A Hop, Skip and a Pivot
For the past few months we’ve been working on something that isn’t Accommorate, having decided to move away from our original start-up idea.
We’re Breaking up?
There are a few reasons for the decision. As questions around growth and monetisation continued to persist, we slowly began to transition away from student housing reviews and towards something completely different.
The biggest concern we had was the lack of incentive for anyone to actually write a review. That in conjunction with the fact that we had an incredibly spiky amount of traction (who cares about finding a student house outside of winter?) meant that it’s incredibly hard to generate organic growth, everyone who wrote a review forgot about us by the time they went to actually look for a place.
We spent the first half of our year in London endeavouring to address these issues while adapting to the young-professional lifestyle, and we found that the grass isn’t necessarily greener post-university when it comes to housing.
Head Turning
We had a tonne of ideas about how we could make renting simpler, ranging from ridiculously large projects like a social network for your building, to smaller ones like a Splitwise for bills. With mistakes already made and lessons learnt during our first foray into entrepreneurship we were in a good spot to tackle developing a new idea, and from conversations with Letting agents, one of our ideas really stuck.
This means Accommorate is on the back burner but it’s not going anywhere. The site is still up and I’m incredibly excited to reintroduce its USP into our new project — since it’ll have a continuous flow of users and provide a real incentive for letting agents get their tenants to review. That gives a great opportunity to showcase the value-add of Accommorate’s USP, so it’s mostly a chicken and egg situation here — reviews is something we’ll come back to once we have a larger audience to play with.
We had good times, right?
I’m incredibly proud of the work we did in the two and a half years we worked on Accommorate. We went from two students sitting in our living room to trying to get an idea we really believed in (and still believe in) off the ground. During this time we learnt so much about tech, business, and people — widening our circle to a large swathe of entrepreneurs dotted around our university as well as outside of it. It made us more creative, confident and excited to share ideas we had with others and make it a reality.
We went into entrepreneurship to learn and I’d say we passed that with flying colours, the only thing now is that we can’t imagine actually having a career that isn’t owning our own company.
Let’s actually talk about what we’re moving to, it’s called Flatmatch.
Moving onto something New
For a lot of us moving to a new city to start work, we don’t have the luxury of having a group of friends to move into a house together. Instead, we have to spend hours looking through rooms dotted all about the city with nothing but our commute time to guide us — the actual thing that decides if we enjoy our house, who we live with, is pretty much ignored.
We had this exact experience, and found that who we lived with were okay, but no one we’d keep in contact with. The same could be said about the house, it was a decent place but I’m hardly going to remember it in a few years.
That doesn’t have to be the case, if we’re able to let you know what the tenants are like before you move in (we’ve built a sort of 16-personalities test to recommend you places) then we think we can make sure you’d enjoy your year renting way more. Would you take a 2-minute longer walk to the tube so you don’t hate your housemates?
Our bet is yes.
What to tell the kids
One concern I had was the team’s reaction to our change in focus. Having gone from two members to (at its peak) twelve during lockdown, it was a big ask for people to stay on when the business idea you initially joined to work on had completely changed.
If we were going to avoid our team’s implosion we needed to ensure two things:
- Everyone understood the issues that our platform had well in advance
- Everyone was involved in deciding where we transitioned to.
To the first point, during both our one on ones and team-wide sprint sessions, I gave a few minutes at the beginning to discuss the user journey we’d created and the hurdles that existed during it. We were able to have honest conversations about whether moving to something new was a good alternative, so everyone was on board when we started to do just that.
The second point was a fascinating process that I learnt a lot from. Our team had only recently swelled beyond us two co-founders, so I was completely fresh to the delicate balancing act of asserting your point vs hearing everyone out.
A naturally amenable person, it’s been a big personal transitionary period to drive more from the team, and one I’m still learning about. However during the transitionary period, this inclination to collaborate worked out incredibly well in our favour.
We dedicated meetings to hearing and compiling everyone’s perspective, which we used to hold ourselves accountable when making decisions. We also made the process fun, everyone was able to go away and hone a pitch for an idea they were passionate about — completely open to anyone in the team. Each member then played the role of a judge, giving their own feedback and what they liked/disliked about the idea, forming consensus as to what we all thought was the most exciting, balanced with realistic, idea to work on.
There was a tradeoff for this discussion though, if a meeting was planned to last an hour it always ended up running for over double that. A few times no consensus was made as matters of subjectivity became circular debates, leading to respectful disagreement on the surface with confusion and annoyance underneath. I have ironically fond memories of cooking a late dinner at 10 pm my headset on, attempting to round out the debate and explain how we were arguing over minutiae, all the while mentally drained from the verbal jousting that had just occurred.
This was a small price to pay for the benefits it had. Despite the disagreements, everyone knew everyone ended up closer than ever, despite never having met in person, and there was an aura of respect for each individual. The response during individual conversations with teammates was that while they joined for the dream of solving student housing, they stayed for the team we’d built together.
Of all the successes of the past few months as we’ve pushed hard on this new project, team cohesion is the one I’m by far the proudest of.
Post-Pivot
It’s been a good while since we jumped ship, and the progress so far has been great, while of course still having some room for improvement.
There’s a tonne of things I want to talk about, and will aim to give each topic the time it deserves. On the list right now:
- The step-up from co-founder to team leader
- Each of our values and why they’re important
- Building a team culture
- Going from side-hustle to self-employed
- How we subconsciously started micromanaging our team
- The balance between asserting an idea vs hearing people out
- What work we’re prioritising at the moment
And many, many more.
I’m incredibly excited for the next few months, there’s a lot in the works and it’s down to us to get it to the place it deserves to be.
Thanks for reading.
