Sublet Check: a 24 Hour Project

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My Role & Summary

My technical partner and I saw an opportunity to fill the void of a similar service that went up for 24hours but was taken down due to trademark infringement issues. We thought the idea was promising and deserved another shot, if we could get the project out quick. The planning and design portion was done over a 2-day span (around 14 hours total). We immediately moved onto building the MVP once we had the onboarding flow and a rough idea for the dashboard design. After weeks of vetting the idea we ended up switching to a B2B play.

Brief

Landlords and property owners need a way to detect when their property is listed on a short-term rental site, such as Airbnb, without their knowledge. This is a rising problem in many cities across the United States. Our product will be a 'sign-up and forget about it' type of security that scans all short term rental sites and alerts the property owner if we suspect their property is on one of these sites.  Our service would be a paid subscription model, with a 1st time free scan and a 1-month trial period. 

In the Press

San Francisco housesitter rents out someone else's apartment on Airbnb 
--The Guardian

John and Ed paid a professional to look after their slick city apartment only to discover it had been rented out, coincidentally to one of their friends...

Onboarding

When this was still a consumer facing product, we knew the key to success would be the onboarding flow and hooking the user into paying for the subscription. Our approach was to get the user invested in a self-detection scan, and while that took place to ask them for additional information that we could later use as lead generation once the search results came in. Using user specific geo-location information in our email campaigns would draw the user back to see if their property was in fact detected.