sthielen

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's going to die down a bit until December (though some will be coming in the middle of the year, or returning from study-abroad), and people start looking again as early as January.

We plan to use the downtime in our cycles to promote and brand ourselves through our blog and things like that. We want students to know about us before they even need to use us, and we're doing that by selling the "off-campus lifestyle" and glamorizing the idea of getting out of the dorms and living on your own.

(Unfortunately this involves writing up a bunch of mindless top 10 buzzfeed style lists)

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 the money we can get some people with actual sales experience (none of us have any background in sales). We're also planning on experimenting with some kind of referral system for advertising, where anyone can make a quick $100 if they can convince the local pizza shop to put up an advertisement. Of course, this opens up a whole slew of other issues, but it's something we're going to experiment with if phone sales proves ineffective.

And yeah, the 150-school roll-out is divided by region, they're all primarily west-coast schools, and we plan to launch at a large school and then follow with all the smaller schools in the surrounding areas, just because their markets will overlap and it'll make our work easier.

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 traffic at the school, and then securing advertising placements. We've successfully rolled out to three separate, unique campuses, and yeah, we've definitely learned a lot from each one.

But it's a lot of work for three people, in addition to the rest of the business development and sales and all that. As we add more campuses it's going to become impossible. It makes far more sense to hire a campus rep at a school to go around getting students to use the site, putting up posters, talking with administration, sharing on facebook, etc. than it does to have the CEO and CTO of the company driving down there once a week and spending the whole day doing that. And even though we have revenue it's still not enough to start doing that while simultaneously keeping the lights on.

We're looking to raise money to streamline this whole expansion process and keep our business alive long enough to see that expansion through. We've validated our product and revenue model, but we need some initial capital in order to, for lack of a better phrase, do things right.

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 traffic at that school and then, once we're established, securing advertisement deals.

Our rationale behind raising funding is that we can either cut corners and struggle and keep adding one or two schools a month until it's simply impossible for three people to maintain, or, with a little bit of money behind us to do our own advertising, have someone making cold-calls to collect properties, and have a student representative on the actual campus helping us brand locally, we can streamline the process and achieve the kind of wide-spread adoption we need in order to secure large advertising deals (right now we target our placements toward local businesses, but once we are established we'll be able to secure deals from places like banks or office supply retailers).

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 in the bank after doing these advertising deals, but it's not nearly enough that it's sustainable right away.

We have plans to expand to 150 schools across the country, and if we do that we project to be cash-flow positive within 6 months. But right now we don't have enough resources to expand to even 10 schools and try and maintain that. And especially with how our demographic (college students) respond to word-of-mouth with services like these, we really want to be available to as many students at as many campuses as possible before we lose any "buzz" that we're cultivating (either organically or through marketing efforts).

With regard to legal documents and accounting and all that, we have an LLC right now, with Quickbooks and a boilerplate operating agreement that I found in a book at Barnes and Nobles. I definitely agree that it is incredibly important to be on top of the legal side of things, but we honestly don't even have the money for that right now.

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 have plans for Campus Reps/Brand Ambassadors to help us out "on the ground" at some of the larger schools we're planning on targeting.

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/maintain our property listings, as well as hire campus reps/brand ambassadors at 20 key schools from that set of 150. Our 1y budget for all of this is <1M.

And yeah, we're based in LA, but we're all new to this and don't exactly have any connections with anyone in this industry, so we'll definitely start researching some groups and, I suppose, calling until someone wants to talk to us.

Thanks for the advice!

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" back in March when all we had was an idea and a barely functional MVP, but they're all really theatrical and honestly we'd rather just sit down and talk with someone. We just don't have a clue about how to find those people.