Agent-Free Rent — Mobile App
Goal
Our goal was to help people find the right property and to make some money.
My contribution
- Together with my partners, we developed the concept of a startup, which would become profitable immediately after launch. The idea was that we’d handle all the routine (searching for properties advertised by landlords and not agencies, checking their relevance, etc.) For that, we’d charge around 1% of the letting agent’s fee.
- Designed a user interface.
- Built a team of professionals and launched a mobile app for iOS and Android.
- Created a profitable system for finding and selecting property ads. Selecting those ads manually was expensive. At the same time, automatic algorithms are struggling to distinguish between a landlord and an agent. I invented a hybrid system, whereby the routine work was automated, but the final selection was done by people. Thanks to the low cost price, our services were rather cheap.
- Worked on the app’s promotion until it reached the Top-3 in App Store and Google Play, which ensured a stable flow of organic traffic.
Results
- It took us 3 months to bring the product from a drawing on a napkin to a full-fledged app in App Store, and 1 year to reach a break-even point.
- Our rentals database was the ‘purest’ on the market, containing 0% of agency ads. Our competitors’ sites contained 20-60% of agency ads despite claiming to be ‘agent-free’.
- A huge number of positive reviews (no fake reviews) and 4.5 stars in App Store and Google Play.
P.S. The project’s been successfully running for 3 years, but my partners and I decided to close it down. Despite being break-even, the project wasn’t growing fast enough, and the revenue was too small.
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