Our story building HolaRoost (Part II)

8 min readFeb 26, 2020

If you miss the first part, please check here:

https://medium.com/@silviasanchz/our-story-building-holaroost-part-i-c3e0161dbfbe

To recap, parallel with research we were building a journey map to better understand family tenants and the landlord’s point of view. We were looking for parts of the journey that were ineffective and inefficient. Since the beginning, we wanted to make sure that wherever we build we needed to have a more user-centric approach, which ultimately will lead to better user experience, something that it is missing in proptech.

We had defined our personas in the 1st part so we had an idea of our target: family tenants and landlords who want a steady income.

Create the journey map was useful task. It did help us to figure out which part of the process we wanted to focus on the MVP but also helped us to decide where our values (trust, knowledge, stability, etc) would be defined in the process for HolaRoost.

It was also handy to share the vision each we had and to put it in common.

Step 1. Create a MVP

Deciding what goes into the scope and what will be built afterward was a challenge.
Before going into what to build we review our business idea. We defined our primary goal and analyzed potential users and competitors. We also agreed that Trello, was our way to track our process and make sure there was a system in place.

We decided to make things easier by following these steps:

Define the user flow: We were conscious we couldn’t build everything so we focus on building the happy path, in other words, the perfect path for the user to complete the task.
Prioritize features. This was a long conversation having in mind the time and impact of each feature, this last one being an assumption.
Specification gathering. Understand exactly what needs to be built, which technology we need and how much time/effort involves.
Infrastructure: The developer needed to spend the time building the infrastructure to make sure there is a base built.
Style components
Tweak components if needed

Although this sounds good on paper, it was easier said than done. We came up with many deep problems that we didn’t work out on the big picture, so it took us long conversations, new strategies and tweaks to make sure we could still deliver our MVP and still be happy with the outcome.

For example:

My first view was that both parts; family tenant and landlords would be able to register and create their home with the address. This come up with some complications that we decided to give this power only to landlords. As the image below explain landlords:

Design

To design we used Sketch. The plan was to agree on which features to build and when we were happy upload them on Zeplin.

Step 2. Apply to accelerators/investors/mentors

This part was so much fun and it was incredibly fulfilling. Our first attempt was to list accelerators over the UK and Spain where we thought we could be a good match. We definitely could say from the first form to the last we improved our thinking, vision and the way to talk about our product. We could say we were just putting ourselves out there without much background for this product, but hey, we had a dream so we just follow the dream with optimism.

To be more professionals we created emails with @holaroost so we were coming across more qualified.

The luck came when we were invited for the 1st interview for an accelerator in Bristol. We were over the moon. A 1to1 conversation about our product, what we had, what we wanted and where we see HolaRoost going.

We knew we weren’t ready 100% (well, who is right?) although we went there a bit nervous we had so much excitement and we believed we deliver well. We knew when to speak, when to listen and when to say ‘this is why we are here, to have your expertise’. It was challenging but it made us even more motivated to keep working on this project!
The results came up with good and challenging feedback. They agreed that we should apply again in 9 months with more proved of our target.

So we know what we were missing, evidence of our target. Show that landlords and tenants wanted the product. Although, we had so much data backing up our idea at the end of the day they wanted clear primary research.

Our next step going forward, it was when we were invited to join a weekend workshop to learn, discuss and present our product together with other entrepreneurs, founders, mentors and investors.
It was such an intense weekend, but again, each experience was worth it. We had feedback from mentors and investors, met a nice and interesting people and new contacts. We ended up the weekend with so much inspiration.

Our last experience was with a north UK accelerator. At this stage, we knew what was missing as we had feedback, but we had the opportunity to talk about our product one more time.

It was clearly for us what was missing, fewer assumptions and more data from potential users that could back up our product. We had so much documentation from organizations that told us that there was a market and a problem for it but they need a closer look from potential users and we didn’t have this yet. This opens us to the next step.

Step 3. Landing page

We needed to test the idea. We had a basic MVP, we had a market, an opportunity and we target two potential users, we just had to prove it. We decided to focus on landlords as they were our main drive.

After some research we concluded that the best way to learn more about our users was to create a simple landing page, where potential users could share their email with us. As we were a designer and a developer we decided to create something from scratch but easy to build so we wouldn’t spend much time coding it. Just a quite clean, attractive website that works responsively.

Our main attraction was the Call to action (CTA) “Get started”. They needed to think they were going to start using HolaRoost. After the visitor would have clicked on the CTA, the goal was to explain that HolaRoost wasn’t ready yet but we were excited to realise the product soon.

This step was crucial to allow us to validate our assumptions and to make sure the value proposition was strong enough.

To make sure landlords had enough information we included a faqs section, to minimize as much as we could any doubt about the product.

HolaRoost

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website.holaroost.com

We connected the website with 3 big software:

Mailchimp allowed us to count how many users share their email with us and contact them.
Fullstory allowed us to track and see where users were clicking and struggling on the website.
Google Analytics allowed us to track the number of users going into the page.

When the landing was ready, we needed to send some proper traffic to it. 🎉

Sending traffic

We decided that the best way to create a campaign was using Facebook Ads Manager. After reading about this tool we came up with the conclusion it could be a cheap and quick way to get some segmented traffic.

We can recognize that none of us is a marketing expert and neither social expert although Facebook shows you good guidelines along the line, we struggled to make sure we were targeting correctly.

Money spent: £20
Duration: 10 days
People Reached: 3,565
Link clicks: 45

Be aware we didn’t spend any money until this point. Just our precious time.

We don’t know if we didn’t spend enough money on the results to see good data. We also were aware that Facebook ads are quite popular nowadays so it’s even harder to make people click. We were also conscious that targeting landlords, it was super specific. Making us unsure if we could find our target in this social platform.

And the reality stuck with us. When we analyzed the results, we saw traffic on our website and clicks, but no one filled the form with their emails. We knew we learned so much already from this adventure but with this outcome, we couldn’t prove if our value proposition was true or not. We were questioning if it was time for us after this result to stop and follow other dreams.

Take away

We had a lot of fun since we started this project together. The good part of working on side projects is that you have no pressure, you enjoy the ride and get excited easily.

Although we are conscious we didn’t gain users with a Facebook campaign, I still think that it is something out there where this product could match. Sadly, we decided we are not yet ready and we want to pursue other dreams to make sure next time we are even more prepared. And we need to remember that we grow tremendously.

Reviewing our process, we realised we could have done much more, maybe we could have focused on tenants instead, we could have set time into creating a crowdfunding campaign, go to events were landlords go, create events for landlords and family tenants to start building trust, etc. But we know we did our best and I will always have a good memory of building HolaRoost.

Also to say, there is a deep part of coding and developing that I don’t know much and where Rhys is an expert. So if you are intrigued about how we coded, which technology we used and which process we followed for building the structure please get in touch.

If you read the word ‘fun’ many times in this article is because that’s how we felt.