Woman with a book and pen brainstorming photo credit: GettyGetty
This is the second article of a series titled #StartupLife, in which I interviewed over 70 PropTech founders to discover what truly goes into being a startupper. We explore their motivations for getting into this industry, the barriers they faced, the joys and disappointments they experienced, and much more. In the first installment of the series, I asked them to share why they decided to become a PropTech startup founder. Today, we will look at the starting point for the whole process – the business idea.
How did you come up with your PropTech business idea?
Unsurprisingly, this went hand in hand with the decision to become a founder. They were facing an issue in their daily personal or work life or saw an untapped opportunity that they decided to grasp. Here are 10 of the best answers, in no particular order. You will not believe how some of these founders came up with their idea!
Jonny Britton, Founder of London-based LandInsight, a service to find and assess off-market land: “We did a textbook lean startup. We knew we wanted to make land data more accessible but weren’t sure exactly how. Both of us were software developers but decided not to write any code until we had validated our concepts in the market. At first, we were trying to help self-builders find land to build on but found that they don’t want to scramble around looking for off-market land, so we looked at established property developers. They were biting our hand off to get an advantage so we tested concepts and talked to them until we figured out what was needed to add the most value. After being convinced they would buy our product, we raised money and built the team needed to deliver the product. From there it’s evolved further based on user feedback and still trying to solve the same problem of making the land market more accessible.”
Atle Tiemenes, Co-Founder of Oslo-based Wheel.me, inventor of the first autonomous wheel: “My co-founder, Rolf Libakken, got tired of helping his family moving several times in just some few weeks because nothing he had to move was on wheels.”
Nikolai Narvestad, Co-founder of Oslo-based property management business intelligence company Intrava: “Initially the platform was developed to solve a huge problem in the business intelligence space – getting visualization tools to work. You’ve probably heard of Tableau, Domo, Grow, Qlik View, etc. there are tons of these vendors out there. They all sell the same story, “connect our software to your disparate data sources and magic will happen.” Though that sounds awesome, most data scientists/programmers will laugh. The problem is dirty data. Garbage in is garbage out. You need a middle piece between the visualization software and your databases, where data is cleaned and transformed into a consolidated structured data model, also known as a data warehouse. Once you drop the words ‘data warehouse’ the price tag of business analytics skyrockets, as it involves expensive tools and very expensive people who know how to use them. Hence, BI has long been reserved for corporate heavyweights, but that’s changing now, and property management is first in line.”
Idea photo credit: GettyGetty
Rakesh Thakrar, Founder of London-based property management app Anabode: “The idea for Anabode came about on holiday in Barcelona with friends, when one of my tenants sent me a message saying that she had a leak in the bathroom. Trying to organize a contractor to go over at such short notice ate into my precious little personal time, making me realize that there was surely an easier way to take care of such things, whether at home in London, traveling for work, or on holiday. At this point I was using WhatsApp for tenant communications, Trello for day to day admin, and Google Drive for document management, and it seemed natural to combine these tools with Uber-style on-demand services technology into one mobile-first solution that could be used by everyday normal people. At worst, I figured that at the end of this almighty endeavor I would have a great tool to manage my own portfolio!”
Matthew Partridge, Founder of Infabode, a London-based real estate industry research, and insights platform: “Whilst at University, I found myself trawling through pages of search results on Google trying to find industry information. I realized that Google was fantastic for getting facts but it was time-consuming and difficult to get an overview of a particular market or sector. I thought that there should be an online knowledge portal for every industry, where the best research, data, news, and insights were curated together and made available on one platform, through one login. And so Infabode was born. We soon realized that the real estate industry was going to be a big enough challenge so we focus on that.”
Kristi Hakkaja, Founder of Hesse-based CRE management software provider Moderan: “Our co-founder Raiko has been working in the real estate industry for 15 years. When he was looking for a better tool than Excel for his team to manage leases and reporting, he found several solutions that fit well for large corporate teams (Yardi, MRI, later VTS and others), but were too complex for a team of 3-50 people. We discovered an interesting mismatch – there are many good tools for the large real estate corporations, which manage about half of global asset value but only represent about 10% of the companies in the industry. The other half of the asset value is managed by 90% of the companies, all small and medium-sized teams and most of them are still stuck with Excel because existing solutions are too complex, expensive or old-school.”
Michael von Roeder, Founder of Sensorberg, a Berlin-based Proptech company which digitizes complex buildings and physical processes within offices, coworking spaces, and hotels: “One day I got an interesting request from the Founder of one of the biggest co-working buildings in Germany, Factory Berlin. He wanted to build a building that could become a home for their digital community of 2000 people. For that, he needed a digital solution that would increase the co-workers’ comfort and also allow them to manage themselves in a physical building. This is how the idea to develop a digital access system that acts in parallel as a smart building infrastructure developed. The Smart Spaces Solution soon became popular in the co-working and office community in Berlin and we started getting more and more requests, which led us to decide to become a PropTech company.”
Brainstorming photo credit: GettyGetty
Hussain Hill, Founder of construction site waste-collection app Skrap: “It came out of a problem in another business I founded – Byoot. My Co-Founder Marwan Field and I found that as we scaled our construction company across the country we had several sites that were underserved, prices varied significantly, service was poor and the convenience was just not there. An on-demand mobile application just made sense and there was nothing out there like it.”
Claire Owen, founder of Faringdon-based Loop Software, a market intelligence platform for property agents: “As an agent, I was frustrated with the lack of available and accessible property information. I knew where to look to find planning history, sold data, environmental and area data (things I would look for a lot as a buying agent) but all of the information was in different places and if you don’t know exactly where to look, very difficult to find. I dreamed of a platform that would aggregate this useful data and provide it in a useable and quick to access format.”
Jeannette Wu, Founder of Singapore-based online home concierge platform DD-IY: “The business idea was based on the problem that my friends and I had faced over the years in Southeast Asia, that we didn’t have enough time to do so many things at home. But the business model took many iterations to develop as we gathered feedback from clients and spoke with many stakeholders to understand how we could better solve their different pain points. At a certain point, the business idea came to consist of two parts: our core mission of transforming urban living and our business model that we constantly refine to serve the mission.”