For those who’ve dealt with this, what actually helped bring your community back to life?

For those who’ve been through it, how did you get your first 1,000 followers or subscribers? Was there anything that made a real difference?

At this stage, is it worth dropping Instagram and focusing on LinkedIn, outbound and industry communities instead?

How did you get your first paying customer? Was it through networking, cold outreach, social media, or something else entirely?

Would you still use Reddit for customer research, and if so, what would you look for?

How do you turn community members into customers without ruining the community?

If you had £1,000 to test paid social, would you spend it on ads or put it somewhere else?

On 28 March 2020, I had an idea. Property management felt unnecessarily complicated.

Spreadsheets for one thing. WhatsApp for another. Emails everywhere. Documents sitting in folders. Different systems for referencing, compliance, maintenance, payments and communication. And somewhere in the middle of all of that were landlords, property managers and tenants simply trying to get things done.

I wondered: Why couldn't this all work together?

That question became rentt. At the time, I had a full-time career in data, analytics and transformation. So rentt started as a side project. I built while working. And I kept building. It took four years before we launched in April 2024. Looking back, one of the biggest mistakes I could have made would have been assuming that because I understood the problem, I knew exactly what the market needed.

So we started asking. We engaged more than 200 landlords, property managers and property investors and asked a simple question:

What parts of managing property, if made easier, would give you the greatest peace of mind?

Two problems kept rising to the surface: finding good tenants and managing maintenance and repairs. That research changed how we thought about the product. And that has probably been one of my biggest lessons as a founder:

Your vision can be stubborn. Your product cannot be.

There have been some wonderful moments along the way. rentt was recognised as Real Estate Start Up of the Year in 2024 and Property Management Platform of the Year in 2025. We have built partnerships and integrations. We have landlords and property managers using the platform. We have expanded into Canada. And in August 2025, after years of building, rentt generated its first revenue. But there have also been plenty of moments that don't make the award photographs. Times when money was extremely tight. Features we thought people wanted that didn't get the traction we expected. Investor conversations that went nowhere. Things that took far longer than planned. Moments when the technology was probably further ahead than our ability to sell it. And the uncomfortable realisation that building a good product and building a good business are two very different things.

That last lesson has shaped how I approach rentt today. Last week, I took some brochures and walked down the high street in Haywards Heath. No sophisticated campaign. No automated funnel. Just me walking into letting agencies and saying, effectively: “Tell me about your business.”

I visited six. I spoke with people at Belvoir, Hamptons, Leaders, Holroyd, Fox & Sons and Connells. One conversation was with the owner of a smaller independent agency managing around 25 tenants. Another led me towards the COO of a much larger organisation. Different businesses. Different scales. Different needs. But those conversations reinforced something I've gradually come to understand.

Property managers don't need another piece of software.

There is already plenty of software. What they need is less operational fragmentation. Fewer systems that don't speak to each other. Less rekeying information. Less chasing. Less dependence on someone's memory. Less time spent administering property management and more time actually managing properties and relationships.

That distinction has changed the way I describe what we are building. rentt isn't trying to become another property-management tool. We are building an operating system for independent property managers. And the journey has taken us somewhere else I didn't fully anticipate in 2020. The more we worked in housing, the more I became interested not only in making things better for property managers and landlords, but in what technology could do for renters.

One example is renttRecord.

Millions of people make what is often their largest monthly payment; their rent; reliably, month after month. Yet that behaviour has historically had limited visibility within their financial history. So we began working on a way, with the renter's consent, to use Open Banking to verify eligible rent payments and report that information to Experian. The principle behind it is simple:

A person's responsible financial behaviour should be capable of becoming useful evidence.

That wasn't on the whiteboard when I started rentt in March 2020. Neither was rentt for Good, our social-impact work around housing. And perhaps that's the point. Six years ago, I thought I was building software. Today, I think we're trying to solve a much bigger question:

How can technology make housing work better for everyone involved in it? Landlords. Property managers. Renters. And ultimately, people who struggle to access secure housing at all.

My personal ambition goes even further than rentt. I want to contribute towards a world in which homelessness can eventually be eradicated—where someone at their lowest can still have somewhere safe to call home while they rebuild. That's a huge ambition. We're nowhere near it. Right now, I'm still a founder walking into letting agencies with a brochure, listening to people describe their problems. And strangely, after six years, I'm increasingly convinced that's exactly where I should be. Because the next version of rentt shouldn't simply come from what we think the industry needs. It should come from the people living with these problems every day. So rather than ending this with a pitch, I'll end with a question.

For founders building vertical SaaS or anyone working in property, what have you discovered by getting out from behind the screen and speaking directly to the people experiencing the problem?

And if you're a landlord, property manager or letting agent, I'd particularly love to know: What is the one operational headache you still can't believe you're dealing with in 2026?

Has anyone shifted more of their marketing budget towards Pinterest and actually seen better results?

What’s the best way you’ve found to turn customers into referrals?

Where would you focus your marketing, and which platforms have actually worked for reaching the right decision-makers?