Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Vi Nguyen. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Vi thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

It took me 8 years to get Homads to where it is today. Most people don’t realize how difficult it is to build up to where we are because they are incremental steps each time with multiple setbacks throughout the journey. They often say that you should do things that aren’t scalable at the beginning and then at some point, you can automate it to scale further. I think that’s true but I think the part that sets experienced entrepreneurs and those still learning is the when. It was really difficult for me to distinguish when I should stop doing non scalable things and automate and vice versa. Typically you think it’s linear but there’s a lot of going back and forth.

For example, we initially went door to door in neighborhoods in Austin, Texas to see if homeowners would list their property on Homads. Eventually we had enough listings on our site that it gave other homeowners confidence to list their property without us having to meet with them and sell them on it. We started to get bombarded with hosts wanting to take calls with us and we were getting about 100 listings a month. Keep in mind, this is within the time frame of several years, not months. At some point, we felt we didn’t have the time to meet with hosts anymore.

The flaw in this mindset is that we didn’t need to meet with each host to have them list, but we still needed to meet with them to get a pulse on the host community and sometimes to give them a nudge to subscribe to our listing service. We were seeing growth in supply but not in revenue. So even though we could scale up with one KPI, we still needed to do unscalable things for a different KPI.

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?

My name is Vi Nguyen and I’m someone who if you looked at my resume, my experience probably doesn’t seem to have a lot of relevance to each other. My education and experiences look “interesting” in the best light. If you look at it more closely, you’ll see there’s always an entrepreneurial kick to it.

Homads started in a similar way in that I started to get more involved in house hacking. I owned my own property and wanted to rent it out while I was traveling for a few months at a time. I found how difficult it was to continue building this out as a business and believed there was a faster and more efficient way to house hack. That’s when Homads was born.

I believed that you could rent out your place for a month or longer and not have to deal with the hassles of long term renters or the turnarounds of short term renters. Homads is a listing site that specializes in mid term rentals – essentially any rental that is 30 days or longer. So if you’re traveling for 47 days, you’ll be able to rent out to one person who is looking for that time frame
(or close to it) on Homads. You don’t have to worry about hotel occupancy taxes, permitting or cleaning up after each guest while you’re away.

Homads was definitely built from a vision and passion. We built up Homads to where we stand a chance against giants. One of the biggest things that users forget about us is that we are still a bootstrapped and family run business. We cast a huge shadow but at the end of the day, the risks and capacity of the business falls on only a handful of individuals who are just trying to make ends meet–similar to everyone else who use us.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I know that there are easy businesses and hard businesses. I used to think that if you put in enough hard work, it’ll pay off. It’s a common misconception that early education teaches you in the US. I believe the same thing applies to building audiences on social media. There are much easier audiences to build than others. Sometimes it’s just timing. When I first started Homads, the term MTR or mid term rentals didn’t even exist. We were one of the first people to start saying it. This also means that no one cared to join an audience on social media.

After 2020 when remote work became the main form of work, mid term rentals blew up and continues to grow. We started a MTR – Mid Term Rental Host Community on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/share/g/jX3rAJDMXbpEu8o5/) and it has grown to about 18,000 hosts and continues to grow 1,000 each month. There wasn’t necessarily a change in how we used social media to grow our audience, it was just an easy audience to start.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

Sandy came on to help even though I couldn’t pay that much. She initially came on only to help for a few hours a month. She saw that it was an opportunity for her to learn and get more involved in the startup world. As we continued working with each other, we realized that it was more than just the work that we found rewarding, but the working relationship we have. I’ve had previous business partners or cofounders in the past where things just didn’t go well in one way or another.

One of the things I value most about working with Sandy is that we both handle conflict and stress in a complimentary way. Oftentimes people explode when they’re stress tested. This affects everyone around them and becomes an issue for small teams. Being able to communicate your needs, boundaries and where you’re at is vital.

It’s been a year since Sandy has come on and we’ve become both great business partners but also friends. She is a part of my family and we have become each other’s confidant. Regardless of what business or industry we may fall into, working well together is something we know we’ll always have.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://homads.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/homads_rentals/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/homadsrentals/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/homads/

Image Credits

Photos by Vi Nguyen