“Avast Ye” is a hailing pirate phrase to indicate that the hailed must “stop” and give attention. That’s exactly what we whant to say! Stop, and check out what Uniplaces is doing.
They were one of the winners of Startup Pirates @ Porto 2011.
They have as mission “Make searching for accommodation near your universities easy and accessible”. Uniplaces is a student accommodation platform, connecting students with landlords in an easy and efficient way. It offers students the largest availability of rooms, while giving landlords targeted and direct access to a vast pool of students. Moreover, by forming strategic partnerships with Universities and student organizations, Uniplaces is becoming recognized as the official student accommodation portal in the country. Considering the photo from left to the right the founders are Miguel Santo Amaro, Leo Lara, Ben Grech and Mariano Kostelec that is missing in the photo.
Can you tell us a bit more about your project? What are you doing?
“Since September we have pivoted to the long-term rentals (same rental market; different business model in a different niche) due to a feasibility analysis and a specific need that we found when talking to consumers. “
Describe in a few sentences how these past months have been.
“Set up an office in Porto in October (@UPTEC). Worked in AdeonaRentals and few other business ideas until end of November. Won Startup Weekend 2011 with UniPlaces and decided to focus on UniPlaces. Applied to Startup Chile and got accepted. In January, we changed our office to Startup Lisboa (still have a virtual office space in UPTEC). We’re commuting to often to Lisbon – most of our university partners were in Lisbon and started talking to investors from Lisbon. In January, Leo joined the team as a technical co-founder. Great project management and engineering skills – a real boost in the ambition of our team. In February, we recruited two more people (one engineer and one designer) and started working on a new version of our website from scratch (using PHP language). In March, we started talking to investors about our first round of financing (Seed Round) and we’ve opened our office in Chile. We signed already a term sheet with the investors (UK and Portuguese) and should have the deal done before the end of the current month. Customers seem to appreciate the value of the product and we currently have +20 university partners and a considerable amount of traffic.”
What were the biggest challenges that you faced until now? And accomplishments?
“Biggest challenges have been keeping up the momentum of the team (we’ve seen a high level of growth since the beginning and is important we keep it), making sure we respond on time and positively to all demands of our customers (within our limited startup resources), dealing with some bureaucracy in Portugal (we all expect things to happen considerably faster) as well as managing the engineering and business teams in a very effective way (engineers and managers speak very different languages). Regarding accomplishments, we have managed to build a team of great people (both skilled and personality wise) that are ambitious and fully committed to the team (we have two married guys that moved to Lisbon to work with us and we’re very proud of them!). We’re also very satisfied with the expansion targets (expanding to Chile in less than 6 months of launching the business) and our customer satisfaction (university partners and landlords that use the website). “
Next moves?
“Within the current financial year, we aim to close the seed round of financing, consolidate our market positions in Portugal and Chile and expand operations to Spain.”
What would you say to a person who has a business idea and wants to turn it into a reality?
“Priorities: 1. Team. 2. Market. 3. Product. Get the best team (the first important lesson for any entrepreneur is to convince someone else to join the team/idea/dream). Then, make sure you have a huge market (total addressable market) – you can have an ok product in a huge market, but you shouldn’t have a great product in a very small market. Finally, you should develop a product that customers will love (not you, but your customers – it’s easy to fall in love with your product). If you can, create some barriers of entry /protectionism and make sure it scales fast!“
Find Uniplaces on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Angelist and Github.
