Boston Apartment Hub was an apartment listing site for the Boston area. The idea was probably too ahead of its time.

A 5-minute read that's informative, witty and free? That's Morning Brew — the daily email that delivers the latest news from Wall Street to Silicon Valley .

No more changing developers every time you start a new project. With our full range of development services, no project is too big, too complex, too mobile or too software for us to complete. We’re the only web-dev partner you’ll ever need.

Want to take ownership over the growth of your business, but don't know where to start? Get 1-on-1 advice from vetted growth experts about your business .

Do you want to grow your business? With GenM you can get free marketing from an apprentice as part of their training . The student will work 40 hours per month creating content, increasing SEO rankings, carrying out advertisement campaigns...

Sponsor Failory and get your business & product in front of +20,000 CEOs, startup founders, entrepreneurs, developers and marketers every month.

Hello Jon! What's your background, and what are you currently working on? I have been working in sales and marketing for the past 12 years. My career has taken me from Google to domestic manufacturing. Lately, I have been getting back into the online world with my website Practical Golf. I’ve been at it for almost three years now and built it up to an audience of about 500,000 golfers per year. ‍ What was Boston Apartment Hub about? Right after I graduated college I was hoping to help my brother with this business. The concept was to “clean up” the apartment rental market in Boston by featuring reliable listings that apartment hunters would know was verified. Our goal was to work directly with real estate agencies to broadcast their listings to the marketplace in order to get their agents more business. The service was free to use for the end user, and our revenue model was based on agencies paying to have their listings on our site. ‍ How did you grow Boston Apartment Hub? Our process was twofold. We had to first do outreach to all of the agencies and convince them that they should have their apartments listed on the site. Secondly, we had to import all of their data, and make sure it was up-to-date so that apartment hunters could be confident that listings reflected the current market.

Hire digital marketing interns. 40 hours for $49/month.

Learn More!

AD

From Wall Street to Silicon Valley...

Are you busy? Sure you are — that's why you need Morning Brew. It's a free daily email that gives a quick 5-minute rundown of the day's top business news. Join the 925,000+ people who start their day with Morning Brew!

👉 Learn More!

Reach +20,000 Startup Founders!

If you are looking to get your product in front of founders, CEOs, VPs, web and mobile developers, makers, consultants, marketers, bloggers, product managers, and many other thought leaders, then we can help you.

👉 Sponsorships

✉️ Invite us into your inbox We're publishing interviews like this one all weeks. Submit your email if you want to receive them in your inbox + get 80+ deals on tools to help you scale your startup (worth up to $50,000)! Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again. Your subscription has been successful. Subscribe

Which was the problem with Boston Apartment Hub? How did you realize? The main problem was that both of these processes proved much harder than we imagined. Convincing the real estate agents to pay for another service to list their apartments was difficult. It was a newer format that challenged the status quo of the industry. There were only a few agencies that were willing to listen in the beginning, while the rest of them were not interested. Additionally, the data entry process proved to be very cumbersome as well. It took a full-time person to manually update all of the listings and making sure that they were getting the latest information from the real estate agents. Simply put, it was a much bigger problem to solve than we first imagined. What were your biggest disadvantages? In retrospect I believe this was not a project that should have been bootstrapped by just a few people with a relatively small budget to develop technology and do sales outreach. If it were a larger company backed by investors I think it possibly would have had a greater chance to succeed. Also, that particular market was very averse to changing the way they did business at the time. In a way, the idea was probably too ahead of its time. ‍ If you had to start over, what would you do differently? I’m not sure we could have done anything differently. In that environment, the technology was not near where it was today, and that was one of our main stumbling blocks. The site could have been developed for a fraction of the cost today, but there was no way we could know that back then. The time and place for the business idea were just not right. Sometimes that is just the way it goes!

Your one-stop shop for everything dev-related.

Anything you need, our devs can build: complex e-commerce solutions, custom software or SaaS, beautiful WordPress websites… anything. We’ll fix, upgrade & customize your website, so you never have to worry about troubleshooting web stuff ever again.

Let’s get to work!

Grow your business. Get 1-on-1 calls with +100 mentors.

Learn More!

AD

What did you learn? I learned a lot from this project. Personally, it proved to me that I wasn’t ready at the time to be a full-time entrepreneur. I knew that I needed to develop my skills more in the workforce before I felt confident enough to execute a strategy more effectively. Additionally, it showed me that “going all in” is probably not suited for my personality. A lot of people don’t realize how much pressure there is on you when you have no other source of income to survive. Personally, I have had much more success doing a side project now and growing it slowly rather than disrupting my life in order to validate my ideas. What's your advice for someone who is just starting? I would advise going the route of starting small and not risking everything if this is your first project. The harsh reality is that most new businesses will not succeed and I think from a strategy perspective it makes sense to get more validation on your idea before you are willing to quit your day job. Which startup book would you recommend? Grit by Angela Duckworth is a great read. While it is not about starting a business specifically, it is about a trait that every entrepreneur needs. Where can we go to learn more? If you are into golf be sure to check out my site Practical Golf. You can also find me on Twitter.

Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again. Your subscription has been successful. Subscribe

👇 Other Interviews