HomePage

Co-living made easy.

An all-in-one co-living app that keeps everyone under the same roof on the same page. Calendars, synced; Chores, organized; Landlords, reachable.

Tools
Figma
Sketch

Roles
UI/UX Designer
Business Analyst

Scope
6 months

Tags
Design, Business Plan,
Entrepreneurship

How HomePage 🏠 came to be.

Problem

32%
of the adult population in the US  lived in a shared household.

but... Is there a specific demographic that perhaps has a higher tendency to room with others? 🔎

87%
of first-year university students in the US lived with roommates.
So, let's first focus on university students who live together as a starting point.
Targeting a niche as a starting point could in fact work to HomePage's benefit because: 
1. Relate
As USC students ourselves, having lived in university housing, we also know what problems occur when college students live together.
2. Reach
We have high access to our target audience, who are also university students. This makes the customer discovery process much more precise and reliable since we can easily talk to Residential Advisors (RA) and college students.
To test or sell our product, we can also meet with USC Housing to implement HomePage onto their resident portal.
3. Reiterate
Getting our product in the hands of students or RAs will be much easier, as well as getting feedback from our immediate surroundings.
From our user research, we found that many problems arise when people live together. These are some of the most common problems we found.
Communication 🗣
Chores/tasks must be fairly distributed between different members of the living space.
Most roommates communicate through unorganized group chats, so important details/events often gets ignored or forgotten.
Privacy issues / Noise problems are often difficult to communicate.
Transparency 🔎
We often don't know our roommates' schedules and activities.
People who live together usually have different preferences.
Accessibility 📱
Difficult to get in touch with landlord or management of the property.
Getting to know who you're living with is difficult.
Unequal access to shared living spaces and appliances.
"I was locked out of my dorm for about an hour because I couldn’t get in touch with my RA"
- Kyra, a 19 year old freshman female who has had one semester at USC.
“I remember it’s always been difficult for me to consolidate sources and communication regarding housing. Now that I’m living off-campus, I have trouble communicating with housemates about chores and my landlord.”
- David, a 22 year old college senior male who has had multiple semesters at USC

Solution

Replace all over the place...
With all-in-one.

The all-in-one co-living product. 🙌

Being on the same page eliminates problems.
Upon entering HomePage, you will be directed to a dashboard, summarizing important daily information shared between roommates, so that no one misses an important detail and everyone is kept accountable for their responsibilities.

Dashboard details can be sorted by daily, weekly, and monthly view, as well as by the date posted or alphabetical order. The dashboard itself is also 100% customizable to each user: you can add or remove entries or sections as you wish.
Get to know your roommates, neighbors, or even the Residential Advisors (or landlords) better.
The community section is divided into three parts: People, Events, and Resources
👫 People
You can construct a profile that can be shared to My House, Residential Advisors (RAs) / Landlords, or Neighbors to help foster stronger relationships with those near you and helping you.

Profile sharing is based on a mutual exchange agreement where if you make your profile public to them, you will also be able to view their public profile. In turn, public stickies, pending chores, and other responsibilities sections will only be shared to your housemates when they view your profile.
📆 Events
Community building events often get lost in your email before you even get a chance to read them. We've created a separate events section that enables My House, My Building, or My Bigger Community (i.e. USC in this case) filtering, so you can easily see if your housemates or neighbors are attending these events.
📞 Resources
We've made important information and links easily accessible and downloadable through the resources section of the app.
Reach anyone in your network anytime, without the unnecessary downtime.
Your RA or landlord is reachable through the messaging platform, which eliminates the unnecessarily long wait time between email communication. This also streamlines the communication process between housemates, removing the need to previously acquire their contact details.
Never miss out on another update. Plus, it's automatically saved and sorted for you to easily view later in case you forget.
⏰ Activities
As soon as you or your housemates add, remove, or edit any entry, an update will appear on the activities feed -- kind of like a Facebook news feed. You can choose to sort by latest activity, someone's activity,  someone's assignments, to-do added or completed, overdue to-do lists, or upcoming dates. You can also be notified of activities whilst you're off the app by changing your notification settings.
📆 Calendars (Schedule)
The calendar is a monthly overview of activities and responsibilities. Housemates, categories, events, and time filtering options are available for users to quickly sort their past and upcoming activities.
Get a summary of what you and your housemates have to do on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis customizable by view.
Sort your calendar by entry categories and view them through any time frame including daily view, Apart from calendar the schedule can be customized into an overview list or gantt chart.
Optimized for Mobile
We plan to optimize the software as a mobile application so that it can be accessed anywhere.

Market Analysis 📊

Our Market

We plan to first target
👩‍🎓 University Students living on campus
Then expand our market to
🏠 Anyone living under the same roof

A ROUGH ESTIMATE OF OUR TOTAL ADDRESSABLE MARKET (TAM) and serviceable available market (SAM).

Total Addressable Market
Serviceable Available Market
We calculated our TAM and SAM using the using the Bottom-Up collection method. Starting with the average undergraduate students per college or university in the US multiplied by the average percentage of undergraduate students that live on campus in the US, we arrive at the average number of students that live on campus. Our assumption was that students who live on campus would all have access to the same housing portal, like how every student uses BlackBoard to access their class contents.

After getting the average number of students that live on campus, we then multiplied this number by $30, the price per student per year, when licensed to the university for usage. Our price was determined after much cost analysis, which will be discussed later on. Finally, this number was multiplied by the number of colleges and universities in the US. This is our TAM.

As for SAM, we assumed that Homepage will be able to capture 1% of the market, meaning, 1% of the universities and colleges in the US will convert to using HomePage as their resident portal.

As USC students, we want to start at 'sc. ✌️

How do we benefit from testing and licensing to 'SC?
Our market shares more.
Flywheel marketing dynamic.
Low competition in the space.
Licensing to the university means that every USC student living on campus would be using HomePage. This way, we can entirely acquire 1 out of 4,000 universities in the US, increasing our market share.
With USC Students acting as pre-qualified traffic, we are bound to have good conversions, leading to better search placement and ad exposure, which ultimately leads to more traffic. This will benefit HomePage when we are expanding beyond university sales.
Currently, there's a very few apps that perfectly suits the lifestyle of students living together. HomePage was created by students who has roomed with others and understood the problems associated with it well. Not to mention, any USC students knows how out-of-date USC's current Resident Portal is!
So this is a rough estimate of how much we're expecting in Phase 1.
This was calculated using the same method as our SAM and TAM calculations.

Usability Tests

housepage 😉, the minimum viable product

Before the final version of HomePage, I designed an MVP on Figma that showcased our key features: Shared Calendar / Events, Stickies (Bulletin Board Functionality), Notifications from RA / Landlord, Communication Channel, and Chore Picker.
Usability Tests were then conducted using this MVP on 102 USC Students and 28  RAs.
We asked questions about:
📱Features
🗺 Layout/Navigation
📝 Overall Design
👀  Visual Value Proposition
➕  Understanding of Value-Added
🗣 “Describe your perfect app”

and here's our traction.

9.4
Out of 10 Points
When asked to rate
‍Likeliness of Use
9.3
Out of 10 Points
When asked to rate
How Useful & Valuable
9.3
Out of 10 Points
When asked to rate
Navigation and Feature Simplicity
8.7
Out of 10 Points
When asked to rate
How close MVP is to the Perfect co-living App

The Business Case. 💸

Phase 1 & 2: Current
👩‍🎓 Business-to-Business
‍Service with USC and other Universities
🏠 Business-to-Consumer
‍Subscription Service to individual users
Phase 3: In the Future

Pricing Strategy

After our cost analysis, we concluded that an appropriate price for our product with self-sustaining profit would be $3.00 per customer. However, we only plan to use this price when we start offering a freemium model, which will have more options and customizable features, to individual subscribers in Phase 3.
‍
During Phase 1 & 2, we plan to only license to universities only a B2B service. We decided to only provide a B2B service because when universities implement our program into their housing system, students automatically begin to use and adapt to our product. As students' willingness to use our app increases, we will acquire more customers and more downloads on the B2C service of HomePage.

We've decided to implement these pricing strategies to come up with the final price for the B2B service:
Relationship-Oriented
Customer-Oriented
Parity-Pricing
$30
/ Student
/ Year
By paying for students per year, the monthly price of each student decreases to $2.50, which adds up to a reasonable discount when accounting for many students. This strategy is implemented to build and maintain relationships with universities.
$2.50 (or even $3.00 later on) per month is a fair price for an all-in-one co-living app that is affordable for most customers. We decided on a relatively low price for our service to maximize the number of customers. If universities can pay BlackBoard ~$1.6K/student/year, $30/student/year to improve students' on-campus housing experience shouldn't be a problem.
Many universities provide Calm, a meditation and well-being program, for students free. A year's worth subscription of Calm normally costs $60. To remain competitive, we've made sure to price our product way below Calm's, so that students can have access to stress-free co-living as well.

Data Strategy

analytics overview

Due to the breadth of information HomePage is capable of supporting, we decided to focus on technical KPIs as metrics for our data analysis. Our main goal for conducting the analysis is brand propagation, so we will be focusing on product-based and technical KPIs.
Product KPIs
Technical KPIs
Feature throughput
Support density
Feedback density
Customer interactions
New customer interactions
New tenant interactions
Uptime
Unplanned maintenance time
Downtime frequency
Downtime access attempts

data overview

HomePage itself is a data source. By servicing landlords (RAs) and tenants (Students), we gain many information that they've shared on our platform that can be valuable to other businesses. We believe that we can derive more value from advertising partnerships rather than advertising ourselves.

Students
Landlords / RAs
Course schedule
Shopping habits
To do tasks
Event interest
Tenant population
Tenant demographics
Data
Value Target
Data
Value Target
Regional retailers
Grocery chains
Food delivery
Online retailers
Nearby events
Regional venues
Community tools
Event venues
Partnerships
Financial tools

Revenue Projection

A quick overview of how our financials should look like over the next years.

Next Steps 🐾

funding strategy

1.
Beta test on USC’s campus housing system. Get feedback from real users and iterate to improve HomePage. During the Beta Test (Q1-Q4), our product will be provided for free for USC to test.
2.
Then in Y2, sign an official contract with USC for initial inflow of revenue. After running USC’s housing system for a year, we aim to partner with other universities and institutions around the US the provide community housing in Y3&4. Here, we will also begin to launch the individual subscription (B2C) service.
3.
After successfully, running many universities’ community housing portal, seek investments from venture capitals or angels for further expansion. Use this investment fund to grow customers from the B2C service section of HomePage.
Next Project 👉

What can Centers for Medicare do better?

Let's get to know each other.
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