Android Mobile & Web application

Problem

Hard to find roommates

While experiencing the trouble of finding a shared accommodation in the city of Brussels, I came up with the idea of building a Tinder-like matching application for roommates. The app would not only show the rooms in the house, but also the profile of the roommate and the mutual friends and likes.
 

Facebook Groups

The existing way of working was joining facebook groups. However, it was full of spam, you could not discard rooms you already saw, you couldn't save listings that you liked or keep tracking of who you were communicating with. For an offerer, it was hard to refuse people and sharing the applicants with other roommates.

First steps

Android application prototype

The approach was rather simple: building a two-sided market place where users can list a room, as well as apply for rooms. The first step was building an Android prototype as that was the technology I was most familiar with, as well as the operating system with the highest market penetration. With that app in my pocket, I could talk more concretely about my idea.
 

A co-founder & Java

After building that initial prototype, I found a co-founder and we decided to start building a web application as well. He was most familiar with back-end development in Java. We chose to build a web app first to limit the number of code-bases we had to maintain.
 

Scraping Facebook

An important part of the project was to scrape the facebook groups (read all about it here) in which a lot of people were posting room offers. These groups were not practical since a lot of spam was posted in the groups, you couldn’t track the rooms you liked or the messages you wrote, etc. I scraped these groups every hour of the day, parsed and cleaned the results, and fed them to our database.

End of the project

A functioning platform with lots of fans

We managed to gather about 10.000 room offers per month on our platform, which was active in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Italy. We also invested a lot of time in marketing our app in the different languages using content marketing as well as the facebook groups.
 

No good revenue model

Despite the initial funding of 25K by Telenet, traction, positive feedback & functioning application, we couldn't raise money. There was no clear business model and compared to the U.S. - where our competitor who was in earlier stage than us raised 14 million $ - investors in Belgium are more risk-averse and unfamiliar with B2C marketplace applications.