Apply HN: SimplyGuest – Furnished and Managed Houses for Singles in India | Hacker News Reader

Apply HN: SimplyGuest – Furnished and Managed Houses for Singles in India

11 pointssubbu6 comments

SimplyGuest offers fully-furnished shared accommodation for working professionals. These accommodation are completely managed. SimplyGuest will pay all the house-bills and provide maid services. In short, SimplyGuest will manage the house for its tenants. Tenant sourcing, verification, house-repairs, maid services are taken care by us. We provide a high-speed WiFi connection, a DTH subscription and a cooking gas connection (with unlimited gas supply).

This has been a hairy problem from both sides of the business, house owners and tenants. But we are on the right track to solve the problem. We have found early success in key problem areas.

We are a bootstrapped, profitable startup. We are in business for 11 months now.

__This is an India-centric submission.__

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Interesting, definitely taps into a very large market.

Some Questions: 0. Website/app ? url ? 1. How many rooms/houses have you managed so far? 2. How many tenants? How many owners? 3. Whats your take (assuming you're renting on behalf of house owners) 4. How big is your team? track record of building products/businesses (not that it matters but good to highlight if you have done relevant stuff in the past) 5. What have you learned about the marketplace in the last 11 months?

meta-comment: I think Apply HN is a great idea. I (and I'm sure many others) might consider partnering/investing with promising ventures even if they actually don't get into HN)

0. http://simplyguest.com

1. we have 22 houses, 58 rooms, 80 beds

2. we have 76 tenants and 14 owners

3. Owners don't like revenue sharing. They prefer fixed rent; they don't mind lower rent if we can give them a hassle-free experience and promise long-term rental income.

4. Team is just me, and my co-founder. I am a software eng (past apigee, pramati). I take care of tech, sales/marketing, cust dev. My co-founder is a civil contractor and takes care of operations. We have one part-time person helping us with digital marketing.

5. Operations in general is a challenge. Every house has 10s of keys, sometimes much more; managing them is a problem. There are 20 other such smaller issues.

This is really neat. It sounds like you're learning quickly. 22 houses in 11 months sounds like enough to learn from. Are all 22 houses rented out currently?

I've never been to India and don't understand the market too well. What would motivate someone to use your service instead of something like Airbnb? Is Airbnb the most popular service in India? Is this about short-term rentals (by the week or day) or longer term rentals (by the month)?

76 out of 80 beds are rented out currently. I might close 2 more tomorrow.

We only provide for mid to long-term stays. We ask for a minimum stay of 6 months and bill them monthly. Airbnb becomes too expensive for anything longer than a few days. We have learned short-term stays need a different setup and doesn't suit the way we are currently setup. People who stay for longer periods care for the house and it aligns well with the owner's interests.

I haven't seen too many people using Airbnb; OYO Rooms seems to be the dominant player in this segment.

Do you own or rent the houses? Also which cities are you currently present?

We don't own any of the houses. All of them are rented just the normal way. We are present only in a few localities within Bangalore.

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