We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Vi Friebertshauser a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Vi, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

I started Homads similarly like how most small business owners do which was that I was trying to build something that solved my own problem. At the time, I had a property and was getting involved in short-term rentals. I was traveling a lot and knew what it was like to use platforms like Airbnb and VRBO as a traveler but was interested in renting out my own property. Take note that this was in 2016 so it was close to the advent of property sharing and people were just starting to adopt the concept of the sharing economy. I started renting out my condo and thought I would have a lifestyle business by house hacking but also was not fond of the constant resets and people coming in and out. I wanted more stability and, as an outgoing introvert, deeper conversations with my guests. That’s when I thought to rent for longer durations but not for a year. I wanted access to my property but I also wanted to go travel for a month somewhere if I wanted. I was working as a video editor at the time so all I ever needed was a laptop and a hard drive and I could work anywhere in the world.

So I researched to find an airbnb but for longer term stays and found absolutely nothing. There were no alternatives so I thought about building it myself. I initially thought it would only take $2000 or so to build it as my only exposure to website development were for my portfolio sites. I contacted a college friend who happened to be a developer. I remember asking him, “You did computer science in college. Does that mean you’re a developer?” That was how green I was to technology when I first started. Once I explained to my friend my idea, he said he would help me build it. I had a wake up call of how much it would actually cost me so I decided to raise an initial amount from family and friends to get started. With just $13k from a GoFundMe and another $20k from an SBA loan, we were able to build out our first product.

With any two-sided marketplace, it takes a lot of back and forth on both sides. Early on, we even went door to door trying to talk to homeowners. We did everything, and with trial and error, we were able to hone in on what methods worked the best in acquiring users onto our site.

Vi, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Homads is an online booking platform for people to list and rent monthly home rentals. What most people who use our site don’t realize is that we’re a small business. We cast a much larger shadow than what we really are. Most people compare us to much larger, venture capital backed companies that have billions of dollars behind them. We’ve solely operated on incoming income from the site and initial family and friends as investors.

I’m most proud of the relationships we’ve built through the business. I’m not talking about investors and high status people but rather Homads brought together a lot of people who would not have originally met. The month long stays created bonds that would not have otherwise been created. Our mission is to bring people together to create meaningful relationships and as we’ve found, many of us have several friends we’ve made through our own Homads experiences (or we’ve heard our homeowners talk about it to us)!

There’s so many booking sites out there that many people may think we offer the same experience. Most people don’t realize it until they need a monthly home rental that your needs are different than when you’re looking to vacation for just a few days. We built Homads with this in mind so your experience interacting with other people and our site are different. Rather than highlighting the hottest bars and restaurants, our site lets people know where the closest bus stops or groceries are to the home rental. Homads caters to those wanting to live in the neighborhood rather than just visit.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

This is very relevant in timing as we’re currently pivoting with Homads. Since the pandemic set in, more people understand why you would want a month long home rental. The part that is difficult is that most people still don’t understand how that experience would work. We’ve had to completely change our website and technology to help us move quicker and to help people understand the full process of renting a home for a month.

One feature you won’t be able to see is that we’ve completely changed the technology of the inner workings of our site. This means that we can make changes or fix bugs on our site in as quick as one day! Speed has always been our killer as we are a small business but we’ve been able to find a way around this and are excited to bring in new features that our customers have been asking us for!

We also know that the pandemic made it apparent that most people are tired of paying outrageous pricing for middleman services (i.e. food delivery, booking sites etc). We want to stick with our ideals of having affording pricing while also bringing in security in booking a complete stranger’s home. Since we never took venture capital or any massive loans that would require us to ultimately charge our customers a much higher rate AND we are changing our technology to a much more cost effective technology, we’ll be able to provide very competitive pricing for our services.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

It’s funny to think that the moment you have the highest amount of customers to your site is also the moment you could kill your business. It’s pretty common for businesses to experience growing pains. We experienced this when the pandemic hit as so many people wanted to escape somewhere for a month. Our site flooded with potential people and we had a 500% increase in site visitors. The problem though was that this also required a lot more support in both the technical side as well as from a customer service perspective. Even though we had so many people look for our services, I feel like we failed in that we weren’t positioned well to help them find what they needed. So in the end, we lost a lot of people and had a missed opportunity. This was especially demoralizing for me. I felt like we had been working for years for this moment only to let it pass us by because we were too underfunded and small.

Candidly speaking, I became very angry and bitter about running a technology startup. I felt we didn’t get support from investors who saw big visions in our competitors (who would have been people we would want to be acquired by) but yet didn’t believe in what we were doing. Everyone who turned us down and said no one would want to rent a home monthly and riddled us with prevention questions rather than promotion questions. After working through this, that was when I realized it wasn’t really anyone’s fault. It was timing.

Timing is such an important factor in your success. The amount of money to change customer behavior is expensive but also freak accidents or forces of nature like Covid can make or break a company as well. I learned to take it with stride and to rethink my situation. Once I was able to process everything that has happened in the last few years, I feel like I’m able to be smarter in how to move forward. I decided to rebuild Homads using no-code technology which allows for us to build and make changes faster. It also lowered the cost for us to run the site and the cost of development is also much lower. Throughout the years, I realize that no matter who your co-founder or team are, the more you have a grasp on your technology, the more likely you’ll be successful.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.homads.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/homads_rentals/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/homadsrentals/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/homads
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/homadsrentals?lang=en