Case Study, Part 4: A Data Hub for Affordable Housing
Part 4: Who’s our Customer?
Last week, we ruled out direct models and marketplaces and started to dive more deeply into what a multisided business model might look like. Here’s where we were:
Two users, and, with one market, limited revenue. After double-checking our premises and going back to some source material, this is the model that emerged:
Ideally, the happy users we were producing in our top two factories — one with a throughput of good karma and the other, modest revenue — could serve as the “raw material” for our third factory, that of our “real” customer.
This scenario has landlords doing double-duty as both users and customers, and agencies invested in making sure people have affordable places to live as the ultimate beneficiaries — and customers — of the data hub. And it places no cost burden on prospective tenants, who are already dealing with being housing insecure. I think we’re headed down the right path.
This was reinforced when one mentor this week suggested adjusting our deck to focus on what’s right in front of us. Though we do have several funding scenarios already built, based on our belief that this tool can be both replicated and scaled, she recommended that we pull back for our December presentation and address an Austin-specific solution. “Nothing wrong with presenting a beta,” she said, and potentially getting more development funding, than trying to hit it out of the park with a national pitch just a few weeks from now.
Another mentor had questions about the landlords’ pain points: in a hot market like Austin, how many units were actually sitting empty for any length of time? When I couldn’t answer, I shadowed a staff member at the Housing Authority of the City of Austin, and in our time together, she shared that she gets calls daily from landlords trying to lease affordable units to qualified tenants and asking her to connect them with those seeking housing. Daily. There’s definitely a glitch in the system.
This week in my early-stage founders class, we’ll be learning about markets and scaling, with a practice pitch next week — perfect timing for where we are in this accelerator.
Rohan Mathur and Britney Lyon, our genuises on loan from Code for America, are working closely with Josh Rudow, PhD in the city’s Neighborhood Housing and Community Development office, and together they chopping away at this problem where it really matters: in the code. (I can barely build a “hello world” page, so I happily defer to the brainiacs working this invisible magic.)
I learn a little bit more every day about the challenge ahead of us, and about our stakeholders and their individual journeys. My team and my accelerator cohort are working to overcome systemic biases, distrust, fear, and the comfort of the status quo. Every new fact, every new finding from a user, is an invitation to see everything we’ve done so far with new eyes, including a rewrite of our business canvas, like the one at the top of this post.
And so: we iterate.
Jennifer Houlihan is managing director for Austin CityUP, a smart city consortium in Austin, Texas.
