A concept for startups. photo credit: GettyGetty
This is the first article in a 12-part series titled #StartupLife.
A few weeks ago, I put out a call on social media and through word of mouth for PropTech startup founders to answer a 12 point questionnaire on their experience as startuppers. I received almost 70 responses from founders in a multitude of countries, hailing from different backgrounds, working in diverse areas of real estate and who are implementing a variety of tech solutions to solve a host of problems with startups of varying degrees of maturity.
In this series, we will look at their motivations for getting into this industry, the barriers they faced, the joys and disappointments they experienced, and much more. The goal is to understand what truly goes into being a PropTech startup founder. Over the next few months, I will publish one article per question asked. Let’s get started!
Why did you decide to become a proptech startup founder?
Overwhelmingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, these founders saw a gap in the market and decided to go for it. They were either industry insiders struggling with an issue at work that they then took upon themselves to solve, or end users of real estate services that decided to address something that had personally frustrated them because nobody else was fixing it. A few fell into PropTech by accident! Here are some of the best answers, in no particular order.
Harri Majala, Founder of Helsinki-based GBuilder, a BIM-based solution digitalizing homebuyers’ customer journeys: “I was running our family construction company in Finland for over a decade and was not able to serve my customers as well as I wanted. I looked all over for a comprehensive solution to bring the customer to the center of the process, as it should be. Since no solution was offering this, we decided to create one ourselves.”
Simon Vaughan, Director of UK-based studenttenant.com, the largest online student letting agent in the UK.: “I didn’t actually decide! I was a financial trader that made an investment into the company. When it initially went wrong myself and another investor relaunched the company with some of the staff. The reason for taking it over was due to the fact that I felt we had a very scalable model in a sector that was niche but still very large.”
Bruno Acar, Founder of Berlin-based HomeBeatLive, a platform to digitalize multifamily buildings: “I own 2 apartments. One in Brussels and another one in Berlin. Both are in HOA-buildings. The lack of transparency and efficiency in these buildings was mind-boggling (especially for a digital native like myself). For years I expected a cool Silicon Valley Start-Up to come along and fix this widespread problem. As nothing much happened to that extent, my co-founder and I set out to go fix it ourselves…”
Rajeev Nayyar, Founder of London-based FixFlo, the repair reporting software for letting agents: “I didn’t intend to become a PropTech founder, just to solve a problem I’d experienced when renting out property in London while living as a tenant in New Zealand. Fortunately, the problem I found was widespread enough for us to be able to build a business out of it.”
Markus Asikainen, Co-Founder of Helsinki-based Exquance Software, a financial modeling and reporting platform for investment management and property valuation: “The founders, Markus and Ivan, worked as analysts and asset manager roles in a large real estate investment company. Their tasks were carried out in Excel using in-house models that were really slow to compile and took up 75% of their daily working time, preventing them from focusing on the most important work, i.e. understanding the properties, real estate markets, leasing and development decisions, new acquisitions etc. They looked for a good software platform where all this could be automated and when they discovered it didn’t exist, the founders decided to create one of their own.”
Ryan Freed, Co-Founder of New York-based hOM, a community app for office and residential properties: “We didn’t originally set out to build a PropTech company; PropTech found us. We started hOM because of a journey that the founder’s mother went through with cancer. Our goal was to help make wellness more accessible through a meditation studio. What first started as a retail concept morphed when a landlord gave us an opportunity to test our retail concept in their amenity space. After offering free yoga classes to the tenants and seeing the benefit we were providing to the tenants, the property, asset managers, and fitness instructors, we knew we had to pivot to an amenity provider for landlords.”
Jason Fudin, Co-Founder of New York-based WhyHotel, a pop-up hotel startup “WhyHotel’s story began with a couple of people bent on improving what they knew best. In our case, it was newly built high-rise buildings in city centers. We realized there’s an underlying inefficiency to how newly constructed apartment buildings are delivered to market, so we set out to take advantage of this “timing inefficiency” by temporarily operating “turn-key, pop-up hotels” out of the vacancy of newly built, luxury apartments during the lease-up phase.”
Sonny Tai, Co-Founder of Chicago-based Aegis AI, which employs computer vision to automatically identify guns in existing security camera feeds: “I grew up in South Africa in the early and mid-90s, and at the time, homicide rates per capita were 12x higher than they are in the United States. As a child, I would always hear of horrifying first-hand accounts from friends who were robbed and carjacked at gunpoint, and we even had family friends who were fatally shot in home intrusions. As a result of my upbringing, I have a lifelong passion for addressing gun violence as an issue, which prompted me to start building Aegis AI.”
Tom Gatzen, Co-Founder of London-based Ideal Flatmate, a flatmate matching portal: “Rob (my co-founder) and I were flat-sharers ourselves and become frustrated by the current methods of finding a new flatshare. We wanted to build something that focused on people first, given the most important factor in living in a successful flatshare is that you get on with the people you live with.”
What do you think of these founders’ motivations to get into PropTech? Do you have a story you would like to share? Tell me by commenting on this article or contact me via social media!