Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Valentin Bula, Co-founder of Zoffsite, an online marketplace for the rental of underused space, based in Switzerland.
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Here’s what Zoffsite is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
Real estate is the most expensive asset that a lot of people own, and often the use of it is not optimised, especially corporate real estate, for example, restaurants and private property. When property stands empty or unused for a certain time, it is not generating value for anyone.
The Solution:
Zoffsite is a platform for the rental of unused space, for example, corporate events and media production. The idea is to generate value from underused space. We want to create space by sharing space.
The Team:
We're two co-founders, Céline and me. Céline studied Mathematics and Business, and she previously created her own digital agency. She's an expert in internal operational processes and anything related to marketing strategies. I studied Business and have worked in Venture Capital for two years in Singapore. We both are really curious people and make a good team.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
I used to live and work in Singapore, and my team had decided to be completely decentralised and not have an office anymore. I was living in a shared apartment and often wanted to go somewhere else to work. I was always looking to find a space locally, where I can work just for a short period of time, without having to go back to our central coworking space. This sparked our first idea, which was to use restaurants that often are pretty empty during off-peak times.
After many user interviews, restaurants appeared to be quite a complex industry to enter. We realised that many companies were trying to solve the problem of decentralised workspaces, so we wanted to shift away from this and find a way to stand out from the crowd. This is when we moved into the event space.
We noticed that the event spaces are some of the most interesting because the industry is currently lacking a seamless experience for event organisers. It is still very old-school, running through phone calls and signing contracts by hand. We started working in this space, and through conversations with customers, we found that filming studios were particularly interested, because they currently can't go abroad for filming so are looking more locally.
Many places have restrictions on renting your property for overnight stays, which restrict the use of Airbnb for example. We rent out the properties during the day and therefore are not affected by these restrictions, which means people can rent out their property with us all year long.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
People are way more aware of sustainability than ever before, so optimisation of our assets really is starting to matter more. Also, there is an increasing trend in 'Do it yourself'. People don't want to hire many people to do things for them, instead, they want to do it themselves, and this applies to companies too. With Covid, people increasingly are looking for experience-driven lives. In a company setting, this might mean that people are much more likely to want to have their company event at a new, interesting venue, rather than the office. This is where our platform comes in.
Lastly, there's also the economic perspective. A lot of businesses have lost a lot of revenues during covid, and what we're offering is essentially also a new way for companies with property to generate an extra source of income.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
We just relaunched our platform, which we're really happy about. We rebuilt it using a brand new tool made for marketplaces, Sharetribe, which we only discovered after having built the first version. So we went through the effort of relocating our platform, but using this tool has been absolutely worth it because it allows us to be less involved in the process. Almost everything is automated.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
The biggest challenge, which we still haven't quite cracked is the acquisition strategy for private space owners to want to be on the platform. We thought more people would be interested in doing this, but we are finding that to be quite difficult. Besides the economic aspect, we are finding it hard to appeal to them on a more emotional basis. We also believe that this problem might be quite specific to Switzerland, given that it is quite a wealthy place overall.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
I incorporated the company quite early on, which was really motivating because it was a big step to go back from, but it also meant there was that administrative burden to deal with, even before we had launched anything. So, while doing this wasn't necessarily a bad thing, in hindsight I would have probably waited a little longer, to remove that burden.
Also, I would have loved to know about Sharetribe before, it would have saved us a lot of time in the building of the platform.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
We have to accept that it's going to take time. Things take longer than you expect. So just be patient and be honest to yourself, but it's going to take longer than you think to actually become a success.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Just make it happen. I think this is the only thing that really matters. If you have an idea you believe in just do it. Still follow a structured process in actually validating the idea, but once that is done just start building it. There are so many no-code tools nowadays that allow you to build something without having any technical knowledge, such as Bubble or as we used, Sharetribe.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Be curious and open-minded. If you are curious, you will be open to learning new things, receiving feedback, and meeting new people. I believe you can learn pretty much anything today, you just have to be in the right environment for this and have the right mindset to want to absorb the knowledge around you.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
Many founders inspire me, especially once you realise what it takes to actually build a company. For example, Guillaume Moubeche (founder of Lemlist), who really seems to love what he's doing. I'm also a fan of Elon Musk because he goes all the way in following his craziest dreams. And lastly, I'm a big fan of sports and always inspired by the devotion and sacrifice that goes into being a high-class athlete.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts