sthielen

13 ms·

31.
by sthielen 12y ago
The rental housing market moves incredibly fast, and properties go on and off the market daily. The most desirable houses we list sometimes only stay on the site for a few days before they go off-market, and some of the less desirable ones
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by sthielen 12y ago
Yeah, I understand what you mean and I tried carefully to phrase that in a way that avoided sounding dismissive of what has been good and insightful critique--we've all been reading everything posting on here and following up with a lo
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by sthielen 12y ago
Hi Patrick, Thanks for the advice! I'm an avid reader of your blog, so it's cool to get feedback from someone I admire in this industry. A lot of the comments here are bringing up the question of if and _why_ we need to raise fund
34.
by sthielen 12y ago
Haha don't worry about the harshness--comments like yours are why I posted here. The point I wanted to make with needing to hire people is that it becomes more cost-effective to have one "listings manager" maintaining 35 scho
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by sthielen 12y ago
Oh, absolutely, the business is incredibly cyclical--that's something we did a lot of research about before starting. The housing market is in full swing Apr/May/Jun, but students are still looking through September. Then it&
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by sthielen 12y ago
Yeah, it definitely seems as though walking in to the businesses dressed nicely and giving an engaging demo has been a big part of our success. We plan to do some phone-only sales and see how those metrics compare, and then hopefully with t
37.
by sthielen 12y ago
Our roll-out process involves having people getting and maintaining the property listings (a fundamental component of our business involves vetting properties to make sure they will take students, as about 60% will not), then building traff
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by sthielen 12y ago
No salaries, no office. My two cofounders and I have been throwing everything we've got into this; we're all broke. Our business model requires people actively maintaining property listings at each school, and then growing student
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by sthielen 12y ago
We've been bootstrapped since the beginning, but, as much as we don't want to admit it, we're starting to outgrow what we can do as our very limited personal savings start to decline. Yeah, it's cool to have some money i
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by sthielen 12y ago
We're actually at three schools in California--Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, Chapman in Orange, and the University of San Diego. We've been able to replicate our success pretty similarly in three unique areas, and ha
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by sthielen 12y ago
We haven't raised anything. We're three broke college students who have been putting everything we have into keeping this thing going. We're planning to expand to 150 campuses and bring on some people to man the phones/m
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by sthielen 12y ago
We've never raised money before this. We definitely want to do some kind of seed round, but we don't really have the connections to find the right people. We're all new to this game. We went to a few "pitch nights"
43.
Tell HN: My startup is making money and I don't know what to do
211 points by sthielen 12y ago|128 comments
44.
If you want your developers to be productive, learn to draw.(p27.us)
2 points by sthielen 12y ago|1 comments