Weegee

To my dismay both the app and the websites had 0 users, despite them being online for some weeks. I started to do marketing on Reddit and Facebook while improving my SEO (through ahrefs tools and an expert from work who helped me there).

Slowly my user base was growing to a level of about 70-80 sessions per day. I had a login wall which you hit after some clicks on the website. I optimized the timing of the wall and got a good sign-up rate (around 10 signups per day).

I started reaching out to the first users. Through emails, phone conversation and even one lunch. I learned a lot from these interactions and did some adaptions both to optimize user experience and SEO.

Even though the website would have been enough I was really keen to learn how mobile development works. I chose Flutter as technology so I don't need to learn both Android and iOS development. I took an online course and after some months I felt proficient enough to build my own app.

The hardest part was building an authentication system which both works with Web and Flutter. After some months of development my iOS and Android app were accepted into the store.

My hypothesis was, that people want to have more search capabilities than what the current shared flat sites offered. It was basically only location and price. I wanted to go beyond that. But in order to provide this I needed a way to extract more attributes out of crawled listings. So I built an attribute extraction algorithm and fine tuned it going through some hundreds of listings until it was good enough to be released.

The website I hacked together in one weekend using Flask/Python and Postgres as the backend. I showed a few people at work to get their reaction (do they get it?), found a good free domain name and deployed. The search was still super rough, so you could just choose a location in a dropdown and then filter by price

Some day I realized that yes, there are some shared flat portals in Switzerland but what was lacking is a place which combines all the shared flats in one place. I quickly wrote a crawler for the 5 biggest shared flat sites to validate that they can be crawled and I can combine them into one search result set.