation collected is from our sources so nothing comes from our assumptions.
Tenants:
Primary customer segment: Families with kids or single parents with kids that want to rent for the long term. The reasons are: they can’t afford to buy a house as they still saving money for a mortgage.
Biggest problem for our customer segment:
Hypothesis: Homeownership has changed so much from the past. People were buying their home at 25 to raise a family, had secure careers and pensions to rely on. This is not happening anymore. In consequence, families who can’t buy a house wants to be able to stay in attractive family-friendly homes with certainty that they can stay for long term so they can give to their kids the security they need in a family-friendly area without losing the main benefit of renting; the flexibility to serve notice and move on if they require.
Landlords:
Primary customer segment: Landlords from any age who are looking for a steady stream of income rather than short term profit.
Biggest problem for our customer segment:
Hypothesis: We hypothesize that landlords seek security to avoid long void periods on their properties. They understand that finding a long-term tenant will help them to avoid the high costs of finding new tenants from letting agencies but they are worried they will not be able to have the property back as ‘it’s a long term contract’.
They also search for good tenants that are capable to care about their property so they can build trust.
Both of the groups (tenants and landlords) feel a lack of knowledge on their rights.
The solution (Value proposition)
A platform to list, discover, book and manage long-term family houses to landlords and tenants who seek security and steady income without losing flexibility.
For landlords and tenants who are willing to remain in the market and take onboard a more active, socially responsible role for a truly first-class experience of renting.
A solution that we are seeking to benefit most good landlords and good tenants because turnover is costly for both parties. To reach this win-win situation we need a much more transparent and predictable process to address problems when they do arise.
Our value
The opportunity
The private rented sector has grown dramatically over the last two decades, housing 4.7 million households in 2016/17 up from 2 million in 1995/96. At the same time, the diversity of households making their home in the sector has grown.
The private rented sector is no longer dominated by young or single households in the way it once was. For example, the proportion of couples with dependent children living in the private sector grew from 320,000 in 1995/96 to 1.14 million in 2016/17. Over the same period, the number of lone parents who are private renters grew from 170,000 to 590,000.
People are also living in the private rented sector for longer. Millennials (the generation born between 1981 and 2000) are four times more likely to be renting privately at age 30 than baby boomers (the generation born between 1946 and1965) did at the same age.
Polling commissioned by IPPR from Sky Data supported the findings from focus groups regarding the issues of stability. The research found that most people agree that the private rented sector fails to provide a long-term stable home — 61 percent said it does not provide tenants with a long-term, stable home, compared with 15 percent who do.
https://www.ippr.org/files/2018-12/1543853003_prs-interim-december18.pdf
Step 3. Create competitive analysis matrix
The next step was to build a competitive matrix to understand how our brand can sit next to them.
We ask ourselves:
- What are they doing right?
- What are they doing wrong?
- Why should customers come to us?
We made a list of all our main competitors. We were inspired by this Spotify’s Competitor Analysis. Although we weren’t as specific as this file it helped us to research the crucial components. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ys56wjWSco3v8gq_lg3cM7ejXPMt2PueZSmxDMJNEZk/edit#gid=0
To find competitors we use https://www.crunchbase.com/
The primary thing I wanted to show on this 1st part is research. Without research, we could not come up with ideas that could back up our plans. It is important also to say that understanding the data and making sure you don’t follow your own opinions is crucial.
We came up with the conclusion that the private rented sector failed to provide a long-term stable home, so we were ready to go into the 2nd part to discuss how to create the MVP, how we came up with the designs, pitch in front of investors and mentors and how we created our campaign on facebook.
Thanks for reading. This is such a personal project to share but we thought it is important to put it out there and share it for when our memories can not tell us the truth ❤️.
Check Part II of the article
https://medium.com/@silviasanchz/our-story-building-holaroost-part-ii-a65c140a78f4
