Project/Company Name: home1

image

1 home is our "working title"; we're open to suggestions! We've discussed crowd-sourcing the name from our community, but for now, this is easier and it kinda "works" for what we are doing. There is built-in "brand recognition" in the common expression "Working from home". And there's an "emoji" and free "font awesome icon" so we don't need to think about "branding" and can instead focus on building the community.

Company URL: https://dwyl.com/home

Description

Describe your company in a sentence or two. <input maxlength="60">

We are a Female Founder-Focussed Co-Living/Learning Home [57 characters]

We have worked in the technology industry in several roles for the past 10 years, everything from non-profit and 2-10 person micro co. to 400k person "mega-corp" and high-growth startup: 100 >> 10k (people) growth.

We have built MVPs, advised and trained people for several startups.
We feel we have a grasp of what it takes to run a successful technology startup. (though we expect to gain significantly more wisdom on the subject through participating in Startup School and possibly YC's "main" program). We have lived the "digital nomad" (remote working) lifestyle and know what the biggest challenges are.

Female Founder Focus ?

Being a female founder, we know it is often more difficult to get ideas off the ground. We have felt the pain of female founders coming to us (@dwyl) to build their MVP because male-dominated "dev agencies" did not take them or their ideas seriously.

female-founder-conference-qa

We applaud the tremendous work done by Jessica Livingston and other YC partners to organise the Female Founders Conference and aspire to be invited on stage in a few years time. We want to help accelerate the ascent of other female founders by giving them a space to start their journey (before they apply to YC!)

image @iteles via: https://twitter.com/iteles/status/928221678139822080

image
https://standrewsbusinessclub.co.uk/st-andrews-university-enterprise-week-2017-keynote-event

Vertical

We feel that the "vertical" category that most reflects our project is "community" closely followed by "diversity".

There are 36 options for "Vertical" on the Startup School application form.

home does not "neatly fit" into anyone of them rather it encompasses several:

Make

What is your company going to make? <textarea maxlength="200">

home is a female founder focussed co-living/learning house where people live, learn & work on "something people want". By-product: Mobile App for community, door-access, lights & resource sharing. [197 chars]

Getting this down to 200 characters is hard...!!

Had to cut:

We intend to use Wifi/BLE beacons to give location-contextual UI to the users so they get relevant info through the home e.g: light switches, curtains, teleconference room bookings and kitchen/bathroom availability. People will share recipes (public or private) and meal plans (house-specific) inviting others to partake in meals!

Why?

Why did you pick this to work on? <textarea maxlength="250">

home is what we wish we had when we started in the tech industry. A place to meet, live and learn with peers and a mentoring/support network throughout our career. We are passionate about fostering the next generation of tech workers & founders.

Commitment: Full-time

Are you currently part-time or full-time on this startup?

Options available:

<select class="select required" name="company[commitment]" id="company_commitment">
<option value=""></option>
--
  | <option value="full_time">Full Time (40+ hours a week)</option>
  | <option value="part_time">Part Time (20+ hours a week)</option>
  | <option value="other_commitment">Other</option></select>

If there was an option for "double-full-time" i.e. 80+ hours/week, we would pick that.
For the foreseeable future, home is our life!

Progress: Idea

Which of the following best describes your progress?

<select class="select required" name="company[stage]" id="company_stage">
<option value=""></option>
--
  | <option value="nothing">Nothing Built</option>
  | <option value="idea">Idea/sketches</option>
  | <option value="mocks">Mocks/Renderings</option>
  | <option value="prototype">Prototype/pre-launch</option>
  | <option value="private_beta">Private Beta</option>
  | <option value="public_beta">Public Beta</option>
  | <option value="preorders">Taking Preorders</option>
  | <option value="launched">Launched</option></select>

The <option> that most accurately reflects the progress of our App is "Idea".

Given that our project involves a physical building which is still "under construction", and there isn't an <option> in the list for "building site", the best description at this stage is "idea".

We intend to use the Startup School time to start building the Mobile App (PWA) which will be used by the people staying in home.

We expect the building works to be done by the end of September and the first "MVP" members to join us in October 2018. We are able to "Alpha UX Test" the app with friends & co-workers before we open the physical home.

We have a team of professional construction workers and tradesmen taking care of the physical building so we feel that part is "on track".

How Far Along?

How far along are you? <textarea maxlength="250">

The first home building is 65% construction-complete. (Architect designs & progress photos on website) We have built several components of our Mobile App (PWA) but do not yet have an MVP we can test with users; we plan to make it during Startup School. [249 chars]

Incorporated: No

Have you incorporated your company?* [yes/no]

For the purposes of the "Co-living" project, we do not have a dedicated company for home. Until now we have been funding it through operating cashflow/surplus from our existing company (@dwyl) as well as personal equity.

We are open to advice whether we should form a new company (we are leaning towards a new company...) we have a "four-letter-dotcom" domain: dwyl.com and the corresponding "social accounts" e.g: https://twitter.com/dwyl which we feel would be a "waste" to abandon.

If our advisors think we can "pivot" (repurpose) the @dwyl brand we'd be happy to do that.

There is some "overlap", given that home is helping people discover and do what they love.

tl;dr

We like to think of home as a "Pre-YC" place to learn creative/coding skills, discover like-minded people and focus on solving big problems.

home is not a "coding bootcamp" like "FullStack Academy" (YC S12) and it's not an AirBnB (YC W09) it's more akin to a Recurse Center (YC S10) https://www.recurse.com/ (self-directed learning) meets cost-effective "high-end hostel". with privacy and plenty of space to think, exercise and work.

Our aim is to help people have a solid foundation to launch into a career in tech either as an engineer or founder!

We believe that having a female-founder-focus is essential for achieving "balance" in the tech industry and is congruent with YC's mission.

We are planning to have a "hack space" or "Design & Technology Lab" which is a 50m2 filled with prototyping tools/machines including a Laser cutter, CNC machine, 3D printers and wide range of tools for making furniture, electronics projects and other "hardware hacking".

Please give us a space on Startup School so that we can benefit from mentorship and be part of your incredible network.

Thank you!

WARNING: Below this point is "Work-in-Progress" for "internal purposes". 🚧

We have made it public in the interest of "transparency", but please don't read it if you are in any way "critical" of embryonic ideas that are not "polished" in a "deck".

Why?

People are often more productive/effective when working from home:

working-from-home
http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html > Workplaces

However we are well aware that working from a "normal home" can be challenging:

struggle-working-remotely
https://open.buffer.com/state-remote-work-2018

We intend to build a community where people can live, learn and work with other like-minded people focussed on making things people want and need.

We will have a "bias" towards people who want to (learn how to) start working on their own ideas; i.e. "founders".

Remote Working is the Future Now!

We have been strong proponents of Remote Working in our own company:

Naaz-remote-working https://twitter.com/naazahmed11/status/964527953156694016

People get the work done just as effectively and their quality of life improves dramatically if they aren't "chained" to a desk in a big city from "9-to-5".

See: https://github.com/dwyl/remote-working

What?

The saying goes: home is "where the heart is".
We intend to extend this definition to include:

During Startup School we intend to build the App to help us measure everything in the home community.

Areas we are hoping to explore include:

As you can tell from this list, we have "lots of ideas".
We want/need Help/Mentoring from a YC partner to know where to focus our attention.

Female Focussed?

We intend to direct all of our content towards female founders because we feel they are an underserved group. YC's demographics https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-demographics indicate that fewer than 25% of startups have one or more female founders:

"_Of the founders we funded in our most recent batch, 11.1% of the founders are women (about 23% of the startups have one or more female founders), 3.7% of the founders are Hispanic, and 4% of the founders are Black. " "The bad news, of course, is that applicant percentages are low relative to the entire population."

We want to be part of the solution to this: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/20/y-combinator-diversity-2017

This is a problem we have personally felt while working in Tech. And it's one our female members continue to feel as tech is still overwhelmingly male-dominated and still has "bad apples" spoiling it for others.

Will We Exclude Men?

No, we have no intention of excluding or making men (or people who identify as male or non-binary) feel "unwelcome", much to the contrary, everyone is welcome regardless gender, ethnicity/race, sex, politics or religion.

The only pre-requisites are that:

"Sexism in tech is real." ~ Sam Altman https://blog.ycombinator.com/diversity-and-startups

Female founders and tech workers often feel "unwelcome" in a male-dominated world, we are going address this head on.

From our experience in the Tech Industry, both running Founders & Coders and Working as Developers/Engineers in several companies, we have seen/felt first-hand how a small minority of men are condescending/intimidating towards ladies and minorities, we will address this

One Metric That Matters ["OMTM"]: Happiness

“It really is true, the company will build whatever the CEO decides to measure.” ~ Sam Altman via: https://medium.com/how-to-start-a-startup/47-quotes-from-sam-altman-on-building-a-great-product-51aa656952ab

Our short-to medium-term metric is "Happiness". We want to make "Happiness" our primary KPI because we know that by measuring and optimising for happiness first any other goals will be achievable.

We realise that "Happiness" is a subjective measure however we intend to make it quantifiable in the same way that there is a "World Happiness Report": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report we intend to do that for our company/project and make it available for others too!

This does not mean there won't be disagreements and even conflicts. What it means is that everyone involved knows what we are "optimising for", and can act accordingly.

We have already begun to make some progress on this. see: https://github.com/dwyl/feedback It's our anonymous MVP on: https://dwyl-feedback.herokuapp.com/feedback/new feedback-form

A variant on measuring Happiness is measuring the extent to which people are "Doing What You Love". We believe in this strongly to the extent that our current company is called "DWYL" ... see: https://github.com/dwyl/start-here

The reason we are not trying to measure "dwyl-ness" is because sometimes to do something you love, you have to fund it doing a job you don't necessarily love. PG put it best:

"The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it even if they had to work at another job to make a living." "How To Do What You Love" http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html Paul Graham, 2006

Some of the people living/working at home will fall into the category of "work at another job", so measuring their overall happiness is a more accurate metric.

Exercise

There are "three things they [founders] should be focussing on: writing code, talking to users and exercising". ~ Jessica Livingston Startup School 2012 https://youtu.be/KQJ6zsNCA-4?t=16m51s

Within 5 minutes walk from home there is a great river-side running path free football and basketball court and outdoor gym. 7 minutes walk there are superb tennis courts, public swimming pools and a yoga/pilates studio with both beginner and advanced classes.

We feel that having exercise activities "nearby" is good but in order to actively promote exercise (eliminate excuses), we need to do more.

We have a plan to offer several exercise activities within the home property/garden which will minimise (or eliminate) "friction" to participation.

Slackline

slackline https://twitter.com/iteles/status/1020315417238294528

25m Swimming Lane

This is what the pool looked like yesterday (very much "work-in-progress"):

braga-home-pool-panorama

Outdoor Gym

We have reserved 10 x 4m of garden space and $4000 for an outdoor gym area.

movestrongfit outdoor-gym

http://www.movestrongfit.com

Mindfulness & Meditation

In addition to outdoor mindfulness and meditation areas: dwyl-summer-mindfulness
we plan to have an indoor area dedicated to encouraging the practice.


Why "It Will Never Work" (Risks and Mitigation)

There are several risks of creating a co-living home/community any of which can "sink the ship", we need to be aware of and address them all.

From our background in "Enterprise Risk Management", we are trained to think in terms of hyperbolic headlines and worst-case scenarios.

This list is ordered in terms of their probability and potential impact:

If you can help us think of and address any other risks, we would love to hear from you!

Getting Traction: Revenue & Customer Feedback

In the short term we want to focus on building our App. In order to test the App we need users. To get these users we intend to use the following channels:

MVP: AirBnB Listing

To generate initial demand (and get "MVP customer feedback") we intend to use AirBnB. We will keep the amount of detail on our AirBnB listing to a minimum to "underpromise and over deliver" and hopefully people will be pleasantly surprised when they arrive.

We will incorporate the feedback of people who find us through AirBnB into our App and ask people for reviews on Google, TripAdvisor and to post pictures on their "Social".

We have experience of both listing and "consuming" on AirBnB. (see: "Experience in Real Estate?" section below)

Digital Nomad Girls (DNG)

We are friends of Jenny at https://digitalnomadgirls.com a network of female-only "Digital Nomads" (remote workers) who either have their own micro-business or work for someone else remotely.
Reach: Fb: 8.8K, Insta: 24.9k, Tw: 4.5k (August 2018).

We intend to offer places "at cost" to members of DNG because they are lovely people who share our vision and we know they will help fuel our organic/social traffic by mentioning (linking to) us on their travel blogs, Instagram and YouTube.

Our Existing Social Networks

Inês is a co-organiser of Ladies of Code (London) https://www.meetup.com/Ladies-of-Code-UK (3K members) and has access to other female-focussed Meetup networks. We intend to leverage these to find people who are able to work remotely, and invite them to stay with and learn with us.

Nomad List

Once we have our basic formula working, we intend to test running ads on https://nomadlist.com Our hope is that we get enough "organic" demand to not need to run ads. However given how niche/focussed Nomad List is, we feel that if we need to generate targeted demand, this is the route we will take.

Y Combinator Network

Our ultimate aim is to be part of the Y Combinator Network because we feel that YC is the best "filter" for the type of people we want to attract to live, learn and work at home.

Longer term we plan to build many instances of home around the world, where prospective YC applicants can meet each other and form, storm norm & perform in a controlled environment before they apply to YC. And current members of YC (both Europe and US founders) can base their company and not have to think about laundry, nutrition or bills;

We believe there is a strong symbiosis between YC's Network and home.

Who?

ines-and-nelson

Inês and Nelson went to the same primary school. They have been an "item" for 19 years (since age 14!), business partners for 13 years (2005 - 2007 and 2013 - present. ) and married for 1 year. image

Why Us?

"Let's solve our own problem and see where it goes".
~ Jessica Livingston : How to Build the Future https://youtu.be/nFOC-cgIWaY?t=5m26s

We have started two companies together a Clothing Company and an App Development Agency. Both bootstrapped. Both profitable.

We are using the operating surplus from @dwyl to bootstrap home.

Experience in Training/Coaching Female Founders & Tech Workers?

We have a decent amount of experience of training people from scratch (with no previous experience) to get jobs as developers or start their own companies. founders-and-coders-homepage

Examples of companies founded/grown through Founders & Coders:

see: https://foundersandcoders.com/about/ a-way-into-tech-industry-founders-coders

Experience in Real Estate?

We have previously bought, renovated and rented (out) 3 homes and feel we have learned on "small scale". All our property investments have been cashflow positive. Our existing properties are rented by/to "young professionals" who are not yet "ready" to buy (either because they are establishing themselves or unsure if they want to live in the particular city long-term). Charging people below "market rate" including all bills ("zero hassle") means they have a chance to save for a deposit for their own place (should they chose to go down the route of buying).

Our below "market clearing price" means we are flooded with "applicants" each time someone decides to "move on", which means the other housemates get to chose from a wide pool of potential. This has been a "win-win" strategy over the last 7 years and we intend to adapt it to home: prices will be kept "low" (affordability is essential) and existing housemates will decide who can join based on an online application.

##### Affordable Housing?

We strongly believe in affordable housing for everyone as an essential "foundation" for all forms of human well-being and achievement.

We know (from personal experience) that not everyone is ready to buy their own house/apartment either because they have not been able to save for a deposit or have not found something (reasonably priced) to buy. Some people chose to rent instead of buy because it's cheaper in the short-run. See: "Renting vs Buying" on Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-finance/housing/renting-v-buying/

This is a sample of one of our AirBnB listings in London:

image image image image

Our listing is "unlisted" because the appartment is long-term rented while we focus on setting up home.

To be clear: we don't want to be "landlords", we want to build a community and be part of solving the housing shortage, not exacerbate it!

Our medium to long-term goal is that people who co-live in the home can co-own the company thus the amount they pay each month goes towards ownership not "rent". We intend to explore this option further our 2nd year of operation; once we have launched our 3rd or 4th home.

Modern Decor

image via: "5 Tips for Choosing a Coliving Space" https://www.thehustlejuice.com/lifestyle/2017/9/12/5-tips-for-choosing-a-coliving-space

We have been using MakeSpace as our guide when designing all spaces.

image https://www.amazon.com/Make-Space-Stage-Creative-Collaboration/dp/1118143728

We feel we have an "unfair advantage" over "regular" real estate developers or interior designers who have not done collaborative tech or remote work.

Previous Experience?

This is our third business together. Both previous businesses have been profitable and had zero capital.

Why Portugal and Braga Specifically?

Portugal is highly popular with remote workers (often called "Digial Nomads") and startup founders alike. There is a burgeoning "startup scene" in both Lisbon and Porto.

Nomad List is a crowdsourced database of cities in the world to help you choose where to go next https://nomadlist.com

nomad-list-homepage-lisbon-third At the time of writing, Lisbon is #3 in the World.

https://nomadlist.com/braga nomadlist-braga-august-2018

Further reading on the "Tech ecosystem" in Portugal: https://medium.com/paua-insights/mapping-out-the-tech-ecosystem-in-portugal-who-is-who-862a85fce28e

Library of Creativity/Technology/Business Focussed Books?

good-books

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html (What You'll Wish You Had Known) > Now

bookshelf-large

go-work-for-an-existing-company-for-a-few-years http://paulgraham.com/hiring.html > A Public Service Message

Precedents

From reading https://yclist.com / http://www.ycombinator.com/companies it appears that YC has not invested in any other "Co-living" ideas.

image

RFS

After reading "Requests for Startups" http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs we are convinced that our project qualifies for mentorship in the Startup School program.

Let us highlight the categories which are applicable home:

BRICK AND MORTAR 2.0

We are re-purposing an abandoned single-family large (by European standards) house and transforming it into something new.

We are making all of our plans, decisions and outcomes public online https://github.com/dwyl/phase-two/tree/master/braga so that other people can learn from our mistakes/success and

EDUCATION

DIVERSITY

FUTURE OF WORK

LONGEVITY AND ANTI-AGING

SUPPORTING CREATORS

TRANSPORTATION & HOUSING

Having a place where you can work without needing to commute and where you have access to an electric bicycles and other on-demand transport is the future.

While we are not directly addressing TRANSPORTATION, we will make a car available to all members at each house we build. Our plan is to have one or more electric car(s)

UNDERSERVED COMMUNITIES AND SOCIAL SERVICES

Once we have proved the initial model of home with a successful App and expanded to 5 locations, we intend to hire a team member who will be responsible for reaching out to and mentoring people are especially vulnerable: young adults from "broken homes", children of incarcerated, drug-dependent or dead parents and women who have been victims of domestic abuse.

We already have a working relationship with Domestic Abuse charities http://www.safelives.org.uk in the UK and http://www.cococi.org/fr/about-us in Portugal.

Our aim will be to give women and young adults who have been subjected to domestic violence a chance to live in a safe living environment where they can learn skills, find work and start their own success stories!

Other Areas Which Are Not Our Primary Focus:

A.I

We intend to use computer vision for physical access controls (door entry). This will not be our "product" however we will "assemble" the pieces

For this we will partner with our good friend (dwyl alum) Nikhila Ravi: see: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhilaravi / https://github.com/nikhilaravi who co-organises http://opened.ai nikhila-ravi-opened-ai

ROBOTICS

We intend to use robots for as much domestic work as possible to both alleviate the burden of "chores" and Initially this will be confined to a robotic vacuum cleaner, but with a Hardware Hacking Lab in the basement, we expect at least one of our members to get creative with this.

Universal Basic Income?

https://basicincome.ycr.org/our-plan https://blog.ycombinator.com/moving-forward-on-basic-income/

Further/Background Reading/Watching