Organic tenant growth
Growing tenant demand organically for Friends in Flats.
The effect
- Landlords’ MRR increased from €700 to €50,000 per month
- A €4,500 decrease in monthly spending by cutting costs
- Handling incoming requests without a customer support person: €3,000 → €0
- Removing all forms of paid ads: €1,500 → €0
- Contract-generating service costs reduced from €450 → €0
The problem
Landlords always wanted more revenue. That meant finding tenants.
Since we had few bookings when I joined and they were mainly made by university students, I attended uni orientation sessions to learn more about their listing search process.
That research uncovered a key detail: Students’ primary concern was finding accommodation quickly—far more important than their roommates, room size, or even, to a certain extent, location.
The solution
Growing organically while weaning off paid services.
Getting Friends in Flats in front of students beginning their search
Students coming to Vienna to study apply to every link on a university recommendation page.
To get Friends in Flats listed on 10+ university recommendation pages, I rode a city bike around town, developing relationships with university administrators.
Over time, this enabled us to generated more than all of our paid listing services combined.
Optimizing the application funnel
When I first joined, I saw we weren’t tracking conversions correctly and set up PostHog to start monitoring events. I then ran tests and monitored results to increase application conversion rates.
Some key discoveries were:
- Identifying our flatmate-matching service was ineffective at converting tenants, so I built features that shifted the focus to pricing, listing details, and search tools.
- Spotting huge drop-offs at contract creation, which inspired a move from an expensive third-party contract generation service with rigid functionality to an in-house contract generator and signature tool I built.
- Setting up an automated test suite to help prevent downtime for new applications.
Automating potential tenant enquiries
To manage incoming requests, I set up Intercom along with an MCP server, making the workload small enough for me to manage in a couple of hours a week instead of requiring a dedicated customer support person.